Your thirties were different from your forties. In your thirties, you had your longest relationship of one year. It ended on a sour note. You ignored her and never talked to her again because she lost her mind. Then you vowed never to involve yourself in another one again.
You became spiritual, a so-called Buddhist. You began reading books on spirituality and meditated on mind-altering drugs every day to help with your spiritual quest. (Om, focus on the present, the here and now.)
By thirty-three, Jesus’s age, you were walking around telling others about your journey as if they cared. You read Eckhart Tolle and really related to him. All the while, you worked that traumatic delivery job in the city. You started drinking at night with the mind-altering drugs to mix between getting high and coming back down.
By thirty-five, your spirituality crashed, and you grew a new surliness. Disillusionment set in. You realized that spirituality was overrated and really got you nowhere.
You continued dating other women, but none of them matched up with your ex, whom you loathed now anyway. You met your first sugar mama, who was eight years older than you. She promised the world, but you sabotaged the relationship before the world ever came. You were never that attracted to her, so you ended it before things got too serious.
And then the downward spiral began spiraling faster. The drugs and alcohol took control of you. Your only friends left were at the bar, and they weren’t really friends.
At thirty-eight, you went to your high school reunion, where you were a blackout drunk. You got in a fight there among your alumni and got kicked out of a bar for throwing a glass and cutting someone. You were lucky you weren’t arrested or taken to the hospital because the bouncer had beaten you to a pulp.
As if you didn’t learn your lesson then, you continued spiraling into your forties. The big age came, and you saw that your dreams had never materialized. You heard it too often:
- It’s all downhill from here.
- Life begins at forty.
You thought those were both lies. And then you saw your parents aging. Your mother ended up in the hospital. Your one opportunity to make something of yourself was pissed away by a cruel authority.
You realized you were all alone from the beginning, so you broke down and ended up in the psych ward. The doctor there told you never to take drugs and alcohol again. So then you didn’t even have that to fall back on.
They sent you to meetings to get your life back, but you couldn’t relate to the other people there. And all the while, you looked back at your thirties and thought, man, what a wasteland they were–worse than your twenties. All that self-abuse to try and alleviate the past traumas. The traumas weren’t even real, but they ate away at you from the inside. There was nothing for you to do except continue to live without your vices. And what a lonely life that was. There was really no solution.