Redemption or Ruin

There's a scene in the movie Pulp Fiction that faithfully illustrates everything I'm about to talk about. Pulp Fiction is a masterpiece, the Hanging Gardens of Semiramis of the 20th century, a film I believe they will never make a greater one of, even if Dostoevsky or Dickens themselves were writing the screenplays in Hollywood. The scene perfectly captures the mental awakening I went through at 18, and thanks to which I am where I am in life now… To understand what I mean, you absolutely must watch this video and awaken as I did 10 years ago...

At 18, six months before my final exams, the ground really started to slip from under my feet. I felt that something was seriously wrong around me, I felt that kind of grouping that is so characteristic of this society, and from which I really wanted to get out. We went to school like a herd every morning, and the time spent there, despite its usefulness, I felt was unnecessarily little, and it weighed down on my daily life like tons. This was the era of my first great realizations, and the path, which I hadn't seen yet, was in front of me, but I didn't know where to start, and least of all, where I was going in life. This feeling was a harbinger of those shifts that fundamentally changed my life in the future, as if closing one era and opening up to a whole new world, in which I thought I might finally find myself.

So I started skipping school, and I didn't give a damn about anything that involved even minimal obligations, because I felt like I was suffocating. This feeling still accompanies me to this day, only now it's the corporate structure that I still find hard to stomach. It was January then, and everyone was in a fever about the final exams. All their thoughts revolved around this, but instead, I woke up at 7:30 every morning and left home so that my parents would see the me they wanted to see, and not see the me I was truly living. Months passed like this, and over the weeks, I learned to pass the time in the city from 8 AM to 3 PM so that when I got home, my parents would believe I was at school preparing for my exams. Sometimes, of course, I would go in if I had already seen all the movies in the cinemas and couldn't think of anything else to do that day, but that wasn't typical.

I fabricated tons of excuses and perfectly learned to lie my way through life, deceiving my parents and everyone around me to maintain an appearance of what society wanted to see, because people only care about credentials. School, that damn piece of paper, if you have a girlfriend, how you're dressed, what you do, how much you earn, who you vote for, where you go out, and how you live that damn life that billions of others live, broken down into individual expectations by age group. Everyone thinks they are unique, perhaps even an individual, which we prove everywhere, yet when someone truly tries to deviate from the well-trodden path of the savanna called life, there is great outrage and ostracism, of course, belonging to a group while proclaiming our own individuality.

Well, with these thoughts and a few months of intense slacking, I arrived at my final exams, where I told the teachers that I would either draw Madách's "The Tragedy of Man" and the World War II topic, or we shouldn't waste each other's time, because there was no chance I would pass anything else. The teachers' answers were: the second from the left, the third from the right. I was always damn good at geography, math is just math, even an idiot can speak English, but these subjects require studying, or should have. The final exams were followed by a hedonistic summer, then college, where I continued my usual lifestyle. One April day, events unfolded in the usual way, and I left home just as I had for months before, but this day, which I didn't know then, was different, and this was the day that fundamentally changed my previously hopeless daily life, and definitively hit the brakes on my life's cart hurtling towards the abyss. Signs are all around us, which we either notice or not, but regardless, they are there, guiding our lives. We can call this fate or divine providence; the point is whether we are willing to notice them, whether we have the eyes to see them, and whether we are open enough to the world to grasp them and change our lives. The sign I saw and comprehended on that April day affected me as if someone had injected adrenaline into my thoughts, and I woke up in an instant.

It was perhaps mid-April, and I hadn't been attending so much that I didn't even know if I still had student status or not, and I was still languishing in the dark basement of my self-built, going-nowhere false world, when I decided that instead of school that day, I would go sunbathe on Margaret Island. The weather was nice, I felt carefree, and I kept laughing to myself at those monkeys who were still sitting in school, and for that, I had a deep contempt for them.

It was damn hot, and the park where I was lying was constantly being watered, which was good because I could splash myself if the sun got too hot, when suddenly I felt that some asshole was washing himself in such a way that he was constantly splashing me too. I sat up and what I saw I will never forget. A ragged, old homeless man was washing himself, then when he finished, he went back to his bags and lay back down to sunbathe. Suddenly everything became clear, and in an instant, I was jolted out of my world, which until then I had felt was unshakeably stable. All my self-proclaimed ideologies collapsed, and like someone waking up from a nightmare, I had to face the fact that I was living the same lifestyle as that ragged homeless man, only I had a home to go to, and if I continued this, there was a good chance I would end up in the same place. I saw myself 20 years in the future and realized that I was on the path that led to that homeless man. This whole thing affected me with such elemental force then that I am unable to describe it here now, but for me, this was the sign, that certain point that saved me from total life failure.

Signs, as I’ve already mentioned, are everywhere. It could be a disparaging glance that, for some reason, pierces your soul at that moment, or it could be the sight of your distorted body in a shop window, noticed after many years, which you hadn’t seen before, or rather, had refused to acknowledge. The sign is a constant thing in human life and it never errs. The more you mess up your life and the longer you head in the wrong direction, the more frequently signs from the outside world will find you, and it’s up to you what you do with these signs. You can create an ideology around a pile of dog shit, and let’s face it, most people’s lives aren’t much different from that. Hundreds of thousands of people live among us, leading aimless, uninspired lives, whose miserable, messed-up lives are reflected in their bodies like a window into their daily existence, which they try in vain to hide. Acceptance, these people desperately proclaim, and inner peace, and they are happy this way, because someone loves them regardless, but accepting things is giving up on life, and believe me, they don’t love you that way, there’s just one less person they have to fear due to your insignificance, and as long as you are beneath them, they can feel superior.

For me, there in April 2002, I had to start everything over. I had to rebuild myself and the societal walls that I had demolished over the previous year. It wasn't easy, and you know, if you screw up your life, even fighting your way back to zero will take immense effort, but you simply have no other choice. To achieve something in life, you can only do so through struggle, constantly renewed goals, and never-ending willpower, not through acceptance and compromise, because by accepting your shitty life, you'll only end up in the hospital for the broken, from which it's just a few steps to the social funeral pyre. Your life is bordered by hundreds of signs that constantly help you on your path if you're going in the wrong direction, and warn you if you let them, if you are able to confront them, and if you are willing to notice them. If not, then hope that in your next life, the director of the theater called life, whom you can call God or whatever you want, will not cast you in the endlessly sad role of the small man.