Every time you’re around your friends, no sober guy is sitting on the edge of an L-shaped couch and saying you know, I thought about killing myself last February. For days at a time, I layed in bed, itching my ass crack, fantasizing about my funeral, and putting off things with deadlines because I felt defeated. That’s not what happens. It’s a guy pulling up the girl he brought home and disappointed last Saturday on Instagram or a debate over what the Utah Jazz are doing.
Sometimes you go on Instagram and see that kid who’s six-five next to his girlfriend with four-thousand followers and a body that could save America’s formula shortage, and you just wish you had something like that. You’re not an angel, but you try your hardest to be a decent guy. You’re doing what society expects from you, and sometimes it pushes you to the brink. For every 4:13 AM story of you rolling face, there’s a night you spend looking at your ceiling, yearning for a girlfriend or a new job or better grades. You’re not fucking Malala, but your life isn’t a cakewalk, and you get frustrated because oftentimes, it seems as if the good guys don’t win. I mean, Jesus Christ, Ghislaine Maxwell just got twenty years in prison for apparently sex-trafficking children to nobody.
As hard as things get, and as bleak as things may seem, the most important thing is that you don’t give up. For every girlfriend that’s cheated, there’s a guy that used the pain to fuel himself, and now he’s jacked somewhere on a boat. For every guy that walked home from their school’s library late at night and looked dolefully at the tallest building on campus for a way out, there’s a Father having a catch with his son. And for every guy that stopped himself from jumping off a bridge during the 2008 economic crisis, there’s an old man drinking a strong Margarita listening to a Jimmy Buffet cover band play the steel drums in the Keys of Florida. I’m going to get fucked by some situation or some scumbag at some point coming up, and it’s going to knock me on my ass. And I’m going to get up and keep pushing a metaphorical boulder up the ever-inclining hill of life, and I hope that all of you are there with me. Don’t kys; you’re too sexy.
