It's tuesday afternoon, and I'm having a bad hangover. Still in bed. Haven't eaten anything yet. The hangover is not just from an overdose of alcohol (which I plan not to be drinking anymore for a looooong time). It's from something else also.
I spent yesterday evening in the perfect life of someone else. I still feel nauseated and overwhelmed by it. This couple, they have everything that I always wanted in life, and they're 5 years younger than me. They are on the way of having promising acting-careers, going to the most important theatre school in the country, already being asked by big theatre- and film directors to star in their plays and movies. For now they are very poor. They live on a small boat in the centre of Amsterdam, which was a mess when they first arrived there, so the rent is very low. But they renovated the interior themselves in the most beautiful organic way. All the furniture is hand-made by both of them from old wood, crooked in some places, because they're not furniture-making experts. All the books on their hand-made bookshelves are books I'd like to read. All the cups and plates and forks and knives they served us food in, was exactly of the old taned beauty I adore. The man spends his days writing a play now, and the women is in my favourite city in Belgium for an internship at the local theatre company. In the evenings they watch the sun go down on the tiny bench at the back of their boat, by the water, drinking red wine with the small lanterns they hung beside the boat turned on, surrounded by flower pots containing their own organic fruit and vegetables.
Uuugggh. I need to throw up.
Is this jealousy? I don't know this emotion very well. Jealousy means also that you don't want the other person having what they have, right? It's not like that. I like them very much and I am happy for them. It's just....I don't know. I am so ashamed of myself. It's very powerful. He asked me how come somebody as talented as me had all these dreams and didn't make them come true. He asked me that, the man with the perfect life I wanted in whose perfect house I was sitting eating his perfect dinner. He told me how hard he had to work for it and how insecure he was. I started crying and joked about jumping in the Amsterdam Canal. I couldn't be more vulnerable at that moment. I don't think he realized that. I didn't know him nearly good enough to cry in front of him. But I did. And I felt that all my fears and my holding myself back was just vanity or even just...plain silly. And he said, as many people have said to me in my life, that I probably didn't want it bad enough to go after it.
I don't blame him though. Most of my friends are people who are struggling with the things they love to do, like me. Not that he's not struggling. It's just different. He does it. It's very confronting, but very good to meet people who act instead of wonder. Everything seems suddenly so within my reach, as long as I just do it. But it's not like that for me. And I fear it's going to be harder even with every day that passes.
So I'll just throw up a couple of more times. And go on with my life.
