A Life Worth Living

We were watching an Anthony Bourdain documentary the other night and I got to thinking about his suicide. It’s easy to make assumptions, to romanticize sadness and keep it in your back pocket, ready for the “I told you so” the moment your feelings get hurt. When I first heard about his hanging, I was obsessed with watching his travel shows, reading his articles and books. Honestly, in some fucked up sense, I built it up in my head to make his death more powerful, more meaningful. I would watch these shows with him narrating, talking about how the difficult it is to watching small children in other countries basically dumpster die for food and not be able to do anything about it. That stuck with me.

I thought, you know, of course that lifestyle gets to you eventually. Seeing all of the world’s sadness and being helpless to aid it. It gets heavy, I’m sure. What a guy. What a writer. An Artist.

Then I watched Roadrunner, a documentary of him after his death, in which is closest friends and family reminisced about him and their memories together and shared with the public about his inner circle, his real life. In short, towards the end of his life he met and fell in love with this lady, some French actress, and I mean, yeah he was already acting weird towards the end of his life and he wanted to get out of doing TV and out of this life that he has submerged himself into because he wanted to settle don and love this girl, and then the paparazzi caught her with some other guy and that’s pretty much when Bourdain lost it. And that sucks.

I don’t know him, I don’t know the truth, I don’t know his heart. I only know what I built up in my head, and then what the real story was (or what can be observed), but as far as I’m concerned…..fuck you. I almost wish the former was true, instead. That he killed himself because he couldn’t handle all the suffering in the world. But what pushed him was some girl? I know this is ballsy to talk about, I know it comes with a lot of backlash…. I don’t care.

The rest of the world sitting, waiting, mourning the life of someone who had so much to give, someone who had so much to receive, an then to just give it all up because your feelings are hurt? There are starving, dying children while you go and film them in your Gucci leather jacket, and instead of that being the great change that actually got to you, it was that some girl hurt your feelings?

It put a lot into perspective. I’ve spent so much of my life finding excuses to validate my own feelings. You know, “your feelings are valid”, all that bulshit. Suddenly everyone is okay feeling sad and angry and spiteful. Fine, you are entitled to however shitty it is that you want to be, just don’t forget other people are also entitled to how they react to you being a big baby. Here’s the kicker: You won’t ever be able to change how others react, or what others think. Whether you kill yourself, or write all of the words about how you felt, unfortunately, those things don’t fucking matter. The only thing you can control is yourself, and your emotions, and if you don’t even have that…then what is this big change youre trying to make? You want to be a better person, a better friend, a better father or a better daughter, but you’re not even willing to be in enough control of your emotions to actually make a change that matters? Instead, you fumble and destroy everything in your path and blame it on the heartache. Fuck that. And not because it’s weak, not because “there are more important things” (which there are), but because you’re so caught up in your own pity that you’re unable to see anyone but you. Hey, hard pill to swallow, that’s shitty too.

If you’re one of the few who is aware enough to realize your own faults, you should know how lucky you are to get the chance to be a better fucking person. Start there. Everyone else will follow suit eventually, and if they don’t, it doesn’t matter because you’ll be doing it for yourself. There’s so many angry people in this world, so many hurt and sad individuals. Hurt people that hurt people, and if you’re aware enough to know that, then be grown enough to make it stop. It starts with you. It starts with me.

These next journeys in our lives won’t come gracefully, they’re going to drown us like tsunamis and unless we elevate ourselves enough to see the beauty, we’ll only ever be stuck in the disgrace of the aftermath. Godspeed, my friends.