Jinxed

hydra

I had inadvertently downloaded some kind of a virus, a species of malware. I’m unlucky this way – I seem to attract the damn things. This particular virus wasn’t just bad though, it wasn’t just nasty – it was downright sinister. It was a full-blown no-holds-barred nightmare, as I have discovered to my cost over the last few weeks.

 

To start off with it was only the usual type of stuff – my laptop had slowed down to a crawl and couldn’t do anything at all without making heavy weather of it. There were certain applications I just couldn’t open, others which kept freezing on me, and all the time I was subjected to all sorts of the most repellent pop-ups that – no matter how I tried – I just couldn’t close down. It was like the Hydra of Greek legends – chop off one head and two more grew. It was a hopeless struggle. Anyway that was just the usual stuff. I wasn’t too worried about that kind of thing – I’m used to it. As I say, I get it all the time…

 

That kind of stuff didn’t get me down too much – it annoyed the hell out of me alright but it didn’t get to me. Not too much, anyway. What happened next did. The damn virus jumped the user-interface and somehow got into my subconscious mind. Don’t ask me how it did it – it just did. It turned into a mind-virus. A mind-glitch. Before I knew it I started losing confidence in myself – in all areas of my life, not just the part to do with laptops and tablets and mobile phones. For example if there was a paper-jam in the photocopier at work and I wasn’t able to fix it then I would find myself developing the perception that the fault was in me and not the wretched banjaxed photocopier. If I had just got pissed off with the wretched thing and kicked it a few times or swore at it that would have been healthy, that would have been normal. But I didn’t – instead I would get this awful kind of a feeling in me, this kind of dawning awareness that it was me that was jinxed and not the photocopier. I started to get this belief that I was banjaxed and that the failure of the photocopier was a symptom of some deep-seated flaw in me. And it wasn’t just photocopiers that I am talking about – just about everything I touched was guaranteed to either not work, or sooner or later develop some fault that caused it to break down. And I took it all personally.

 

I’d be waiting at a bus stop and the bus would be late and I’d start thinking that I was the reason that the damn bus wouldn’t come. Or I’d go to light a cigarette and the lighter wouldn’t work and instead of thinking that it might have run out and go to the shop to buy another lighter I would take it as meaning that I was a useless person and feel bad about it. I’d go into a slump. Or maybe I’d lose my keys and instead of just looking for them like any normal person would I’d sink into a state of deep hopelessness and despair because I knew that it was me and not the keys that was the problem. I internalized everything.

 

“Yeah, yeah, yeah,” you might say. “We all get that sometimes. So what. Big deal. Just stop being such a bloody wimp about it. Just get over yourself, would you…”

 

It went beyond that though. That was only the beginning. I started realizing that nothing would work for me, not ever. Not even the simplest, most reliable thing would work when I was around so there wouldn’t even be any point in me trying. I was useless and I knew it. I was worse than useless – it was as if wasn’t even able to exist properly anymore. I was still there, but only in some derisory kind of a way. Only in an ineffective, impotent kind of a way. I was there but I wasn’t there. I was there but only as a kind of futile bystander, a ghost at the banquet. It was as if I couldn’t properly manage to interface with life any more. I couldn’t log on. I kept on trying but my login details were invalid. Life didn’t recognize my password any more…

 
It had gotten to the stage where I was afraid to keep on trying to get stuff to work because like the subconscious message my repeated failure was giving me. I didn’t like the implications of it all – the philosophical implications of not being able to engage with life in any kind of a real or effective way. What was this saying about me? It wasn’t exactly what you’d call validating, after all. I was there, I existed, but as I have in a purely ineffectual kind of a way. A futile kind of a way. My self-belief had been terminally damaged by the virus, I suppose you could say. I used to believe in myself – at least I guess that I did, I presume that I did. I assume that I used to believe in myself because I never really thought about it very much, but now I’m thinking about it all the time. Its all I do. The fact that I’m thinking about it all the time clearly means, as I can now see, that I don’t have any. Self-belief that is. That’s what it’s like when you’re jinxed – you think about the fact that you’re jinxed the whole time! You can’t stop dwelling on it, in a perfectly futile way. In an agonizingly futile way. You go over it and over it, you never stop going over it…

 

“Yeah, yeah, yeah,” you’re probably thinking. “Boo-hoo. Get over it, loser. Either do something about it or shut the fuck up…”

 

But that’s just it – that’s the whole problem. I CAN’T do anything. I’ve been infected, viralized. I’ve been trojaned. I’m totally jinxed. I’m thoroughly banjaxed. I’m not able to do anything about anything anymore…

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