New Writers 1,000-Word Short Story Competition 2024 – Third Place
How to Have an Existential Crisis
by Jamie Simpher
Wake up to the sound of screams. You are not the one screaming but you will think you are until you come out of your dreams.
Silence your alarm.
Drag your tired body to the gym. If you want to be able to travel and enjoy yourself well into retirement, you have to exercise.
Of course, right now it makes you feel like crap. It keeps your body exhausted and sore, so you groan every time you stand up or bend over, like a woman far beyond your thirty years.
Carefully log each set in your weightlifting app, because if you aren’t recording it, what’s even the point? Of course, there is no point. Picking up heavy things and setting them down again serves no purpose. Nothing is getting done. Dumbbells aren’t even real objects. They’re heavy just for the sake of being heavy, invented just to create struggle in the lives of those whose lives are too easy.
But using the app will give you the illusion of progress and a momentary burst of dopamine. And if you pour more and more energy into lifting the dumbbells again and again and again, then as a reward, next week, you’ll be strong enough to struggle with dumbbells that are just a little bit heavier.
After the weights, spend some time on the treadmill, every day, trying to outrun the building rage in the pit of your stomach. You can’t outrun anything on a treadmill, least of all rage. It will continue to build. But at least you’ll get in shape.
The time between your shower and the beginning of work is your writing time. But somehow there never is any. Spend the scant fifteen minutes putting dishes away or folding laundry or something else that feels important until it’s done.
Log on and begin work.
Let the endless details and relentless waves of frustrations fill the time that ticks by. Don’t think about the days at the beginning of your career, when your work was inspired and creative and felt like it mattered. That was a long time ago. In the intervening years, your job has been a slow process of collecting more and more responsibilities as more and more people leave the team and move on.
Don’t tell your manager that people are relying on you in ways they should not. Don’t tell him that you feel like human duct tape. If you do, they’ll fire back. They’ll say you’re hoarding knowledge, and there’s information that lives only inside your head. They’ll call you a control freak.
You might be a control freak.
But it’s not your job to create a functional organization or a strong team. Don’t take on that responsibility, too.
Every day, daydream about quitting your job for exactly fifteen minutes while you eat lunch. Your boyfriend has offered to support you, if you want to quit and just write your novel.
Never take him up on this offer. Tell him you need the structure of a day job; you can’t just sit and stare at a blank page and hope for inspiration.
Don’t tell him any of the real reasons you’re saying no: that you were handed too much in your youth and all you have ever wanted was to feel independent; that having a high-paying job fulfils a need, even if you hate it. That while you were once a strict minimalist in a tiny, freezing studio apartment, you’ve gotten to like your yoga membership and your apartment with a gym and having enough money to order in sushi once a week.
Definitely don’t say that you’re afraid to lose your excuse for not getting much writing done.
Don’t say any of that.
Just stick to your healthy routine and your comfortable job and your pathetic attempts to finish your novel so you can stick it in a drawer and say it needs edits and never let it see the light of day.
Just look straight ahead and never ever glance into the periphery because you know what’s there, what is always there: the void closing in on you day by day, the screams you’ve been swallowing, the panic that will eat you alive unless you make a change and every day you say today you will change your life but then the end of the workday comes and you are tired, so tired, so you promise yourself that tomorrow, tomorrow you will work on your novel and apply for grad schools.
Put on Netflix.
Watch a show you hate. Don’t stop watching until it’s time to go to sleep.
In the morning, the alarm will scream at you to wake up. It’s not the sound of your heart screaming but it might sound like it for a minute.
Do it all again.
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Jamie Simpher graduated from the University of Iowa in 2014. For the last eight years she has worked as a professional writer in the world of advertising, but one day she aspires to be a swashbuckling pirate captain sailing the high seas. Her work has been published in SmallWondersMagazine and nominated for a Rhysling Award. In the fall, she will attend the University of Alaska Fairbanks to pursue her MFA in creative writing. When she isn’t writing stories and poems, she loves to do yoga, cook vegetarian meals, and travel. She is an absolute recluse on social media, but if you insist, you can find her on Instagram: @average_pirate.