ItGetsMoreGay

by: IOW Staff

Readers, today is the third installment of our Reasons to Live series, where In Our Words writers respond to our open question about things that make life a little easier, that make the day wonderful.  Today, we’re going to talk about Woody Allen, existentialism, the beauty of the seasons and waiting for the mystery of life to unfold.  Shit got deep.

Mariann Devlin:

As an atheist, but most of all a human being, I’ve always struggled with finding meaning in a universe that’s empty of ultimate truths. I’ve also had a pretty chaotic childhood, which has made me sensitive to the threat of change and, at worst, panic-stricken when faced with life’s ambiguity and uncertainty. There were moments in my life when I wondered if it’s worth carrying on, since happiness and security will always be replaced with disappointment and, ultimately, grief- no matter how you were raised.

I hope that the people reading this, who have also struggled with major childhood baggage, can begin to understand that such a loss is actually our gain. We know, perhaps better than others, that everything meaningful eventually goes away. But that knowledge can allow us to live freely and without the kinds of ruinous attachments that plague other people. I’m definitely a more spontaneous, enthusiastic, free-spirited and free-loving person because of my deep understanding of life’s ups and downs.

And just because life is empty of inherent meaning, doesn’t mean that it’s fruitless to go on living. It means we have a responsibility to ourselves, and to the people we love, to create our own meaning and our own truths for how to live and love authentically. That’s where my sense of purpose comes from. The emptiness of existence actually frees me up to be creative about the kind of person I want to be for the other people sharing the planet with me. We’re all in this together.

Plus, as the great Woody Allen put it in one of my favorite movies, Hannah and Her Sisters, if life truly is meaningless then we lose nothing by taking part it in and enjoying it while it lasts. It bears repeating: even if life is meaningless, and there is no afterlife, we lose nothing by taking pleasure in living.

Keep your head up! As you can tell by all the contributions, you’re clearly not alone.

Jonah Lefholtz:

What gets me through really bad days is knowing that I have an amazing opportunity to get a lot of unconditional love from the 2 year old and his family that I nanny for. There’s nothing like somebody cherishing you and you getting paid for it. Well, just in general, there’s nothing like somebody cherishing you, period. Knowing I have a good support group during a really rough time in my life right now (I am trying to stop drinking and a relationship I wanted to depend on just ended, and I’m dealing with a pretty bad depression all at the same time) keeps me going as well. I know beautiful people and even though I don’t always believe them, when they tell me that I am also a beautiful person, it takes the edge off. It at least keeps me from harming myself, because I would never want to hurt any of them. Also, Lake Michigan and the sunshine on a Chicago Spring or Summer day, and trees and bright little flowers cropping up all around. There are so many reasons to live; I’ve come thus far, and made it through some terrible experiences, and I’m faking it (feeling strong) until I make it (actually believing in my own strength).

Timothy Lalowski:

What excites me most about this world we live in is the simple pleasure of seeing each characteristic smile on a person’s face. Every one is so amazingly different and reveals the great chance variety they each have to offer. Each face presents another opportunity, another adventure; at love, at friendship, at thrills, at compassion. It is the knowledge that these opportunities exist everywhere around me, that allows me to find beauty. The world is one amazing adventure with mysteries untold, waiting to unravel.

Barbara Crowley:

When I was fighting against my zombie mentality, my addiction to self-harming, I put every single ounce of effort into searching for something that I would miss. I know how difficult it is to find purpose every day when you are stuck under the weight of depression, abuse, and conflict. However, there is something. There is something, no matter how small, that you would miss if you left this Earth. Maybe it is the smell of the first dewy spring morning when the tips of the blades of grass are wet but the ground is dry and warm. Maybe it is the feeling of your cat softly kneading his head into the back of your calf for attention. Maybe it is the brilliant white light of the moon surrounded by the deep, dark blue twinkling sky that sends your mind to outerspace, to other worlds and galaxies that sparks some small feeling of hope within you. This world, fucked up and ungiving as it can be, is a beautifully complex rock circling a bright gaseous ball of fire in an infinite universe with infinitely unknown aspects. There is something. There is something in this universe that you could miss. I held onto that something for dear life and it gave me hope I would be here today. I am.

by: IOW Staff

Today is our second installment of “Reasons to Live,” where the In Our Words staffers list some of the things that make life worth living right now.  And, of course, Ryan Gosling was going to be somewhere on the list.

Rebecca Kling:

My reasons for living vary from day to day, and sometimes even moment to moment. On a good day, I’m staying alive because of all the fun and excitement in the world: the delicious tastes and sensations, the orgasms, the laughter, the movies to see and books to read, the LEGO towers to build, the board games to play, the water to swim in and grass to lay in. There’s so much to DO, and so much of it is wonderful.

But I can’t always keep that energy going. Someone directed a particularly mean comment at me. Someone questioned my gender or identity or sense of self. Sometimes I don’t know why – I just know I’m sad and want the sadness and the pain and the world to go away. When the world looks particularly dark, I remind myself how much my suicide would hurt my parents, my brother, my friends, all the people who love me. When I can’t be strong for myself, I try to be strong for them.

Zachary Stafford:

Dying is uncertain. When dead we really don’t know what is next; it could be anything from an eternity of being “rick rolled” or if you’re lucky, tea time with Ryan Gosling in the South of France. My point is, dying is uncertain and has too much unknowing for my tastes. But you know what isn’t uncertain? Living. Living at its most basic form is about breathing, and breathing we can all do. In Yoga, we use breath to not only center us but also to work through all of the pains and struggles within our practice. You breath to cultivate heat inside, and you breath to cool down. Breathe is key to human life, and with every breath you’re tasting life and what keeps this big bad world movin’. Use your breath, keep on living, because through breath we build moments, we build a life. Stay alive because you are breathing, and also because Ryan Gosling breaths and we all want to be more like him.  Don’t we?

Raechel Tiffe:

The nuzzle of my kitty’s nose against my cheek before I fall asleep. The way the first bite of an amazing home-cooked meal tastes to a grumbly belly. When a song you love is randomly playing in the grocery store. When a friend sends you a text saying something reminded them of you, and that they miss you. When you hug someone who needs it, and realize you need it too. The wagging tail of a dog on a walk who is so excited about everything they pass by. Re-reading a favorite book or poem. Learning something new. Exercise (and those sweet, sweet endorphins). The smell of baking (vegan!) cookies. The first snow, the first autumn leaf, the first warm day of spring when the city is unstoppable.  Catching yourself at a good angle in a mirror. Laughing til it hurts your sides. The Chicago skyline. Stories of organized resistance and radical rebellion—stories that make you remember that struggle leads to progress. The satisfaction of a morning stretch. Impromptu dance parties in the middle of the day (with a friend, or your cat, or just yourself).

When I start to feel that this moment, right now, is either too much or not enough, when I begin to fall into the depths of nostalgia or hurl myself into hazy dreams of the future, I try to take a moment to breathe and be present. And that’s when I feel my eyes open for real, that’s when I start to notice those things listed above. I have learned, over time, that sitting with imperfection — with ourselves, with the world, with our surroundings — has a funny way of revealing things that are actually quite beautiful.

Kara Crawford:

“I see skies of blue/clouds of white/the bright blessed day and the dark sacred night/and I think to myself/what a wonderful world.”

Louis Armstrong hit the nail on the head, in my opinion. Whenever I think of what has gotten me through some of my most dark and difficult times in my life, I remember this song. I generally manage to maintain a positive outlook on the world, so it’s often easy for me to remember the message of this song. However, there are moments that we all face when life is difficult and the world doesn’t seem so wonderful.

I think that the second line of this verse is particularly telling and an important reminder: the bright blessed day and the dark sacred night.  In the good times, we’re living that “bright blessed day,” and in the bad it’s the “dark sacred night.” How could the darkness be sacred (not necessarily in a religious sense but in the sense of “highly significant?”) Even in those times, we learn about ourselves, we grow, and they really become part of us; they really become sacred. Another important reminder which that line gives us is that even in the darkest of nights, daybreak is still around the corner. There may still be difficulties on the road ahead, but we cannot forget that the bright blessed day will return. There are so many more days to be lived, and while nights may come, daybreak will always follow.  In addition, there are even more things that make the world wonderful, and I think that’s enough reason to live in and of itself.

by: IOW Staff

Readers, I’ve been trying to work on a piece for awhile based on a journal I had as a kid. Most kids keep things like “diaries” or journals on WHY DOESN’T HE LOVE ME, like Angela in almost every episode of My So-Called Life. Because Nico Lang was a really morbid kid, my journals were those sorts of composition notebooks that Harriet the Spy used, except instead of judgmental thoughts, it was a lot about killing myself. Ways to die. I used to doodle lots of pictures of exploding heads and people getting shot in the face, because if I didn’t doodle about it, I would probably just do it. There were a lot of nights in Middle and High School where I slept with a bottle of pills in my hand, daring myself to do it.  This helped make sure I didn’t.

But later, I decided to do the opposite. Rather than filling my notebooks and the flaps of my binders with outtakes from David Croenenberg movies, I decided to fill my life with reasons to live. Sometimes, it was a perfect sketch of the boy I liked at the time or a heart with his initials around it or song lyrics from Oasis (don’t judge!) or a simple affirmation of, “Today was a good day.”

I don’t have those books anymore, because I’m a terrible sentimentalist and never keep anything, so I thought we’d make some, together. This is the first installment of all the reasons our staffers want to live, the simple things that keep us going every day. It’s great that it gets better later for some, but sometimes, it’s just good to know that some things are nice right now.

Dominick Mayer:

Though I have no doubts about the efficacy of “It Gets Better” as a life-affirming/saving mantra for some, I was never that kid. I was the perpetually vitriolic misfit who didn’t care if it was going to get better because it damn well wasn’t now. In that time, I found punk rock, and later hip-hop. (There’s always been movies, too, but that’s a different and more intimate thing entirely.) As much as age has instinctively made me roll my eyes a little too hard at “music saved my life”-type declarations, in a lot of ways it really did. In addition to the common things, like the sense of community and the feeling that someone else was going through the same shit as me, it also gave me a new thing to obsess over, something wonderful and rare that my parents and the suburbs couldn’t show me. I had to go out and find it on my own, and in doing so I eventually kind of forgot about wanting to kill myself more days than not, and started living.

Carly Maria Hubbard:

I love to “stop and smell the roses.” Yeah, ok, I know it’s disgustingly cliche, but I swear it’s an instant mood boost. I live for those spring moments when the daffodils and tulips finally bloom and the grocery stores are chock full of fresh freesia. And in the fall, the smell of burning leaves and the crunch and crackle of newly loosed ones under hiking boots- mmm, utterly delicious. I live for skinny dipping in Lake Huron every summer with my cousins. I live for crappy teen romance novels and amazing coney dogs back home in Michigan. I live for afternoons spent buried in my Riverside edition of the Complete Works of Shakespeare, for homemade mint tea, thunder storms that shake me awake on a Saturday morning, inside family jokes, Disney movie marathons with my high school gal pals, any time spent with my little cousins, crappy music I’m not supposed to like, cheap Pinot Grigio, new college-ruled notebooks, trips to see my family in Vienna, for making cookies with my childhood nanny every Christmas, driving around with my sister (with all the windows rolled down and music blaring, naturally), for ‘family dinners’ with my little spiritual group here in the city, and for thousands of other little, seemingly inconsequential things and happenings that make my world spin off in complete euphoria. And orgasms. Can we all just take a moment to fully appreciate how wonderful orgasms are?? They’re the best way to start a day, the best way to end a day, and the only way I know how to give a crappy day a “happy ending.”

But of course, if you’re really down in the dumps, it’s hard to appreciate all the little things. I know that when I was diagnosed with depression in high school, it was tough work just getting out of bed in the morning, never mind going all Julie Andrews on myself and singing off a few of my favorite things. Not a whole lot helped when I was in that place. One thing that did keep me going was the reminder that I had a choice: I could choose to live, or I could choose not to. So much in life is out of our control (especially when we’re teens), but the decision to end or not end my life rested solely with me. So everyday, I got to make a choice that no one could take away from me, but the thing about that choice, was that if I chose even once to end my life, I’d never get to have that kind of control again. I would lose that power forever. As twisted as it sounds, the knowledge that if I stayed alive for just one more day, I would get to exert control over my life again tomorrow, kept me alive during my darkest times. That, and the thought of someone having to explain to my baby cousins why Carly couldn’t ever come over to play again. I stayed alive for them as much as I did for me, if not more at some points. They are the beauty I see in this world.

Mar Curran:

When I think back to my darkest moments, the thing that always got me through them was the open possibility of the future. I imagined myself as a 30-year old-cartoonist, dressed in a black turtleneck with short hair and glasses (yes, I am Alison Bechdel in my mind) living in a New York loft with my partner, eating unlimited Chinese takeout. I realize this comes from my perspective standpoint with a lot of privileges. I do believe, though, in a lot of cases having dreams for the future is what saved me and could help others. If I think about the possibility that I might not have experienced all the terrible, wonderful, loving, and life-altering things I’ve had happen in the past two years alone it’s distressing enough. That makes me want to see what the future 80 years bring.

J.D. Gore:

I have learned not to underestimate the power of beverages, especially teas. When I am feeling distressed, I flip my world and pretend everything else exists so I can sip that steamy blend of herbs. Tea makes doing other things better, especially meeting new people in new places. Tea has become part of my personality so that I feel intimate with everyone or, if I need to be alone, with just my cup. Coffee has become practically a sacrament. Fresh juices, bubbling sodas, and even just plain water on a hot day. It sounds so simple but whatever I drink is an offering to my body and existence — hydrating says “I love being alive. I will keep living.” It’s the first thing I thought of and sometimes it really is the only thing left. When life is going to fast and heavy, I can sit with my steaming cup and tell it all: “Back-off. I am having my tea.” When I take that moment, it is even better than meditation. I remember other reasons to live and the people I might have a cup with someday.