Failure

An introduction.

I’ve had many names. I like the anonymity. I don’t like being the center of attention, don’t like people talking about me. Sometimes I’m surprised people pay attention to what’s happening in my life. They remember. They perceive. Isn’t that scary?

For now, I’ll be Antonio Mrak. Antonio is the constant, following me throughout life. Everything else is flexible. Mrak means darkness. My home language, a distant friend occasionally calling to me, otherwise neglected, banned to a rather distant corner of my brain, occasionally resurrected for family gatherings. It feels familiar, nostalgic and also foreign. It’s childhood and parents and holidays in Croatia. The smell of carpet and cigarettes. Family visits in Bosnia. It is also a language I lost contact with.

I can ask if someone wants more coffee. I cannot explain why I am unhappy. Cannot express myself to my own parents. Can tell them facts but not my life. Fumbling, getting angry, misunderstanding, remaining misunderstood. Sometimes a feeling of loss keeps me awake.

Never understood should be the title of my biography. How perfectly it fits! Has anyone ever really understood me? Not for lack of trying. In my thirties I’ve become a ghost to most people. It’s my fault, really. But what can you do? Plenty, probably. I didn’t.

I have always been better at becoming someone than remaining him. A name, a job, an ideology, a future. I enter enthusiastically and leave without a goodbye.

Let us talk about failure, dear reader. I have failed you, too. Remember when we talked on the pavement? Romantic times. So idealistic! So angry! So fucking stupid.

And then I was gone without warning. I ghosted you. I treated you like something embarrassing from my past, which, to be fair, you were. Then weird experiments, unsuccessful all, bland all, shameful. I was tired. I apologize. And I do not believe anymore. Here I am!

Failure. School was good, I was smart. After school: disaster. Mostly in the professional department, so unimportant? — no, important after all! Rent is due and someone asks what you do for a living.

Status. Money. Goddamn money. I never had enough. Always on the verge of struggle, standing by the cliff, looking down, thankfully never taking the plunge. Stability and anxiety.

I grew up in very relative poverty. What this means is: I never really struggled, never went hungry, never went without a roof, never experienced the sort of deprivation that would make an actually compelling memoir. What it also means is an inferiority complex. A rich, rich country where everyone is richer than us. Everyone got a house while I had to pay rent from the age of twenty. Boo fucking hoo, yes. I know.

In truth, I had everything. All the opportunities of this world, all the chances one could reasonably want. So why did I fail?

Well, I went through life unreflecting. Never thought about my strengths and weaknesses. Thought about what a life looked like from the outside and never about how it would feel to live it. The result was a fucking disaster.

Would it surprise you if I told you I’ve had thirteen jobs in the last ten years? Since graduating from university, the first person in my entire family line to do so, — what a fucking useless achievement — I’ve quit thirteen jobs. Some of the jobs were genuinely shit and deserved the treatment I gave them. Others were somewhat less shit and could have been endured by someone who isn’t me and I also didn’t give a shit.

The degree had made my family proud. For one brief moment I’d been legible to them. The little weirdo had done something. Status, the universal language. One could talk to relatives about me without inventing lies.

Office jobs. My nemesis. My darkness. My recurring mistake. Always I seek you out, for the love of the money and the status and the “having your life in order” and that great abyss of sunk costs; always I leave you, could not even bring myself to try. God how I hate you. Swear to God, true hate.

Sitting in a farted-through chair, abused by asses across generations. Small-talking myself into depression, micro-managing myself into rage, drinking the coffee over and over and over again, rage against life itself. The office cannot be a real place. The office is the place where souls go to rest. Years I will never get back. Money that is already gone and did not make me happy in the slightest.

Yet I hated the non-office-hell jobs, too. Because I felt too good for them. Could not face the failure and admit it to myself, to my friends with good jobs, to my family in particular. So status drove me back to hell, over and over again, like a lobotomized donkey unable to learn. There were expectations and I only ever met them briefly. Then I lied and I hid and I waited it out and then I got another job and boasted again and died again.

I comforted myself with imaginary biographies.

I could have been a surgeon. An intellectual. A scientist. Someone who betters the world, someone doing something. Some job that doesn’t drive me into clinical depression. Something. Anything. All lives are available to this imaginary me. He works hard, he is social and outgoing, he accumulates wealth slowly, he never spends hours scrolling through nothing, he has his shit together. He is very impressive. I could not have tolerated being him.

I guess I’ll be getting my autism diagnosis soon. I have an appointment.

Let us talk about the mental stuff another time. It is no excuse for not reflecting upon yourself for decades and also it’s just words for describing behavioral patterns. Descriptive, not prescriptive. I write this because I do not entirely believe it. And still we cannot travel back in time.

I did several intelligence tests that I tell nobody about. Except you now. The result was an IQ of 131 and several weeks of superiority complex. I’m good-looking. I’m intelligent. How can the world not be mine, right? How can you be intelligent and make the most stupid decisions, over and over again?

University — goddamn business administration, can you believe it? Was I unconscious at eighteen? Was there a gas leak? Lead in my brain? Someone should have intervened. A teacher. A parent. A friend. The psych ward. Someone.

Instead, I chose the degree that looked most like a good life when viewed from a safe distance. I imagined myself a manager in a football club. Read that again. How did no one say anything?

Instead, alcohol, drugs, hedonism, scrolling the days away, chasing short-term satisfaction over long-term peace. I became extremely talented at choosing whatever made the next hour easier and the next year worse.

The disappointment of everyone involved in this curious endeavor that is my life is self-evident. Failure.

I’ve had it all. Multiple times, actually. Every single time I threw it away, and the scary thing is that I would do it again. Because the mistake wasn’t the post-factum throwing-away-part. The mistake happened earlier. I kept choosing lives because I liked their silhouettes. I liked the title, the salary, the imagined respect, the person I would become. I fought myself and thought I could win. Thought I could be someone different. Someone better.

Looking back. As a child and teenager I was autistic as fuck and particularly about football (the European kind). That was my great hyperfixation for years. I could have learned so many useful things, but I had to hyperfixate on fucking football. I know ten towns in Northern Ireland and can recognize the flag of every nation on this planet and can tell you the intricate history of five different football clubs in Moldova. And then one day I lost interest like the whole thing had never happened. As if I hadn’t spent months of my life playing Football Manager, shrimping over my PC, leading a Sanmarinese club from the fifth division to Champions League glory. (I never actually achieved that. I restarted the game over and over because the novelty of each club faded too quickly. New badge, new players, new imaginary future. Then came repetition, maintenance, some disappointing results, and I was gone. I couldn’t even be consistent in Football Manager.)

That was the blueprint. I should have recognized it. I loved beginnings because beginnings are exciting. Then reality arrived and required things I could not bring myself to deliver.

I wasn’t even failing to reach my goals. I was failing to remain the person who had chosen them. I was disappointed over and over again and some of it wasn’t even my fault.

Failing myself, failing my privilege, then turning the failure into another little performance, another story of defiance.

But, oh surprise, perhaps I am finally learning. And I got a plan.

Of course I have a plan. I always have a plan. But this one is different, which is what I said about the others, but this time for real.

But first let me tell you about the bombs.