Why is This Happening to Me? I've Done Everything Right

Photo by Carmine Savarese on Unsplash

Why is this happening to me— I’ve done everything right.

This is not a question. It’s a demand and is meant to be directed at the sky because that is what you do when you have done everything right and then this happens.

When I interrogate the sky about this, it doesn’t answer, preferring instead to go about its business.

But then I am told--

There is another sky

ever serene and fair

And there is another Sunshine

Though it be darkness there

Thank you, Emily D.

Now I realize that I am under the wrong sky. If I was under the correct sky I would have the perfect life because I did everything right and that was supposed to be the payoff.

Honestly, doing everything right was not hard for me. All I had to do was look at other people and copy them. Fortunately, it worked out that I wanted the exact same things that they wanted and, in many cases, had the means to buy them.

I not only bought the things, I bought the whole system. It provided the only way to live, I thought. If you want to know how it works; it’s very simple. It is capitalism at its very best—money and goods are exchanged for the high opinion of others which then trickles down to a high opinion of oneself.

I, like most of my peer group, was in right in the middle of it, wheeling and dealing with the rest of them, until I realized that the benefits I thought I would receive --the joy and all that, were not manifesting as they should, at least not for me.

Because there is another sky.

My sky, as it turns out, wasn’t as protective as the more mainstream sky and definitely not as user friendly. Plus, all the things I had grasped after and acquired felt wrong and made little sense when viewed in this sky’s light. In that slanty light I could see to my horror that my things had grafted onto me.

I don’t know the exact science of it, but whatever I had congratulated myself for obtaining had somehow physically fused itself onto me creating in the process another me—one that was not me, but me adjacent, kept alive by the good opinion of others and the good opinion of myself, which mattered the most, of course. How could it not? after all, I had to live with myself and it would be unbearable if I did not admire the person I had effectively created—the one who had all the right ideas and the right things.

Wanting the right things is an important life skill and must be learned early on. I myself had just about mastered it when I awoke under the other sky where, sadly, this self, curated and cultivated to live under under one set of conditions was now completely at odds within the ecosystem.

The other sky had no use for my fancy lifestyle choices. In fact, they became a hindrance to what I now call, survival.

But I couldn’t just throw them aside. I loved them. Yet my love was complicated by the fact that they they were suctioned onto me, making me believe that I could not have a life without them. This will make no sense to you if you are not familiar with the phenomenon.

Tolstoy’s Ivan Ilych understood it. At the end of his story, he was able to see that the life he had sought for himself and had attained—the one in which he had done everything right, was actually a no-life. This no-life was problematic because it had lied to him. It had convinced him that x equals y, that his life, x would guarantee that all would be comme il faut or y. So nothing bad would happen to him. He would never have to suffer or die. But he was dying and all of the people around him were mad at him for doing it right in front of them.

Ivan suffered and died, but not before he got a few things straight.

What kept him from getting into it was the claim that his life had been a good life. This justification of his life clutched at him, would not let him move forward, and tormented him most of all…

Both Ivan and I spent a good deal of time resisting the idea that we should have any pain or discomfort, especially after doing everything the Best Way To Do Things.

The suffering was the first shock to the system.

“What do you want? was the first clear idea, expressible in words, that he heard.

“What? Not to suffer. To live,” he replied.

Of course, these are things everybody wants—not to suffer and to live, but the voice in Ivan’s soul pushes him on this:

“To live? To live how?” asked the voice of his soul.

“Yes, to live as I lived before: nicely, pleasantly.”

“As you lived before, nicely and pleasantly? Asked the voice.

I can almost hear the voice in Ivan’s soul laughing as he says this.

And he started to go over in his imagination the best moments of his pleasant life. But—strange thing—all those best moments of his pleasant life seemed now not at all as they had seemed then…all that had seemed like joys melted away and turned into something worthless and often vile.

Poor Ivan. Under interrogation all that made his life seem nice and pleasant melted away.

And he begins to see: “Not right. All that you’ve lived and live by is a lie, a deception, concealing life and death from you.”

We know that Ivan dies, it’s in the title of the story. But, his death was not what he thought it would be. It turned out to be, after many days and nights of struggle, a no-death.

Where was it? What death? There was no more fear because there was no more death.

Instead of death there was light.

This was an unexpected twist in the story, at least for Ivan.

“So that’s it!” he suddenly said aloud.

What joy!”

Whatever Ivan apprehended in that moment changed him completely.

I think it had something to do with the voice in his soul, and about no longer being deceived. You cannot be joyful and deceived at the same time. Trust me.

I want joy.

So I began to question my other self with the voice in my soul and that made it nervous because, like every parasite, it has a will to live. And it knows it can’t survive without me, and knows the the moment I no longer want what it wants—it’s over. My other self always understood the precariousness of its existence and that is why it will try to distract me by being all worldly and swanning around. It needs me to buy what it sells—without my investment, without me caring what people think about me and my things, or what I think about me and my things, the other self would wither away.

Withering away is actually the same as thing as dying. But, because, like Ivan, my other self is a made-up character, or in this case-- a construct-- the death the other self would undergo would have to take place on the same plane in which it lived, the plane that happens to exists only in my mind. Truth be told, I abhor violence of every kind, and like Tolstoy and Gandhi, try to practice ahimsa. Even so, I will have to be the one to kill the other self.

Trying to kill an imaginary character that has gone rogue is a delicate operation. First, I have to eliminate the energy source—the attachment I have to my fancy things.

This is going to be rough, but I had already been stripped of most of them so all I am responsible for at this point is the elimination of my strong affection for them. This sounds easier said than done, but, as any addict knows, you can quit something and still have an attachment to it.

My attachment will have to be dug out from the root like a root canal. And the fact that the other self lives exclusively in my mind will not preclude my very real body from feeling the pain of the extraction. Of course, all must be done in a way that preserves the healthy tissue—the part of my being that wants, like Ivan, to not suffer and to live.

I do not know if it is possible to be free from all attachments—but, my hope is that by unloading this other self with all its superficial concerns and vanity, I can at the very least live my life under this sky.

I am only in the first stage of the process now, the stage in which I acknowledge this fake self and the fake system it operated under and commit to bringing about its end.

When this happens, I hope the death will be like Ivan’s, surprised as he was by joy, or maybe just happy not to be deceived anymore. But, do you know what would be even better than that? A death like King Arthur’s:

Yet some men say in many parts of England that King Arthur is not dead, but had by the will of Our Lord Jesu into another place.

I will not say it shall be so, but rather I will say: Here in this world he changed his life.

Photo by Ricardo Cruz on Unsplash

Le Morte d’Arthur