The Difference Between You and Me

Chapter 15

Life is a sadist. It teaches us lessons through hurt and pain, not for our own good but for its pleasure, thinking that's the only way we can learn. And watches as we struggle day and night to grapple with the cold hard truth and attempt to bounce back/overcome. It smiles as we crawl from rock-bottom, our fingers desperately gripping at the slippery walls on our way up and finding ways to knock us back down when we emerge victorious. That is called life they say, it's unfair they say. But what are we supposed to do about it? Simply take each blow as they come.

Ammie stared blankly at the computer screen before deleting what she had just typed leaving only the words 'Life is a sadist'. She had to write a college admissions essay on the topic 'What is life to you?' and she has started it for the fourteenth time now over the past eight and a half hours but still has not successfully made it past those three words. The blinking text cursor seemed as if it was reprimanding Ammie for not having written anything and she stared at it as if daring it to say something to her.

Life, she began again, is like a tumbleweed. And again, she deleted it

Someone once asked me if I knew the meaning of life, I said 42. To this day I have no idea what I meant by it. Maybe it was a natural response because life truly has no meaning or maybe I was compelled to give a logical response because life itself is too complex. All I know is the nature of life is to suck and that is a well-known fact. As soon as you are born, the realization hits you smack in the face. Life screws us all over and we take it, we let it laugh at our expense because we are masochists, and life is a sadist.

In Café Society, Woody Allen causally inserted the line 'life is a comedy written by a sadistic comedy writer'. But I disagree, because life itself is the sadistic comedy writer, writing comedies for us to make complete fools of ourselves for its own pleasure. Or is life a playwright? Carefully constructing its own small, individual parts or one-act plays significant to something bigger. I believe that would explain coincidences, the 'it's a small world' concept and déjà vu.

Life is about this and if it doesn't work out then that's life. If the worst happens then that's just life. Life loves to do things its own way and sometimes life just, does its own thing. However, we have to try to wrestle back some sort of control. And it'll take time, but nothing worthwhile in this life comes easily now does it? So, we scream, we shop and max out our credit cards, we eat and get fat then self-loath; coping mechanisms that only makes us more miserable. It's all so hilarious really.

And when you really think about it, there's a lot of humour in life. Sometimes you get down in a funk and then you realize that life is just a bad joke and that's when the laughing things off comes in. Because why allow life to feel good at your expense when you can laugh it off and move on. Life also write its own ironies. But thinking about how ironic life is always does brighten my day. It has a way of working out, in the ways you least expect. You're thrown for loop after loop. And through it all, sometimes it's easy to forget that even though you didn't get from point A to point B the way you planned it, it still happened. You just may not have noticed it. And in such situations, it's truly hard to see the proverbial 'silver lining'.

Life...is what you make it. It tends to just happen, and it can be pretty dismal at times. 'Maybe it could be look upon as a nightmare, and maybe to stay awake meant truly living instead of falling into mediocrity and happiness', my friend said to me one day.

And life does work in weird ways, trying to be cynical and funny, by going out of its way to be an inconvenience when it doesn't need to be. But in the end life is life and it goes on.

Well this is awfully short, Ammie thought to herself

Not to mention five hundred and eighteen words of utter trash, her subconscious chimed in.