overyourhead

Living Each Day As If It's My Last...

There is a lot to be said for living each day as if it's your last. Don't waste your life waiting for something to happen, man. Make it happen. You could be run over by a bus tomorrow. Carpe diem, baby. Seize the day. Well, that's the theory anyway.

As for me, I've perhaps been seizing the day a little too hard and a little too often just recently. Mainly round the neck. These last four months I've been throttling my days like a crazed strangler. Oh yes, I've been doing a lot of seizing of late. A lot. Way too much in fact. And not always in a good way. I've not so much been burning the candle at both ends as setting a blow torch to it. I’m living each day as if it's my last. Take just 24 hours out of this last weekend just gone. Just 24 hours: hangover, Darren's party, Comptons, Bar Code, sauna, hangover, pub, Gummi - drinking and smoking all along the way with little sleep at the end of it. It was, quite frankly, exhausting. And it's not as if I don't know why I'm doing it. Oh yes, I'm quite painfully self-aware. I'm perpetually going out searching for something that I know I could find very much closer to home. A bit of self-respect.

You see my self-respect took a big kicking recently. It was pretty much crushed in fact. It was clutching its stomach and rolling on the floor. It was lying in the gutter in a pool of its own blood and may not have made the night. And it needed some help. I needed some help.

And indeed help is what I sought. I talked to friends, I went to counselling, I attended courses. In fact I’ve managed to build up quite a support network these last months. But you know what? Ultimately they have all said the same thing. Give it time. It takes time. Time is what it takes. And with so many people saying the same thing you have to believe it, right? We asked a hundred people the same question… our survey says… the top answer is… what they all say is… ‘give it time’. So that’s exactly what I’m trying to do. I’m trying to give it time. My self-respect will return apparently. If I just give it time.

But giving things time is not something I do very well. The lure of going out looking for affirmation in the short-term is still pretty strong. But I suppose the corollary is that by living each day as if it's my last, I dramatically increase the chances that it actually fucking is.