Hello friend, how’s life? Great. I mean, ok. I can’t actually hear you. You know that, right?

Anyway, hear me out. Tomorrow morning I’ll be 19 years old. Crazy, right? Not really, kinda expected that, to be honest. But it is weird in a lot of ways.

The first thing that feels weird is that I’m feeling actually older, like I’m starting to take a look at what’s over the wall. My teenager years were a little bit troubled, not anything out of the ordinary, I believe. But there are a couple of interesting plot points I’d like you to pay attention to:

#1 I had a late puberty; it started when I was almost 17, and to be honest, I think I’m still in it;

#2 My older brother went to another state for medical school when I was 12;

#3 I was, for the most part, a lonely kid who spent most of his time alone playing strategy games on his computer because he was too insecure to do anything with his friends;

#4 My mother was, and still is, an overcontrolling parent who never let me go out, hence why I only went to three “””sweet “”fifteen”” “”” parties in my life, and one of them was my best friend’s sister’s party—I was already 17 by then;

#5 My father is kind of the antihero of my life, and when I say anti-hero, I mean the opposite of anything a hero represents; maybe one day we’ll discuss that in more detail.

• Right now it’s 10:39pm, and I need to finish this thing before midnight. Fuck. –

The combination of these 5 factors, plus a bunch of others that are less overarching, culminated in my creation of a certain mental condition me and my dear therapist like to call (get ready, it’s not that creative) “undeath.” In my case, undeath is a life state in which one is walking and talking but presents himself without desires and, on top of that, doesn’t get pleasure out of anything.

Just a quick parenthesis: I believe that this undeath of mine was the reason I started smoking when I was 13 years old. Anyway, I just wanted to type so my future self can think about it =).

So there I was, a little skinny white buuuoooy who had no desires and felt no pleasure in this life. Kinda crazy to live your first “mind-free” years like that, I’d say. I can honestly say that my adolescence’s memories were almost all trampled over by the crippling feeling that I was dead all that time. Maybe one day I’ll cover this story. It’s a cool one; it involves suicide and time traveling! And I’m dead serious about this.

After all that morose phase, I finally was 18! Hooray!!! And I made a promise to myself: this year is the year that I’ll try to live as hard as I can. I was out of high school and filled with hopes about the future; after all, I had just gotten the news that I’d gotten a scholarship at a foreign college. And man! What 18 year old doesn’t want to explore the world and do crazy stuff? GOTCHA! Corona virus time, babey! I got stuck here lol. That sucked. Really did. But still, I made new friendships, already “fell” in love with one of my classmates (but that didn’t last long, even though right now everything is just fine between us—like, we’re friends! Really! I actually listen to her two-minute-long audios, ok?). Once again, I’ll talk about it in another post.

The thing is, I spent almost 5 years undead, and for that, I had to spend my last year trying to learn how to actively pursue things that made me feel like living. And after all that, all I want for my 19th year of life is to try as hard as I can to enjoy this MF. I recently watched a video essay about the book “King, Warrior, Magician, Lover,” and man, do I need to learn how to be a lover, holy shit. All I want is to enjoy my friends as much as I can. And I don’t know, if one of these days the girl I like starts liking me back and we can share our feelings, I want to enjoy that a lot too! Surprisingly, and perhaps even laughably, as of now, I really enjoy liking her even though I’m 100% unsure about what she thinks of me.

I’m so happy right now, even though my head hasn’t quite accepted the fact that I’m getting older. Like I said at the beginning of this, I feel like I’m finally getting on top of the wall to see what’s on the other side. But actually, it’s more of a looking down. Recently, in one of my dreams, I heard the following sentence: “every single thing is made of the past,” and right now this couldn’t sound truer. There isn’t one part of myself that isn’t made of what I picked up in all these few years I’ve had. And tonight, I’m proud of it.

With all satisfaction,

Happy new year to me!