Hamlet
“To be, or not to be, that is the question.”
Said Hamlet. And, to continue in more modern English…
“…is it better to carry on suffering quietly, or to bravely enter a useless and suicidal battle which you know is already lost?”
But, I might ask,
“…is it better to carry on suffering quietly, or to enter a dangerous battle whose outcome you can’t possibly know at this time?”
Hamlet was, after all, suffering from clinical depression, and he could have used a healthy (i.e. not an overdose) dose of Prozac. After all, if you give up, you lose everything. If you struggle and fail, you lose everything. But… if you struggle and succeed, then the world is yours. For a long time, I was like Hamlet. I thought to myself, why try, when I am pre-destined to fail anyway. I truly believed that was my wyrd. This idiocy crapped all over my happiness, made me live life in zombie mode in order to avoid difficult questions.
Life. Ah, life. What are you.
It’s a struggle, and the enormity of the task is scary, but trying to taking control of my life gives me hope. I’ve always found that the best form of revenge against life’s troubles is to outlive them all. carry on long enough, and they stop mattering so much. No mere Hamlet am I.
In that Hamlet speech. I used to think that “suicidal action” was the ‘not to be’ part of his speech. But sometimes, I wonder. Perhaps suffering in silence and not taking up arms, living life in zombie mode — perhaps that is the real ‘not to be’.
It isn’t enough to be alive. What is needed is to live.