fight for your happiness

I’m scared that I am just this to a lot of people. I’m scared of one day looking back and being just a trope with no dreams, no aspirations, no hopes or determination nor any other function but something to be your distraction for a moment, cheer you, make you feel happy about life.

I think I’ve struggled with this feeling for most of my life, I just never knew there was a label for it. It doesn’t help that I can relate:

She watches, with child-like wonder, the people in the world around her, yet feels separated (by her quirkiness?) from them.

The title character is a cheerful Bohemian, who turns out to be a spoiled, unfocused, pseudointellectual, neurotic child in an adult’s body, a horribly broken person.

I’m not happy, I’m not happy about a lot of things, I just can make other people happy because I’m constantly trying to wrench my mind out of the horrible self-pitying hole it digs for itself, and somehow my neurosis translates as “quirky” or “odd” or “whimsical”.

I’m scared that I’m not actually anything. I’m just a collection of eccentric idiosyncrisies packed together in a body outgrowing its perpetual childishness, written together by some sad sappy man-child. That for all my meager accomplishments I would be nothing but two-dimensional to everyone, and maybe they’re right.

Maybe its all mopey sad ravings and nonesense. Maybe I’ll never know because I’m always wrapped up inside my own head too much. I’m afraid of getting lost in it.

And you know what happens to manix pixie dream girls in real life, when they have to grow up?

Edie Sedgwick, a woman who hung around with Andy Warhol in his day, seems to have been this. She was anorexic and addicted to barbiturates. She eventually fell apart, went in and out of rehab a few times, and died of a drug overdose. Which tends to reinforce that this trope doesn’t work very well in real life.

Zelda Fitzgerald was this for her husband, F. Scott Fitzgerald. She was his muse and the inspiration for many of the heroines in his novels and short stories, and they lived the ideal Roaring Twenties lifestyle together, but she had a fragile grip on reality and eventually ended up in a mental institution.