Redemption or damnation

There's a scene in the movie Pulp Fiction that faithfully illustrates everything I'm about to talk about.

Pulp Fiction is a foundational work, the Hanging Gardens of Semiramis of the 20th century, a film I believe will never be surpassed, not even if Dostoevsky or Dickens themselves were writing screenplays in Hollywood. The scene perfectly illustrates the mental awakening I also went through at 18, and thanks to which I am where I am in life now… To understand what I want to say, you absolutely must watch this video and wake up the way I woke up 10 years ago…

At 18, half a year before my high school graduation, the ground really started to slip from under my feet. I felt that something was very wrong around me. I felt the kind of pigeonholing so characteristic of this society, and from which I desperately wanted to escape.

We went to school every morning like a herd, and despite its usefulness, I felt the time spent there was needlessly insufficient, weighing down on my daily life like a ton. This was the era of my first great realizations, and the path, though I didn't see it then, was before me, but I didn't know which way to go, and least of all where I was headed in life. This feeling was the harbinger of those "clicks" that would fundamentally change my life in the future, closing one era and opening up a completely 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 commitments, 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 gripped by graduation fever, all their thoughts revolving around it. But not me. I wasn't interested in that. Instead, every morning I got up at 7:30 and left home, so my parents would see the me they wanted to see, and not the me I was actually living. Months passed like this, and over the weeks, I learned how to kill time in the city from 8 AM to 3 PM so that by the time I got home, my parents would think I had been at school and was preparing for graduation. Sometimes, of course, I went 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. I perfectly learned to lie about my life, deceiving my parents and everyone around me, to maintain an appearance that society wants to see, because people are only really interested in appearances and validation points. School, the diploma, whether you have a girlfriend, what you're wearing, what you do for work, how much you earn, who you vote for, and how you live a life that billions of others live, broken down into individual expectations by generations. Everyone thinks they are unique, perhaps even an individual, which we constantly try to prove. And yet… When someone actually tries to stray from the beaten path of the masses, there's a big uproar and ostracism, naturally belonging to a group while proclaiming our uniqueness.

With these thoughts and a few months of intense slacking, I arrived at the day of my graduation exam, when I told the teachers that I would either draw Madách's "The Tragedy of Man" and the topic of World War II, or we shouldn't waste each other's time, because there was no chance I would pass anything else. To which I received the following answers from the teachers: second from the left, third from the right. I was always good at geography, math is just math, even an idiot can speak English, but these subjects require studying, or should have. The graduation was followed by a hedonistic summer, then college, where I continued my usual lifestyle.

On an April day, events unfolded in the usual way, as I left home just as I had every morning for months before. But this day was different from the others, because this was the day that fundamentally changed my previously hopeless daily life, and definitively slammed the brakes on the cart of my life hurtling towards a precipice. 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 eyes to see them, and whether we are open enough to the world to grasp these signs and change our lives. The sign I received 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-May. By this time, I was skipping school so much that I didn't even know if I still had student status. And I was still living in my self-constructed, aimless, false world. On this day, instead of school, I decided to go sunbathe on Margaret Island. The weather was good, I felt carefree, and I constantly laughed to myself at those monkeys sitting in schools, for which I deeply despised them.

It was warm. The park where I was lying was constantly being watered, which was good because I could splash myself if the sun got too hot. This fun lasted for half an hour when suddenly I felt some asshole washing himself in such a way that he kept splashing me. I sat up, and I will never forget what I saw. A ragged, old homeless man was washing himself, then when he finished, he went back to his bags and lay down to sunbathe again. Suddenly everything became clear, and in an instant, I was jolted out of the world I had been living in, which until then I had felt to be unshakeably stable. All my self-deceiving 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 back to. It dawned on me that if I continued this, there was a good chance I would end up the same way. I saw myself 20 years in the future, and I realized that I was on the path that ended with that homeless man. This whole experience affected me with such elemental force that I cannot express it here now, but for me, this was the sign. That certain point that saved me from total life failure.

The signs, as I mentioned, are everywhere. This could be a scornful glance that somehow pierces your soul at that moment, or it could be the sight of your distorted body noticed in a shop window after many years, which you hadn't seen before, or rather, didn't want to acknowledge. The sign is a constant thing and never wrong. The more you mess up your life, the longer you head in the wrong direction, or even lie to yourself about an entire life, the more frequently the signals from the outside world will find you. Everyone receives help and guidance, and what they do with these signs is solely up to them.

For me, in April 2002, I had to start everything over. I had to rebuild myself and the social walls that build a person's character, and which I had constantly demolished. 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. Because achieving something in life is only possible through struggle, constantly renewing goals, and never-ending willpower, not through acceptance and compromise, because by accepting your shitty life, you will only have a place in the hospital for the broken, from which it's just a few steps to society's funeral pyre. Your life is bordered by hundreds of signs that constantly help you on your way if you're going in the wrong direction, and warn you if you let them, if you are capable of confronting 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 if you want, or whatever you want, will not cast you in the endlessly sad role of the little people…