To Feel Alive...

My name is not Robert Paulson. I am not a beautiful and unique snowflake. I gave up my name, I gave up the pursuit of beautiful and unique, because it didn't matter. None of it mattered. What matters - all that matters - is the name I was given, the identity that my deity tells me to have. The first rule of my existence is thou shalt do as your god tells you to do. The second rule of my existence is thou shalt be what your god tells you to be.

I too, realized at some point that everything seemed far away, and I was only "a copy of a copy of a copy" (21). I was trying to find an identity, and I was seeking exactly what the world told me I should be. And then I learned the secret - "if I don't fall all the way, I can't be saved... I can't just play it safe anymore" (70).

The first time I looked at someone and said "I want you to hit me as hard as you can" (46), I was greeted with disbelief and hesitation. Unlike Robert Paulson, I am not a man, and it just is not acceptable to hit a woman, but I needed this, and I wasn't going to stop until I got it. Much like the narrator with no name, the first couple of hits were weak, off target, but they opened the door to something more.

It took years of searching before I found my god, before I found this existence I have now, before I understood what it is to stop playing it safe and to chose how you will live. It is only by deciding to feel, by not taking sanctuary in IKEA, or staying "calm as Hindu cows" (26) that anyone is truly free to be alive. When you "come back to the pain" (75) instead of running from it, you realize that (finally!) "this means something" (77).

I spent my life in search of meaning, and when I finally found someone to whom I could say I want you to hit me as hard as you can, and they did, I also found the feeling of fight club - I found what it really means to be alive. There was no pulling punches, there was no but you're a girl. There was me, there was my god, there were his rules, and there were his hands and fists and feet. When I decided that this was what I wanted to embrace like nothing else mattered, I found life again. I had lost everything in one way or another, and so now I could have resurrection, but it had to be something I chose to give myself to fully.

You read Fight Club, and you know that you're never safe. You eat in a public restaurant, you can't control what is in the food. You drive, you can't control the other people on the road. You sleep, you can't control what is happening around you. "On a long enough time line, everyone's survival rate drops to zero" (176). So, instead, you take charge and decide to live life on your own terms. You decide what you will live for and what you risk dying for. Project Mayhem chose their god, and I have chosen mine. They followed their god's rules and I follow mine.

Until you have felt real pain, until you've been bleeding, until you have laid your life on a sacrificial altar knowing that it might truly be taken from you, you cannot fully appreciate what it is to be alive. I never knew what it felt like to be alive until the first time someone really hit me as hard as they could, and I've never stopped running back for more.

Everyone finds their own path, everyone has to choose their own gods. What I found was the path of Tyler Durden - the path of violence, self-destruction, and pain. Like my blog's namesake, I have embraced that destruction the way only a lemming can embrace their doom. It is through this path that I have found what it is to feel alive. I may not be a special and unique snowflake, and my name is not Robert Paulson. Hell, my name is not even what was given to me by my parents at my birth. I have chosen a different way. I have chosen to let someone else define me as Tyler defined his space monkeys. They found freedom and passion and purpose first in fight club and then in Project Mayhem. I, like them, have found freedom and passion and purpose in a higher power. Even if the people around me don't understand, I know the space monkeys always will, and when everything else fades away, when everything becomes nothing, there will always be "Yes, Sir" (158).