John's melancholy

            John Doe is stuck. Stuck in this pathetic routine that everybody else tend to call life. It’s basically one day after another, one lost hope after another, drifting away into nothing, drowning in misery. The perpetual struggle got lost along the way and the only thing left is to take each moment at a time, praying for survival, because redemption is long lost and forever forgotten.

            But that’s not the point is it? It says right there in the title that we should talk about melancholy or something like that. Well, truth be told, it’s a bit much to say that John Doe is a melancholic. He doesn’t really have much too crave for right now, so he tries to hide in the past where no one can bother him. But you can’t travel back in time unfortunately. The human race hasn’t been so kind as to offer him this option. So what’s left? One thing and one thing only. Memories. And John has plenty of those.

            Lots of things from the past go trough John’s mind, he gets haunted by various ghosts, some of the happy, some of the sad times. He likes each and every one of them tough, he doesn’t discriminate. It’s long past the time when John Doe learned to take the good with the bad, and now he knows that life’s full of misery and sorrow, but that shouldn’t make one sad. At the very most it should make him a cynic. But he’s not a cynic, he cares too little about the world around him for that. So he lets himself be haunted, missing his past as much as he despises his present.

            He thinks about Jane Doe, her presence sometimes lingers in the depths of his twisted mind. He doesn’t miss her tough. He knows too well that she is dead, and there’s no way he could bring her back. Too much has changed. People don’t change, that’s for shure, yet everything is now different from what it was when John was in love with her. He wishes nothing more than to go back to those times, when everything was simpler and everyone was less. But he can’t and he knows that.

            Basically John doesn’t miss Jane Doe, he doesn’t even miss loving her. He just misses the way he loved her. That unconditional, never-to-be-shared love that kept him alive and never let him down. So if John Doe is melancholic, then he’s got the melancholy of delusion. He misses his own self, he misses his old ideas, his old concepts, no matter how terribly wrong they have proven to be. Reality has failed him, the present has failed him, and the only thing left is to find shelter in his illusions of the past. He might even be wrong, those times could have seemed even darker at the time.

            Most likely, the times were bitter back then. John vaguely remembers the frustrations caused by his secret passion, and he resents himself for not saying anything when the time came to talk truth. But he doesn’t regret anything. He never does. He accepts what he’s done and what he hasn’t done, because altogether if it weren’t for those decisions, he probably wouldn’t be standing here today, revealing his darkest corners, exposing even the biggest depths of his soul. So yes, John is melancholic, but life goes on and his melancholy is just water under the bridge. Seize the moment, as they say.

John the vain

            Never make decisions when angry. It’s just an advice, listen to it, don’t listen to it, it doesn’t make much difference to anyone, but to John Doe it almost did. It almost made a huge difference. There aren’t any good decisions or bad decisions, John doesn’t believe in that. There are, however good times and bat times for making decisions and choosing new paths. Anger is one of the bad times. People could get hurt, and it’s not worth it when you can avoid casualties simply by postponing a decision. John Doe knows this so very well, because he almost died by the cause of an anger fueled decision.

            It was a close one too. For a brief moment, killing John Doe seemed like the right thing to do, the normal thing to do. Well, it turns out it isn’t. John Doe must live, however hard and painful it might be, his existence must never end for good, he can only die if he’s prepared to resurrect from its own ashes, ant this wasn’t the case. If John had died now, he would have died for good. Thank whoever you might want that it didn’t happen. John Doe shall continue to exist, the world doesn’t have the chance to get rid of him just yet.

            We should take a look at the reasons for John’s death wish tough. Well, you might say it was all a big misunderstanding of his actions and emotions, or better yet the lack of them. John Doe has had his share of sorrow and misery, and he is now slowly drifting away in his sea of resent and self loathing, and sometimes, that’s just not good enough. From time to time, he should struggle a little, just to prove that he’s still out there, to show that he didn’t drown yet. Instead, he chooses to live redundantly and soak in a painful monotony, and this near death experience should wake him up and make him realize he has to change something.

            None the less, it’s John Doe’s ego that’s hurting him. It’s stopping him from making any decisions at all, it just numbs him, makes him unresponsive to everything that’s going on around him. And it’s stronger now than it ever was before. John has been hurt before, he has let down his ego, threw himself into the unknown, hoping for the best and expecting the worst. It’s easy to assume that he got what he expected. And his ego, much like a mythical beast, grew stronger after every hit. The saying “what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger” may not apply to people, but it very well does describe what happened to John’s ego. It has now reached unimaginable proportions, and it threatens to take him down.

            Basically it all returns to decision making. Everything about John Doe is based on actions and reactions, on decisions and consequences. And that’s exactly what scares him the most. That’s the reason his ego grew so big, the fear of consequences is what’s feeding it and it’s hurting John’s existence. But he keeps learning from his mistakes, and hopefully, it won’t be long until John Doe will start all over, regaining his ability to consider choices and decide in his own name. And then, he will embrace the consequences, lifting himself above all egos and trying to reach his ideals once again, losing his fear of the unknown.

            Long live John Doe.

John's chances and opportunities

            John Doe is many things, but he is definitely not an outgoing person. He hates having to initiate a conversation, and you can never count on him to be an ice-breaker. He’s just not that into people. He hates useless interactions, and pities others, who constantly feel the need do force conversations in order to avoid awkwardness. He likes awkward situations, they somehow make him feel more comfortable, in contrast with how the others feel. He doesn’t care about much, especially not about other people’s opinion on him, so awkward times give him the opportunity to asses different types of attitudes and actions.

            In some way, when things feel peculiar, that’s when John feels normal, knowing that he’s not the only weird kid from the block. This attitude does not always work out for him tough. It has cost him a lot during his existence and it most likely keep costing him just as much. He could have done many things differently and it probably would have meant a better life for him, he wouldn’t be so fucked up right now. But he didn’t, and to be honest, if it were to live his life once again, he would most likely make the same decisions and screw himself just as well, mainly because he doesn’t give a fuck if he’s a screw up, he likes it that way. Normal is boring, right?

            And there’s another thing. He is who he is because of these mistakes, the decisions that he made in his existence added up and created him. We already established that John Doe’s only conscience is the past. He lives in the present, but thinks only in memories. And what is the past, if not a never ending series of lost chances and missed opportunities? Let me tell you, it’s nothing. You need to lose something in order to gain another. And John does this quite often. He loses himself to regain another form, constantly changing and never returning to a past form.

            There is something about these missed opportunities tough. It’s something that affects every single one of us, even John. It’s a feeling you sometimes get in your gut, some sort of misunderstood rage, it’s resent. Yes, even John sometimes feels resentful. It’s quite normal actually. He feels angry or sad because of a chance at happiness that he might have lost. And it’s not even real. It’s just a shit at a pursuit that most often ends in grief and sorrow anyway, so there shouldn’t be any regret there. But there is. People like to feed their illusions, for them even that small shot, that insignificant opportunity is something to crave for, and therefore something to resent.

            He wouldn’t change a thing tough. This resent isn’t strong enough to make him try and do something about it. It’s just one of the many small pains and inconveniences that have learned to coexist and live in peace, safely sheltered inside John’s precious little heart and wicked little brain. Maybe that’s why John misses his Jane Doe. He misses the love he had for her, the love she never knew about. With Jane, there are no missed opportunities, because there are no opportunities whatsoever. He knew he never stood a chance with her, so he never did anything to try and get her. It was all just about pure, unrequited love. Nothing more. And John Doe sometimes misses that. It was a simpler time back then.    

The society of John

If there’s something you ought to have understood until now about our beloved and hated John Doe, it’s the fact that he pretty much doesn’t give a fuck about the perks and advantages of having a busy and exciting social life. Yup, the truth is, John is what you might call a lonely rider. He doesn’t like to go with the flow, and the flow mainly consists of people, so he doesn’t like to go with the people, or better yet he doesn’t like to go where the people are.

Truth be told, who could blame him? Honestly, you can’t say he doesn’t have a point. People suck, everybody knows that, and everybody feels that more often than they would like to deceive themselves into thinking they do. John is just one of the rare cases of beings that are willing to accept and embrace the lack of perspective that social interaction has to offer. He is much happier with his choices in life, and he chose to go with his own flow and listen to his own advice, good or bad, rather than taking other people’s words into consideration. It’s a much healthier lifestyle, but the sad part is, when everything goes terribly wrong, and trust me when I say it will, John Doe has only himself to blame. He can’t lift the weight of bad decisions from his shoulders and throw it on somebody else’s, so he just throws it into the world with a simple “Life’s a bitch”, or a plain “shit happens”, and he means it with all his heart.

The thing is, when you first meet John, or his projection into the real world, you might think he’s shy. And in some way, he is, not shy, more like a bit socially awkward. He doesn’t really know how to act out around people he doesn’t know, so he prefers to not act out at all. But beyond John’s awkwardness, there lies the real source of his apparent shyness. He is, in the full meaning of it, antisocial. He hates people, not as individuals, but as generalized beings. He hates the concept of “people”, because with John Doe, almost everything is about concepts and abstract matters. He is happy in his own little world, he loves its imperfections, its many broken pieces, way more than he will ever be able to love the real world. It’s somehow logical, if you think about it. John Doe is a selfish prick, amongst others, so it’s natural for him to love his own little world, the reality that he created, and hate the one that’s forced down his throat with every day that passes. He shouldn’t be blamed for that. John is like a piece of the puzzle that doesn’t fit, but as far as he sees it, the puzzle is the one that’s wrong, so he cuts out his own models and creates a perfect fit into an imperfect mold.

But there’s one thing that’s missing from his beautiful distorted world. A think he finds very hard to admit to, a think that’s been kept out of sight for a long time now. He even thought he forgot about it. But he was oh so very wrong. There is a hidden place inside his heart, a small, dark corner that’s been locked a long time ago, and was thought to be forgotten. It didn’t perish tough. It’s still there, it’s a craving, greater than any other. He never thought he would miss anything, but the impossible happened. The craving is starting to surface, and there’s not much anyone can do about it. John misses, he misses the one that got away, the one and only, Jane Doe.