Innocence Gone

*** WARNING: irrational emotional ramblings ahead, please turn OFF your logic circuits before proceeding. ***

Lately, I have been playing this online game that I bought into several years ago. The account is still active as they never shut it off. It serves as a decent distraction from the depressing nights.

There's a part of the game where you earn in-game points for watching ads. That's not a half bad way of generating a revenue stream for the makers of the game - it's a pretty smart idea, really. Unfortunately, some of those ads make me sad.

As ads will do, they try to persuade you to buy things. There's a few that's presented with such innocence so you get the feeling that everything will be all right if you just bought this and that for in-game use. I can see that if you're really into that online game, that might actually be true but it would also mean you don't really have a real-life type life if you spent that much time on the game.

No, what makes me sad is that I haven't felt as if anything was going to be all right for a long time now. I miss that innocence, that feeling that if I worked hard enough, or if I did things right that everything will be fine in the end. Sometime in the last two years, something has changed inside of me where I have realized that no matter what I do, life can intervene and radically shift things from good to bad in a heartbeat. It doesn't matter if I've tried to do things as right as I can with the best of intentions - it all goes pear-shaped in the end.

When I was a child, I was beaten everyday for years and years. These days, they call it child abuse. Back when I was growing up, it was par for the course. When I say beaten, I don't mean "beaten with cause" - I mean "beaten because someone had a bad day". I believe the term used for that is "anger transference". When I say everyday, I meant every single day. For years. I used to run and hide from my family, crying soundlessly lest they hear me and drag me out for more beatings. I had a comfort object that was all mine which I still have and hold dear to this day. You know what the irony is? I felt more safe then, hiding behind the shelves or under the table clutching my comfort object than today, lying in my bed in my own home blogging.

You see, back then my world was a lot smaller. No matter what happened to me, I knew that at mealtime, there would be food on the table, that there would be cartoons to watch (quietly!) on the TV and my imaginary friends (as kids normally would have) would be there to play with me and tell me that everything was all right even as I nursed my bruises. I now know as an adult just how close we came to running out of money back then and just how much my Dad finagled to keep food on the table and our house in our possession.

These days, the kids depend on me to put food on the table. I'm the adult who has to keep them safe which I will gladly do. Heck, I would gladly lay down my life for the kids if needed. No, what scares me is the fact that regardless of what I do, something can happen that will royally screw not just me over but also my family too. On a smaller scale, I'm always fully aware that no matter how nicely I treat people, some of them will turn around and take full advantage of me to my detriment if it suited their needs.

There was a time when I could lie to myself that what I did mattered. You know what? What I do really doesn't matter. I could take care of my family but still have a family member go deathly ill on me. Or some urgent house repair would happen that will require a massive amount of money that I simply cannot cover regardless of me being employed and have savings.

It doesn't matter in the end. It really doesn't. I will continue to go to work and care for my family as always. But I really don't believe that life is really worth much anymore because nothing I do will matter in the end. I can do the best job I can for my team at work and still get stabbed in the back. I can care for my family members and bring joy to them as best I can but still have them run away when I needed them the most.

I miss the days when I believed in what I do. When, like in those in-game ads, I still believed that if I did this and this and that, that good things will happen. I know it doesn't anymore. Oh, I've always known that this chain of causality was merely an illusion, a lie that lets me sleep at night. However, life has hit me so hard, so fast and so often lately that it's shredded this comfortable little lie that lets me keep going. As with all illusions, once it's gone, it's *gone*.

I had to take my nephews over to the local toy megamart during a weekend recently to do a recce on potential birthday presents. We had to walk through the plush toys to enter the store proper and as we did, I felt a strong wave of sadness palpably hit me in the gut. For most kids, a plush toy is their comfort object. It's what they hold at night when they go to bed. It's their friend, albeit an imaginary one. What I saw were plush toys all over the floor, where they had been knocked off their shelves. Some were damaged and will probably be binned when the staff came around to tidy up. This really upset me. As irrationally as it may sound, a plush toys' ultimate calling is to be a companion to a child, to bring joy to that child. The damaged ones that will be binned will never be able to do that. Even the ones that do end up with a child will eventually land in a garbage dump somewhere when the children are done with them. Yes, I know that they're not alive, that there's no "calling" or "reward" for them. Yes, I'm being irrational, probably because of my abusive childhood when all I had was my stuffed companion comfort object to hold as I cried. It just kicks me hard in my sense of what is "fair". Again, I used to believe that if one does one's best, that everything will be all right, that there is a fair and just ending to those who work at it.

There isn't one. There never will be. There are no guarantees in life. Whether you are good or bad, the rain still falls on you when you least expect it. What has been core to my identity and remained unchanged since childhood has been the idea of fairness. However, the world simply isn't fair.

I'm not sure anymore if I have a place in this world or what the value of remaining in it is. The simple act of just living hurts so much these days.