i'll live my life if it kills me

09 Mar, 2026

It's been one of these periods, when my mind oscillates between the sheer meaninglessness and unbearable significance of my existence. One moment I render the whole world trivial, the next it feels heavy with implication. This is not a new affliction. I've often existed in dichotomies, meandering restlessly inside opposites.

I seek great refuge in reading: partly because it enriches my own prose, partly because it reassures me that someone, somewhere, has already articulated my contradictory feelings in cadence more precise than my own. It's a form of recognition, how a thought I believed was uniquely mine had already inhabited another mind. It's why this line, by E.E. Cummings, firmly lodged itself in me: i'll live my life if it kills me.¹ It carries both defiance and fatigue, the paradoxical consolation that living is overwhelming while insisting on it nonetheless.

I'm aware of how easily the mind collapses everything to nothing. It's a wicked inclination, one I know too well. Perhaps it's personal hardship, or the grim state of our world, that tempts us to conclude that our ambitions, anxieties, the small projects we repeatedly return to are merely transient gestures that amount to little. Still, don't these gestures matter precisely because they're fleeting? That the act of caring itself conjures significance where none was guaranteed? (See also: Absurdism.)

Even if the world is burning, it still feels necessary to try.

Often, being alive means permitting intrinsic meaninglessness and meaning to coexist, without demanding a clear final answer: continuing to write, to make things, to reach towards whatever feels momentarily alive, even when the effort itself feels absurd. To live stubbornly, even if it kills me.