You can decorate it with some cool led lights from depop or something. You can even get them in your local second-hand shop. Ask them in Instagram. A little plant dying in a corner. Always gets sun, always gets water, and yet there it lies. Screaming, I guess. Screaming when the water is too much and screaming when is not enough. Put up a poster of that artist that you love, next to the photography book of Wolfgang Tillmans. You framed that drawing that your artist friend made for you; “East End Boys” can be read.

Do whatever you want with the hamster wheel. But do not even think of stopping.
Whatever happens, stay there, stay, and keep running, keep the wheel turning. The engine cannot stop. The engine does not care. The engine needs all the gears to just keep turning over and over again. Lately I don’t know If I’m sick because I’m tired or I’m tired because I’m sick. Maybe both. Maybe I am just overworked. Maybe I don’t do enough.

I am finishing the third year of my university course. I am working full time. In hospitality. I try my best to stay sane, connected. To have fun, while still not wasting money. To be healthy. Obviously, I’m failing.

The other day, I cried. It’s not an event because it happened, I am not scared of emotions, not anymore. I was held by someone I love, and I cried, in a small childish tantrum, because I did not want to work. I am well acquainted with the economic system. I know that is made to break people down. Drain the energy of the individuals until we become mindless automatons. This is why thinking is considered almost a magical ability. This is why unique point of views are so attractive, they are scarce.

But I refuse to be a victim. I want to move on, gather new energies, blossom, and try my best.

I haven’t been a quitter since I left therapy. When the veil was lifted, my eyes could see like I have never seen before, my ears could listen like I would have never listened before. I don’t want to stay in the headspace of thinking that I am a slave of my circumstances.

Spanish philosopher Ortega y Gasset stated “I am myself and my circumstance; if I do not save it, I do not save myself”. People often recite the first part but forget about the second. It is about the circumstances, but more so, about what I can do with them. I need to create a circumstance that is benevolent. I refuse to stay and dwell into the idea that life is unfair.
Life is unfair. That’s kind of the point of it. Chaos happens. Life is chaos. It is not about managing which kind of chaos we will get, that’s out of our control. It always was about what we, as individuals, can do with the chaos that we get.

It might sound overly individualistic. Too entitled, too privileged. It is not. Staying connected with the idea that me, as a human being, get to decide what to do with what is given to me does not enter in conflict with the fact that the system is broken. And by “what is given” I am not invoking some kind of anthropomorphic entity, for the record.
T

here I am. I’m crying, more like quietly sobbing, while I’m being held. My alarm is going off. My boyfriend hates it with passion. So do I, to a lesser degree. I understand that trying to fulfil all my duties is favourable for my future in this economic climate. In the big picture, everything will make sense. Sure, why not.

Why not.
Why not.

Work hard. Try to improve your situation. Stay connected with yourself. Find time to be creative. Love your family, love your friends. Have a good time. Take care of all the spaces that I will inhabit. Stay healthy. If I’m doing what I’m supposed to do, why am I feeling exhausted most of the time? Why the system puts me in a machine that drains all my energy?

I cycle to work. I try my best. I have never been the one to do the bare minimum at work. I am high energy; I try to bring my best. I get rinsed and I cycle back, tired, with whichever album I’m obsessed with at the moment blasting in my headphones. Right now I am rotating in between The Car, The Loneliest Time , Bing Funny In A Foreign Language and Midnights.

And I get home, or to my boyfriend’s, and I am exhausted. I usually fell asleep watching a movie or a series. Sometimes I gather enough energy to put some laundry. In the eternal cycle of laundries that is adulthood. When the stars align, I do have enough gas to have a shower and orchestrate a dinner with friends, or some drinks in a evening. I have a great time, only to be even more tired afterwards.

Do whatever you want.

But stay tired, mindlessly running, in your lovely hamster wheel.

Be mad. Upset. Feel bitter, tired.

Smashed. Destroyed.

Destroyed.

My housemate, an actual English northerner, always tells me that destroyed is a word that you don’t use for extremely tired. Knackered, he would say. But I feel more than knackered. It is not just physical. It’s a feeling that crossed me in multiple dimensions. The physical, of course. But also, the mental, the spiritual.

It is a lovely hamster wheel, isn’t it?