just words

 

I've been watching your show since I was at least nine years old. Back then, you used to come on around 10 or 11 o’clock, and I could only watch you in my sister’s bedroom. She had one of two TVs in the whole house that got cable, and she would stay up extra late on school nights drinking SoBe fruit beverages, the ones in the tall glass bottles, while talking with her friends on her laptop using AOL while MTV played in the background. My bedtime was a lot earlier than hers, but after my dad would put me to bed, if I wasn’t sneaking Game Boy time underneath the covers with my worm light, I would tiptoe out of my room, creep through the dark hallway, and slip into my sister’s room to watch you. My sister would always tell me to GET THE HELL OUT but, after a few minutes, she’d always calm down and accept the fact that I wasn’t going to leave. “Whatever, as long as you don’t talk to me. And don’t touch my SoBe.” So I wouldn’t talk to her, and I wouldn't touch her SoBe. I’d just lay on the foot of her bed, stomach down with my elbows on the mattress and my head in my hands, and stare into the glow of the big CRT, watching you. And I could usually get away with this for about an hour before I’d hear my dad coming down the hall to tell my sister to TURN THE DAMN LIGHTS OFF AND GET SOME SLEEP, at which point I’d sneak into the closet, wait for him to leave, then creep back to my room as if nothing had ever happened. I tell you all this to illustrate that I have some fond memories of watching your show back in the late 90s and early 2000s, but also, back then, I didn’t really understand any of it. I just liked the art style and the music and how you and your friends seemed to make fun of everything. Compared to the stuff I was watching, like Johnny Bravo and CatDog and Pokemon, your show was like stepping into a whole other world, one I didn’t understand but desperately wanted to be a part of for some reason.

 

By the time my acne came around, which was real bad let me tell you, I was watching your show pretty much religiously as it came on Noggin’s “The N” block around 9 or 10 PM. Back then, I had a crush on you, to tell you the truth. I thought we were soulmates. I thought we understood each other. I felt like an outsider, and you were an outsider too. Your parents, your schoolmates, and even your friends didn’t really understand you, and they didn’t understand me either. But you understood me. And I understood you. At least, I thought I did. I thought your detached cynicism for everyone and everything was intoxicating, because that’s how I saw the world too. You seemed to take nothing seriously. In my view, you were above it all. And you were so intelligent too. You had a sardonic quip for literally every situation, like that one time when you were at a job faire and someone asked you about your life goals and you said, “My goal is not to wake up at 40 with the bitter realization that I've wasted my life on a job I hate because I was forced to decide on a career in my teens.” I laughed my ass off when you said that. It was so true. I loved that. I remember thinking, damn, I wish I could come up with stuff like that. I wanted to be just like you. You were my dark star. You had the mind and soul of a subversive writer born in the wrong era, and I loved that about you. I wanted to be just like you. And I wanted to be with you as well. I remember getting seriously jealous when you would get all shy and blushy around Trent. What did he have that I didn't have? I started dressing like Trent, acting like him, thinking this would appeal to the simulacrum of you I had created in my mind. And when Tom came around, well, I could barely even watch as you hooked up with Tom. Fuck that guy. He was a pretentious asshole. You deserved better than that. He didn't understand you like I did. You were an outsider, and I was too. We were both born in the wrong time and place, we naturally gravitated toward things, like art and music, that were created way before we were even born, and we thought everything from our generation onwards was insipid, stupid bullshit. We both felt like the suburbs were some sort of karmic hell we were reborn into because we had been bad in our previous lives or something. We both saw the middle-class suburbanite losers around us as zombies, puppets, just walking around performing their stupid little roles, roles they didn’t have the intelligence to question or the willpower to resist. We both knew that everything was shit. Life sucks then you die, that's what you'd say. That's what I'd say too. We were above it all. We looked down on everyone and everything and we liked it that way. We would never give in. We would never conform. Tom didn't know this about you, he just pretended to. He wasn't your soulmate. I was. I understood you. I loved you.

 

But now, looking back almost two decades later, I realize that I didn’t really understand you at all. And that’s because I didn’t understand myself.

 

Maybe you can relate to what I’m about to tell you, Daria. Maybe you’ve got it all figured out already. You’ve got more years under your belt now, after all. But I’m going to tell you this stuff anyway, because maybe it will help you, who knows. I'm going to tell you that I have spent my entire life trying to figure out how to deal with the frustration of simply being here, on this earth, in this skin, with this mind. There seems to be no rhyme or reason for it. Why me? Why this body? Why this planet? Why this city, state, country? Why do I think the way I do? Why do I even do the things I do? What is my purpose? And I spent so much time dealing with this frustration simply by rebelling. Back when I had six different face creams for my terrible acne, I refused to participate in school, never did my homework, got held back several grades, and eventually flunked out of high school. Teachers thought I was stupid, they put me in special classes. Of course, they didn’t know that this was just my way of saying FUCK THE SYSTEM, but that didn’t matter to them, the end result was the same. I looked down on everyone and everything. I was cynical, sarcastic, sardonic, ironic, all that stuff, and I thought it was cool.

 

But really, I was just fucking miserable. And, on a certain level, I was making myself even more miserable, by solely relying on negativity to cope with being miserable. I was a feedback loop of misery.

 

I saw life as a big meaningless joke and pretended that I didn’t care, just like you did. But the truth is, I cared a whole helluva lot. I cared, arguably, more than anyone else around me. My detached irony belied a terrible secret, which was that I was a self-conscious, egotistical brat who cared way too much about what others thought about me. And since I felt like I had nothing to offer, I would pretend like the world was below me, because this made me feel better. I would criticize everyone with short little sardonic quips, social-media-friendly one-liners, while offering nothing constructive in return. I reveled in this destruction. I told myself that deconstructing things with negativity was meaningful in some way, but I was just a confused, angry little demon. A melancholic phantom nightmare boy. I pretended I was above the stereotypes but all I was doing was reinforcing the very stereotypes I pretended to be above. I didn’t see people as people, I saw them as characters in a TV show, characters who only existed to be subjects of my scorn and ridicule. I would reduce people to tropes and caricatures and I would revel in it. I would see an athletic kid playing soccer as nothing more than a dumbass jock with nothing going on up there in his head, and I would make fun of him and I would laugh at him and then I would go home and sit on my bed stewing in psychic garbage for hours while watching your show, and there you were, just like me, and this made me feel better, made me feel understood, so I leaned into you and wanted to be just like you, because you were my ideal, you seemed to have it all figured out, you seemed to truly be above it all, and I wanted to be just like that.

 

But I didn’t truly understand you. I didn’t understand that you were going through it too. I didn’t understand that you were just coping with the frustration of simply being here, on this earth, in this skin, with this mind. I didn’t understand that you were just as miserable as I was.

 

But I think I’m getting better. I’ve adopted a sort of mind-over-matter attitude. I’m trying to be less ironic, less detached, less negative all the time. I’m trying to be more sincere. And I find that, by reminding myself that everyone is just going through it, trying to cope, trying to figure out how to deal with the frustration of simply being here, that we’re all alike in some way, that we all have something in common, this fosters a sort of feeling of togetherness within me, a certain positivity that gives me hope. We are all in this together. No one is better or worse. No one is a trope. No one is a character in a TV show, Daria.  I’m trying to see people less as stereotypes and more as real, living, breathing people with interesting hobbies and unique outlooks and deep personal lives, and this outlook is helping me, it really is, it’s helping me be less miserable.

 

And that’s why I’m writing this to you today, Daria, because I want you to be less miserable too.

 

Love always,

 

Forrest