I just turned 33 a few days ago. 

Turning 33 feels like Tuesday. .  and Tuesdays have no feeling. 

I thought I would be somebody by now. 

Instead, I am pushing the gas pedal on an express highway to a midlife crisis -with no stop signs on the way.

I am becoming everything I never thought I would; a cliche! 

I used to think that a midlife crisis is about your past. You wake up one day to find yourself turning 40, and you have forgotten to live . .to actually live! And in the midst of academia, career and romance, you have actually missed on everything worth living for. 

But then again, I was wrong. 

A midlife crisis is about the future -or lack thereof, better say.

It is that sunken feeling deep down in your heart, knowing you’re walking in the second half of your lifetime, and you haven’t even gotten close to answering any of the big questions. 

Aside from the impossible ones; like God, aliens and an after life, you’ve also failed to answer the most personal ones; Who am I? Why am I here? What makes me tick? Am I happy?

I am not alive. 

I am just busy. 

We go through life, not knowing what we really want, so we try to follow the path that has been laid out for us.

Go to school. Get a degree. Get a job. Get married. Get a mortgage. Make some babies. 

And then before you even know it, you’ve turned 40 and you’ve forgotten to live. 

You are not living. 

You are barely chasing an illusion. 

This illusion takes different names, shapes and forms, but eventually it is all the same; an illusion. 

Like a soldier who goes to war. He doesn’t really know why he is there or what he is fighting for. 

He either kills, or gets killed -or even both. He loses some of his comrades. He suffers silently in the bleak midwinter. 

Then, they told him the war is over. 

But he still doesn’t understand the war or even himself. 

He goes back home with his scars and war souvenirs. But he’s not the same. What has been seen cannot be unseen. He can’t go back to who he was and he can’t move on. He spends the rest of his life suspended in-between his nightmares and his existence – not knowing which is which. 

There is no way out. No escape. 

So he picks up a gun and shoots himself in the head. 

So where were we?

Yes, midlife crisis. 

I am becoming everything I never thought I would; a dissapointment!

But that’s what life is after all, it is so painfully disappointing. On so many levels. Beyond words. Beyond measure. 

I am just getting by. It took so long to get here. This is your reality when you start 6 feet under. You waste half of your life just to get to the ground, thinking that once you get there, all of your problems will be solved. You don’t know that life starts at that level. Now after you got your shit together, now you have to start tackling the big ones. 

But you’re already exhausted. You’re bored and boring. Above all, you’re damaged. 

What has been seen can’t be unseen. 

I am becoming everything I never thought I would; defeated! 

No gas left in the tank. No more hope. 

This is where you find your God, or lose him. 

“For what profits a man if he gains the whole world but loses his own soul.”

33 years of bad choices. Now what?

You realize the light at the end of the tunnel is actually a few lost souls who got tired of hoping and sat down in the middle of the tunnel to start a fire and get drunk.

There are no answers.

Only disappointment.  

I am becoming everything I never thought I would; a failure! 

“Rome is burning, he said, as he poured himself another drink. Yet, here I am knee deep in a river of pussy. Here it comes, she thought. Another self-indulgent, whiskey-soaked diatribe about how fucking great everything was in the past. And how all us poor souls born too late to see the Stones at – wherever, or snort the good coke like that they had at Studio 54 – well, we all just missed out on practically everything worth living for. And the worst part was, she agreed with him. Here we are, she thought, at the edge of the world – the very edge of western civilization and all of us are so desperate to feel something… anything… that we keep falling into each other and fucking our way toward the end of days.”