Confessionism

I think I'm a masochist.

I say this as I sit here exhausted and in a fair amount of physical pain. I just got off work after having 5 hours sleep having been snowboarding all day then to the 'after-party', which I did after about 3 hours sleep having been to a gig where I moshed to an extent my body hasn't been put through since 2003. And I loved every minute of it.

My chosen career involves working at night, being exhausted, abusing my ears with a lot of shit to root out the good stuff, running around after egotistical artists then working to strict deadlines which are always a day too short. And, of course, having no money. But I can't imagine doing anything else.

My main goal is to write a novel; a difficult, stressful and uncertain process, at the end of which people slate you or praise you according to nothing more than personal preference. Writing in general is a solitary and time-consuming pastime, and horrendously under-paid, yet it makes me so stupidly happy.

The funnest and most exhilirating things I've ever done involve being fairly close to death or feeling like you're going to die for the briefest of moments, like skydiving and bungee jumping. My favourite sporting activities, surfing and snowboarding, necessitate me being freezing cold and leave me with the physical gait of someone who's been beaten up by a brick wall for days on end (which may be because I'm so unutterably shit at both of them), but I jump at every chance I get to do either of them.

I strive to travel and live in loads of different countries, despite the expense, the stress, and the fact that I have to leave behind the people I love, miss them constantly, and then have the exact same situation with the new friends I've made in the new place when I move on. My biggest hate is missing out on things but I remove myself from situations time and time again, and still the alternative isn't preferable.

Then again, maybe its not me. Maybe true pleasure only comes when you move out of the banality of everyday life and do things that hurt, things that freak you out. Maybe you have to have the lows to have the biggest highs, and I'd rather be on a wave of peaks and troughs for the rest of my life than a staid line of average 'til I'm seventy. Maybe everyone who really lives life to the full is, to some extent, a masochist.

In the glorious words of Henry Miller,
"The aim of life is to live, and to live means to be aware;
joyously, drunkenly, serenely, divinely aware."

Live life.