Where’s My Better Life
Six weeks into 2011 and I’m already wondering where my better life went. When January first rolled around, I had plans. Real ones. Ambitious ones. Lists on paper, lists in my head, all stacked in the drawer by my nightstand. The kind of thing that gets crumpled by March, except I didn’t even make it that far.
I stand naked in front of the mirror and take an honest inventory. What follows is not encouraging.
Career. I could’ve done the whole circuit in the past six weeks—design conferences, web summits, places where important people network and pretend disruption matters. Could’ve built a proper portfolio, played the client game, thrown myself at someone with a pitch about my amateur genius. Could’ve actually sat down and learned Photoshop, memorized every product Apple ever made, made something worth showing. Didn’t. Didn’t even try. Watched that ship sail without a backward glance.
Love. This one’s easy to measure. I look at my wedding picture on the nightstand—me and my right hand, hairy and devoted. Can’t blame myself though. I’m just waiting for my impossible woman. Emma Watson mixed with Megan Fox, red-blonde hair, freckles, the artist living in some old Berlin apartment with exactly the right amount of cool and exactly the amount of availability I require. She doesn’t exist. Never will. So I keep dating myself.
Body. My stomach laughs when I even think about it. Chip bags from every corner of the world stacked in the cabinet like trophies. Kebab and curry ketchup and fries with mayo cycling through my system like that’s all I deserve. Gym. Broken. Bike. Broken. Running. The weather’s shit. Swimming. Yeah, right. I look at myself and see someone who gave up so completely he stopped even pretending by week three.
I’m sitting in my little apartment in Wedding, the Berlin neighborhood that’s just poor enough and just boring enough that nobody’s desperate to move there. Not some 200-square-meter loft in a district anyone’s heard of. Still ordering things online that a man uses alone, having to maneuver around my own stomach to reach them. Thirty pounds heavier, zero dollars richer, no closer to anything I imagined on New Year’s morning.
Tell me you did better. Someone must have.