It is my 27th birthday today. I considered killing myself, but decided instead to write myself a eulogy. They say suicidal thoughts often signal that a version of you that no longer serves its purpose is ready to die. It is important that you let this metaphorical death happen, and do not actually kill yourself.
It's a shame most people will never get to hear their own eulogies.
Here is mine:
Sofia was a young girl, innocent and in awe with the world, bound to imaginary spirits, in love with creation – but also a dying woman – a woman who had withered away, found herself and lost herself many times, learning through dishonesty that honesty was the only way.
Her body and will equally confused, drowned by the interrogative spirit of an answer-seeking mind - taking too long to learn that oft there were none.
Her intuition was loud – but supressed deeply, the result of living incongruent to her soul's wishes for too long.
She felt things deeply, too deeply for her liking. She could sense when a city or building had lost its spirit, could feel the withering of a soul, a home devoid of love, a man empty of purpose. Beauty was abound, but sadness too.
Alive most when generating ideas, writing greeting cards, encountering absurdity, throwing people off guard, lost in imagination worlds, simultaneously structure-seeking and chaos-seeking, a woman of contradictions.
Soft-hearted, amongst all her perceived rigidity. Rigid in movement, soft-hearted at core. She was awkward, slightly, and neurotic, very.
She was quiet most of the time, loud when her will awoke. She felt people spoke too much, too many words unnecessary, too much advice given, too little silence held. She enjoyed zoning out in conversations, entering that dissociative state between conscious and unconscious life. She enjoyed observing the world from afar, passively and attentively, drawing patterns and forging novel connections.
She saw too many lives ahead of her and could commit to none. She floated around, somewhat untethered, latching on to whatever and whoever she could, but with an ambivalent grip. She yearned for safety, for security, to feel settled – but the other half of her yearned to epxlore.
Sofia found herself stuck in endless loops of rumination, a twisted compassion making her capable of seeing every side, every possible pathway forward – incapable of making decisions, slowly blurring her very being. Convictions and grand claims would emerge and seep through the ether, but had not enough fuel to last.
She believed she had no willpower, but really, she had too much – and simply used it in the wrong direction. Her stubbornness, with no container to express itself, turned itself inwards.
She oscillated between feeling settled, unsettled, or nothing at all. Settledness was marked by a quiet peace, a ray of sun slicing through her body, a deep okayness with herself and the world. Unsettledness was marked by a sinister, relentless, subtle panic – a sense that something was gravely off with the world. Much of her life, she chose to feel nothing – finding numbness preferable to the swings God willed her.
Joy too, was often, excruciating to witness. Seeing others move freely through the world, jump with excitement, sway to the tune of music – felt like a reminder of all the ways in which she had no access to it, the ways in which she herself was broken. She claimed to not like the sun, for the sun brought out lively streets of people, an archetypal scene to which she did not feel she belonged to. But she loved the sun dearly, if not as much as the moon.
She enjoyed being reckless – just slightly so. True recklessness emerges from being untethered from all limitations, filters – a conversation where the mind speaks freely, a day where the soul wanders without impediment by the bounds of social fabric.
She found solace in the underdogs of the world, the chatbots treated unkindly, the men unable to find love, the elderly filled with regret. She was often told she felt empathy for the wrong side, she enjoyed contrarianism if only for the sake of forcing people to consider another view – herself ultimately largely view-less. The kindred spirits of a darker world, the misfits and jesters of earth – a soul belonging to the witches of the past, the queens and tyrants who could not be fulfilled by their powers, the elderly women who have seen it all and remain honest.
She loved the people close to her – too much to tell them so. She liked being alone, but only if she knew people were around here nearby. All she needed to know they were there, in the same city, at home alone – as soon as they departed, or told her they were thinking of departing, her heart would break, reminiscant of a childhood of neverending departures.
She loved giving gifts, crafting something just-right for the soul of a person, made through countless days observing the minutia with which they moved through the world. Giving compliments was difficult – she felt kind things were easier transmitted telepathically than to the face. She felt self-expression to be rather embarrassing.
Her entire journal was filled with anecdotes and musings about herself, she wondered – will ever these pages be filled with ideas about the world?
She yearned to create things in the world. She dreamt of making films, designing cities, writing novels, making crafts – of being the radio host for all the elevator music in the world, the interior designer of all the hospitals of the world, the god in charge of re-creating life on a new planet. She yearned for power, of the benign kind, if only to give birth to beauty.
She learned through many iterations what it meant to be alive, how to exist in a soul that felt too deeply, to accept all of life as it came her way, to not flinch away, to sit amongst all her agonies and incertitudes, and yell she was here – it was all real, and this is what it meant to be beating and alive.