when I wake up
There is that moment early in the morning right after I awake from my slumber and I exactly know how that specific day would go on and in that instant I just want to blow my mother fucking head off, the same cycle and the same patterns over and over again.
It is not the alarm that does it. It is the pause between sleep and waking, that half-second before the brain fully boots up, where the ancient reptilian part of me that predates language and money and meaning takes stock of the situation and says “again?”
(Disco Elysium players know this moment. Harry waking up on the floor of the Whirling-in-Rags, his ancient reptilian brain telling him to stay down, the limbic system flooding him with the memory of every failure, every lost love, every bottle emptied. And then he gets up anyway because that is what the animal does).
In the game you can talk to those voices. The Ancient Reptilian Brain and the Limbic System are actual characters with dialogue options. You can agree with them. Tell them they are right, that there is no point, that the bed is warm and the world is cold and staying down is the rational choice. Or you can tell them to shut the fuck up and get on with it. I have chosen both options in real life on different mornings and I cannot tell you which one is more honest.
(the brilliance of Disco Elysium is that it makes the internal argument literal. A voiced dialogue between the part of you that wants to die and the part of you that is too stubborn to oblige).
The repetition is the killer. Not the work itself. Not the difficulty. The repetition. Waking up at the same hour. Brushing teeth in the same order. Taking the same route. Seeing the same faces. Doing the same tasks. Coming home to the same four walls. Sleeping in the same bed. And then doing it again for forty years until you are too old to do it anymore and then you are free but also you are dying.
(this is not unique to me or to Addis or to the third world. This is the basic texture of life under capital. The endless loop. The commodification of time. The reduction of a human life to a unit of labor that needs maintenance between shifts).
And here is the fucked part. After that moment passes, after I tell the reptilian brain to shut up or just ignore it long enough to swing my legs over the side of the bed, the day goes on normally. Nothing happens. I brush my teeth. I drink coffee. I look at my phone. I go through the motions. The existential dread that felt like a gun barrel in my mouth at 6:00 AM becomes a vague background hum by 9:00 AM, indistinguishable from the general noise of living. I laugh at a meme. I reply to a message. I do the work. I am fine.
(the fact that I can be fine after wanting to blow my head off three hours earlier is either a testament to human resilience or proof that nothing actually matters. Both interpretations are equally valid and equally terrifying).
The game gets this right too. Harry wakes up a disaster. His life is in ruins. He has no memory. His ex-wife is gone. He may or may not have committed a crime. The entire city is falling apart. And then he puts on his tie and goes outside and talks to people and solves problems and the game proceeds like any other day because that is what you do. The world does not stop for your personal apocalypse. It cannot afford to.
I think about the elda. The old women who sell vegetables on the side of the road from 6:00 AM to 8:00 PM every day, seven days a week, for their entire lives. They do not have the luxury of the morning existential crisis. They have to be at the market before the sun is up or someone else will take their spot. The repetition for them is not psychological. It is structural. They cannot afford to feel the weight of it because feeling the weight of it would break them and there is no backup plan.
(and I sit here in my room with my laptop and my Wi-Fi and my relative comfort and I have the audacity to feel oppressed by the repetition. The elda would laugh at me. She would be right to).
I do not have a conclusion for this one. The morning will come again tomorrow. The reptilian brain will make its case. I will either listen or I will get up. And the day will go on normally. And nothing will happen. And that is the point.
(when I wake up the only battle that matters is the one between the part of me that has seen it all before and the part of me that has not given up yet. Some mornings the first one wins. Some mornings the second one does. Most mornings neither one wins. We just go to work).