Deathbed confessions

If you have things you'd only be willing to admit to on your deathbed, you're living with too much regret, or too little. 

Self pity

There's a sick bit of joy and comfort you can take from hopeless depression. It's easier when you feel everything and everyone is against you, that the odds are stacked to make you lose, that your God has forsaken you. It let's you blame everything but yourself for your problems. It lets you get away with doing nothing about it. But life is a lot less convenient than that. And it's so much worse and hopeless when nobody cares, when nobody pays attention. When whether you succeed or fail makes no difference to anyone anyways.

Gatekeeper

A person bad at keeping secrets seems mysterious. 

But a person good at keeping secrets just seems boring.

Secrets

You told me a story once about how much you like food. We may not have been particularly sober at the time. But you really, really wanted me to know how much you appreciated food. Your eyes, I kid you not, got a little teary as you spoke to the Cheeto in your hand. You said that you were afraid of how little you would have to say if you didn't like food. And then you got even more quiet, as if telling me a deep secret, and admitted you had never told anyone that before. I giggled, not knowing how else to respond. You giggled too, wiped your eyes, and then made another bad joke. I instantly forgot about it, but that night as I drifted from drunken stupor to sleep, Sometimes even dumb secrets can be as important as scandalous ones.

Membranous Glomeronephritis

I am surprisingly grateful for this disease. There are times I am sad about it, or scared. But those are almost always the times I am letting myself indulge in my self despair. When I just want to feel sorry for myself for any reason - self pity is almost like a rich and creamy cheese cake. You can just immerse all your senses in it and lose yourself in it if you let yourself, and the deeper you go the richer it gets. And just like a good slice of cheesecake, once it's all done and even a few hours has passed, you're none the better for it, and any vestige of indulgence you gained from it is already gone.

But when I'm not embroiled in self pity, which happens far less often now, I feel grateful. I feel like where I was just going through the motions of living, I am now actually living. I think it was the fear of losing control of yet another aspect of my life. Of losing control of my life itself. I have spent so much time fantasizing about death or at least not existing that I was so surprised at myself for caring so deeply that I might be meeting my end after all. And even that thought was being pretty melodramatic. I was so upset and scared and angry that God or fate or whatever would let this happen to me. I refused, I refuse, to let anyone control my life but myself. When and how I die will not be left to God or fate or disease or old age. My death will be my own, as my life has and will always be my own. No one will get to control it except for me.

That's what my disease gave me. Not a passion to live, but a passion to avoid death. It gave me the time and motivation to truly appreciate my mortality. My end will come. I don't know when, but I know when it does, it will be because I have decided on it, and nobody and nothing else will have any say on it.

transformation

There are some people out there who probably think about you, that you never think about. You probably would never even guess they think about you, and you could probably never guess why they even would think to. There are two people in my life I can think of like that. Barbra and Suresh.

Barbra was a girl in my 8th grade class. Barbra was entirely unremarkable. She was an average height girl, her hair was long and just a little frizzy, she was a little on the skinny side, she was friends with other similarly unremarkable girls. She wasn't particularly attractive or unattractive. She never spoke up, didn't stand out in any way at all. She didn't excel or do poorly in any particular class, never got in trouble, never went for anything extracurricular. Even her clothes were all mono colored pastel shirts and sweaters, jeans that weren't too baggy or skin hugging. There was no reason to notice her at all, and she did nothing to really change that. She was quite literally a background character. I think the only reason I noticed her at all was because of how unremarkable she was. I was used to trying to apply stereotypes to people when I was younger, find ways to compartmentalize people, to simplify how I interacted with them, or even just to find some empathy for them. I was big on trying to understand what motivated people. But she was a mystery to me. Eventually I just lumped her into a category called "quiet girl" and moved on.

I don't have many memories of Barbra, but the most vivid one was a group assignment we had. We were talking about something to do with Canadian history. I couldn't tell you now what it was exactly about, but it involved discussing our opinions about something that had happened. In our group of five, two other kids had taken lead on the discussion, and were mostly arguing with each other, the rest of us content to just sit and listen. I remember I spoke up at one point and offered a counter argument, and Barbra cut me off with an impassioned point of her own. We all stopped talking and just sort of stared at her. Her eyes were wide, I remember that even now, with rage. Or maybe something a little less than rage, but it was there. And it was pointed at me. I wish I could remember what it was we were talking about, but I can't. What I do remember is my reply, something to the effect of "Wow Barbra, you never say anything!". And just as quickly as it had come, her eyes went back to normal, and she looked down and didn't say anything else. And the conversation picked up again and she looked away and didn't contribute anything else for the rest of that assignment.

After grade 8, we graduated and went to high school. I don't think I ever thought about Barbra again, and didn't see her around the school - this wasn't surprising, the school was a big place and unless you ran in similar social circles, it was easy to avoid some people for the entire time you were there. Maybe two years later, in the middle of grade 10, I saw her again. This wasn't the same Barbra that I had known in grade 8. She was wearing all leather. Her hair had been straightened, almost tortuously so. Her nails were painted a bright red that matched the lipstick that she now wore, and her face had been smoothed out and touched up with makeup. I was down a long hallway of lockers when I first saw her, but even from that distance I could hear her high pitched giggle carry down the hall. I don't think I'd ever even seen her smile before, much less laugh or giggle. She was surrounded by a group of girls all similarly made up. Underneath her black leather jacket she wore a bright orange shirt with a zigzag pattern on it. She told, what I presume, was a joke because she spoke and then everyone around her burst out laughing. What struck me the most about everything here, more than her new appearance and her giggling, was her height. This might seem odd, but, throughout grade 8, maybe even earlier, whenever I saw her she was slumped over a little all the time. She was always just a little hunched over, always turned just away a bit from everyone, and she never looked anyone in the eye. And yet here she was, standing tall and confident, and telling jokes.

Suresh was someone I went to high school with. He was an academic, he was a pretty smart guy if not a little awkward. He wore clothes that were obviously knock offs of real brands, they all fit just a little too big, and he was already a pretty lanky guy which made them look that much sillier. A lot of kids made fun of him behind his back for smelling, which I never thought was an issue and figured it must be just one of those 'nothing better to make fun of you' type things. He was nice enough, but just socially inept enough to be outcast from most people. He hung out with the social reject group. I don't say this in any sort of mocking way, for awhile I was a part of that group too. Guys who were generally unremarkable, didn't excel in sports, didn't do well in school, weren't well off enough or cared enough to be fashionable. Suresh generally kept his head down, did his school work, and went about his own business without really bothering anyone. If not for his competitive streak which drove him to talk to people, just to see if he had beaten them, he probably wouldn't have had any friends at all.

Even amongst the people he called his friends, I never really realized just how outcast he really was. Everyone always kind of called him a nerd and egghead, or whatever, to his face. I guess it seemed okay because he was so competitive, and he kind of welcomed it. Or seemed to anyways. Nobody really treated him as anything other than 'that smart guy', and it dictated the interactions people had with him. If people wanted to hang out with him, its because they wanted help with homework, or wanted him to be in their group project. I don't think I really realized just how much he defined his friendships by what people took from him until some point in the 12th grade, when he won a bunch of free theatre tickets. His mother had somehow gotten a booklet of coupons for the theatre, something like 50 free individual tickets. When he showed up to school with them, he showed us the booklet, but explained to us that they were actually 50% off tickets. We didn't think anything of it, and the first time he used them, he brought eight others of us to see a movie. He said since the tickets were 50% off, we'd have to give him the money for half the ticket, and he'd give us a coupon, which we could redeem for an actual ticket. Some of us were confused, but I think we were all too excited to be seeing a movie to really think it through. Once we got in the theatre, we all sat down as close to the centre as we could, and thats when we realized Suresh wasn't with us. We looked around and saw him sitting by himself off to a side of the theatre. One of the group went off to go ask him what the matter was, when he came back he said that Suresh didn't like to be around talkers during movies. We whispered amongst ourselves "wow, isn't that really messed up?". During this hushed conversation, one guy mentioned that he had seen what the coupon had said, and that the ticket was just free. We all thought about this, but quickly forgot once the movie started. But, on the bus ride back home, one of us brought it up with Suresh. He said "yea, well if it wasn't for me, you'd be paying full price for the ticket, so it's fair that you pay me for half of it". Someone else tried to explain that you don't just use your friends like that, but Suresh didn't really listen.

Suresh actually ended up going to the same university as me. I didn't know this at first, but figured it out a few months in when I saw him on campus. I was walking through a residence I don't normally go to, and saw him there laughing with some other Indian students in one of the lounges. I didn't pass that closely to them, but they all smelled heavily of smoke and alcohol. Suresh had always been a conservative kid, never one to do wrong, always worried about what his parents would say or do if they caught him doing anything untoward. And he had never hung out with other Indian kids before. Like me, we had hung out with a pretty multicultural group of guys, all unremarkable losers. But here he was dressed in pricey urban wear. He was wearing a gold chain, and his hair actually had gel in it. There were girls too, dressed in clothing that fit in, and they were intermingled amongst the guys. All of them just splayed out on top of each other on the couches. I approached him, asked him how it was going. I mentioned I didn't even know he had been going to this school and asked "what degree are you doing?", to which he replied "really? who gives a shit" and the whole group burst out laughing.

I used to spend a lot of time thinking about those two people. How someone can change so drastically in such a short amount of time. I wondered how they could do it, how you can just wake up one day and say "today, I'm going to change the way I look, and act, and everything". Clearly, I didn't understand how they did it, but I wanted to. I wanted to because I wanted to change too. Leading up to my second year of university, I was convinced I knew who I was. I was religious. Pretty deeply religious even. I was conservative. I generally did what my parents wanted of me, and had so far. They had wanted me to be an engineer, and so that's what I did. They wanted me to go to a certain school, and that's where I went. I didn't drink or smoke or talk to girls at all. According to my parents, I couldn't date until I had graduated, and so I didn't even think about it. I didn't even swear. I couldn't even think about swearing without feeling uncomfortable. I, to this day, remember distinctly the tightness in my chest that I'd feel if I even thought about the word "ass". You might never know the social anxiety of when someone tells a joke where the punchline involves the word "shit", and the person beside you says to you "I didn't hear that, what did they say?". If I ever said anything even mildly scandalous, anyone who knew me that was around would jump on it, laugh at me for it, and just make it clear I wasn't living in the box they had me in. And in the middle of university, that's what it felt like. It felt like I was living in a box that I used to fit in nicely, but now not so much. But I couldn't get out of it because that's not what people expected of me. People expected me to stay the same. It didn't matter that I had started to question my religion - people saw the religious icons in my dorm room and assumed that's who I was. It didn't matter that swearing didn't seem to obscene to me anymore - if I ever swore, even accidentally, everyone around would make a big deal about it. Nobody ever asked me if I wanted to go to a bar, and always said "if you don't want to drink, of course we won't make you". Generally, I was the shut in. I never wanted to do anything exciting or interesting, I just stayed home and did my homework and studied.

At the end of my second year, I got an intern position abroad. I was there with 5 other students from my school that I had never met before. They didn't know anything about me, and I didn't know anything about them. At first, I settled into my old habits, but I realized something was different. These people weren't putting me into a box and treating me the way I had become accustomed to. They asked me to go to bars. They asked me to ditch work to go to the beach. At first I was thrown, and had nothing to do with it. But they insisted, and, far more quickly than I thought I'd have been able, I adapted. I drank. I partied late at night. I cut work constantly. I even went to clubs and danced, two things I wouldn't have even considered before. I became the guy who was always up for everything, and would never say no, no matter how ridiculous the idea. Soon after that I became the guy who came up with crazy ideas. I liked it. I LOVED it. For the first time in possibly my whole life, I felt like I had finally found myself. I liked who I was. I liked what people thought of me. I felt interesting and that I was someone worth knowing. I stuck out. I bought a fedora (and this was before wearing a fedora was being a hipster or cool or uncool, people just didn't even do it), and wore it all the time. I grew my hair out. I stayed out late, and sometimes never even came back home, crashing at someone else's house. I think about it now and think about how tame I still actually was, but by my old standards, I was living a hedonistic and high speed life.

I was away for four months. When I got back, the day I landed happened to be one of my friend's birthday. He was celebrating it at a club in downtown Toronto. He had asked if I could make it, I think expecting me to say I wouldn't be able to come for some made up reason, the real reason being I wouldn't be caught dead in a club. But I came. Straight off the plane. Everyone who knew me was shocked to see me, I think. Long hair, wearing a sport jacket and fedora. This was not the same person who had gotten on that plane four months ago. I bought rounds of drinks for everyone with reckless abandon. I was singing at the top of my lungs with the music, and dancing. I didn't realize the effect I was having on everyone around me - I had been partying the same way the night before, and this just felt like an extension to that. It didn't occur to me just how jarring a change I had undergone. My friend, the one who's birthday it was, took me aside and started grilling me about it. "You swear now? And you drink? What happened to you?" And I said simply "I'm still the same person, I just do some more things now". Because that's all it really felt like to me.

I realize now that those changes had been brimming inside of me, just waiting to come out. But it was my family and friends that kept them boxed up. I couldn't change without them immediately putting me back in my place. It was the same thing for Barbra and Suresh. It was the people closest to them that were preventing them from becoming the people they really wanted to be, or at least from discovering who they wanted to be. I don't personally think people can go through instantaneous changes. I think we are more like caterpillars. When we feel a change, we start to build a cocoon around ourselves, in the shape of our older selves while we are changing inside. And you don't realize it until you're given the right nudge to burst out of that cocoon, and show the world the butterfly you wanted to be all along.