JONTILLMAN.COM | part of the problem since 1976

And you may ask yourself
How do I work this?
And you may ask yourself
Where is that large automobile?
And you may tell yourself
This is not my beautiful house!
And you may tell yourself
This is not my beautiful wife!

– Talking Heads Once In A Lifetime

Have you ever gotten everything you ever wanted, only to realize that it wasn’t actually what you wanted? I think that a lot of people have experienced this feeling. Why else would we have phrases like “mid=life crisis” and “seven year itch”?

I had it all; the house, the car, the wife, the motorcycle, the job, the pets, the friends, the hobbies…and one day I realized that I had spent a huge portion of my life working towards where I was, chasing down all the things that I had, becoming the person that I was - and none of it was real. It was someone else’s idea. All the things I did to get to that place; the work, the talk, the lies, the tears, the sacrifices, the choices, the accolades… all of it was in the service of some idea that suddenly, years after I began, did I realize was not my own. I discovered, in one horrible moment, that I was living one of a infinite number of possible lives, and I had allowed someone else to choose which one.

I have no idea when it began. I have tried to work backwards, performing forensic investigations of my own life, my own mind. when did I stop writing? When did the music stop speaking to me? When did I start talking so much in order to fill up the silence? When did the routine overtake the novel? When did I loose my sense of wonder and awe?

The soul will endure much, but not all. Even it has limits, and at some point half a year ago, that limit was reached. When that limit was reached, it became obvious, painfully so, that I was trapped, had trapped myself, in a story that someone else was writing.

If that life is a fiction, then it is possible that all of the possible lives we could be living are fictions to a degree. If we accept that possibility, then it would be insane for us not to go about choosing or inventing whatever kind of fiction best suits our own particular tasters, to take the pen and write our own stories.