Out of Stock


I’m not sure I can say what I’m trying to say.

Picture it. It’s a date, she’s really pretty, probably too much for you. Luckily, there’s too much time to worry about it.

- I’m not religious. I never really was. I don’t believe in the existence of God, but I’m spiritual. I do believe in irrational things. Like astrology.

- What is the difference between being religious and spiritual, then? The structure? The rites? The rules?

- Yeah, I guess. How about you?

- I don’t believe, rationally. But there’s definitely something inside of me that believes. The idea of a big plan and, in general, retribution.

- So you’re spiritual or religious?

- No, because it doesn’t affect my day to day life. I don’t make choices based on how I feel. Or at least, I try not to. That’s why I never go to the supermarket hungry and I don’t hit on women when I’m drunk.

The joy and pain that we receive must be what we deserve”, would say Rush. And a few years ago, many years ago, I would have thought the lyrics were right. Now i understand both the meaning of the song, myself and the world a little better to understand that those words had a hint of sarcasm in them and that I believing in karma is not much different from praying a god. Delegating to an intangible entity, much bigger than us, the responsibility of everything. Thank god for what’s good, curse humans for what’s bad. We are rational animals and rationalizing is what we do, even when it brings us to believe in irrational explanations.

And of rationality I proud myself. If I could sum up the journey of the last 18 months it would probably be the discovery of a path to rationality and I’m happy I’m walking it. I love using my mind in a logical way just as much as I like to be surprised by the flaws in my own logic. My excess of rationality has been also a cause of pain because logic (head) and feelings (heart) don’t always go hand in hand. As a matter of fact, they rarely do.

On this crazy journey that has brought me to deepen my knowledge on so many topics I would have never thought I’d be interested in, let alone read books about them, I also realized how susceptible I am to cognitive distortions. And seriously, thank ANY deity for that (for real, they’re all the same. Pray any of them to deliver a pizza for you in 30 minutes and see if the outcome ever changes). Once I discovered what cd are, it was much easier to rationalize some feelings. It worked pretty well on me.

I’ve known for a long time that part of me believes in the idea that my good days are behind me and that everything worthwhile is now confined to the past. I’ve felt that for a very long time, several years. This is not the catastrophic nihilism of a teenager so arrogant to believe he’s seen it all already from his not even 1/5 of a respectable human life. It’s still, in part, catastrophizing (a common cognitive distortion), but I think it gets me because it plays the same keys of the religious cosmic justice that sets every wrong right. This connection is something I thought of today.

And I thought of it today because, like many times before, I felt that way. Sometimes is “no one will ever love me again, because many have loved me before and I missed the train”. Sometimes is “I won’t ever be happy again, because I had my chances. Funny enough, I think the first time I remember feeling like that must have been in 2014 or 2015.

I remember lying on the tatami, feeling that sense of emptiness mixed with loneliness. It was completely unjustified, yet it felt so real. I remember watching this episode of the first season of Bojack Horseman and having this quote stuck in my head for weeks.

You know, sometimes I think I was born with a leak, and any goodness I started with just slowly spilled out of me and now its all gone. And I’ll never get it back in me. It’s too late. Life is a series of closing doors, isn’t it?

video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MaGil6peeRY

It still rings true, but also looking back at this 7 - 8 years so many unexpected things have happened that I could not foresee in any way. Life is a series of closing doors, because opportunities come and go. We tend to underestimate how many doors are out there though.

It’s a huge supermarket. Maybe you’ve been buying this product for a long time, then one day you find out it’s not there anymore. You try to ask to the clerks, but no one seems to know when and if it’s going to be restocked. You can despair, because that product was perfect for you, yes. But most of the times there are huge shelves around, you simply have been too focused on looking for that specific one to notice. That product might be gone, but the supermarket is still there.

I feel like, in the last few weeks, I started walking through the aisles of the supermarket. Not with a specific goal in mind, I mindlessly walked around.

I’m not sure I can say what I’m trying to say, but even though today I felt like all the products I wanted were out of stock, I felt like the supermarket was still huge and not worth despairing about. That is, the metaphorical supermarket. Because the one across from my flat still doesn’t have jack shit and my holistic approach to life doesn’t magically bring the Nutella back to the shelves.