Let’s say there was a time when I would meet up with friends for coffee at 5 or 6 pm, willingly. It was around that time that I began to suspect adult life wasn’t that great. In order to survive and pay for my college tuition, I had to work insane hours while falling in love with partying, and a few boys who wouldn’t love me back, no matter how perfect our match was in my mind. Let’s say there was a time my heart ached so bad that the only coping mechanism I could reach for was shouting louder than the pain. Someone (or something) was stabbing me in the chest.
There are two tragedies in life: one is not getting what one wants, and the other is getting it. It was supposedly Oscar Wilde who wrote that sentence. A few years earlier, George Bernard Shaw published something similar. “There are two tragedies in life: one is to lose your heart's desire. The other is to gain it.” The great thing about this overlap in thought is that it doesn’t really matter who came up with it first. They were both trapped by the edge of the knife: that paradoxical blade cutting every stretch of life.