I am a sick man. ... I am a spiteful man. I am an unattract-ive man. I believe my liver is diseased. However, I know nothing at all about my disease, and do not know for cer-tain what ails me. I don’t consult a doctor for it, and never have, though I have a respect for medicine and doctors. Be-sides, I am extremely superstitious, sufficiently so to respect medicine, anyway (I am well-educated enough not to be su-perstitious, but I am superstitious). No, I refuse to consult a doctor from spite. That you probably will not understand. Well, I understand it, though. Of course, I can’t explain who it is precisely that I am mortifying in this case by my spite: I am perfectly well aware that I cannot ‘pay out’ the doctors by not consulting them; I know better than anyone that by all this I am only injuring myself and no one else. But still, if I don’t consult a doctor it is from spite. My liver is bad, well—let it get worse!I have been going on like that for a long time—twenty years. Now I am forty. I used to be in the government ser-vice, but am no longer. I was a spiteful official. I was rude and took pleasure in being so. I did not take bribes, you see, so I was bound to find a recompense in that, at least. (A poor jest, but I will not scratch it out. I wrote it thinking it would sound very witty; but now that I have seen myself that I only wanted to show off in a despicable way, I will not scratch it off on purpose!) When petitioners used to come for information to the table at which I sat, I used to grind my teeth at them, and felt intense enjoyment when I succeeded in making any-body unhappy. I almost did succeed. For the most part they were all timid people—of course, they were petitioners. But of the uppish ones there was one officer in particular I could not endure. He simply would not be humble, and clanked his sword in a disgusting way. I carried on a feud with him for eighteen months over that sword. At last I got the better of him. He left off clanking it. That happened in my youth, though. But do you know, gentlemen, what was the chief point about my spite? Why, the whole point, the real sting of it lay in the fact that continually, even in the moment of the acutest spleen, I was inwardly conscious with shame that I was not only not a spiteful but not even an embittered man, that I was simply scaring sparrows at random and amusing myself by it. I might foam at the mouth, but bring me a doll to play with, give me a cup of tea with sugar in it, and maybe I should be appeased. I might even be genuinely touched, though probably I should grind my teeth at myself after-wards and lie awake at night with shame for months after. That was my way.I was lying when I said just now that I was a spiteful of-ficial. I was lying from spite. I was simply amusing myself with the petitioners and with the officer, and in reality I never could become spiteful. I was conscious every moment in myself of many, very many elements absolutely opposite to that. I felt them positively swarming in me, these oppositeelements. I knew that they had been swarming in me all my life and craving some outlet from me, but I would not let them, would not let them, purposely would not let them come out. They tormented me till I was ashamed: they drove me to convulsions and—sickened me, at last, how they sickened me! Now, are not you fancying, gentlemen, that I am expressing remorse for something now, that I am asking your forgiveness for something? I am sure you are fancying that ... However, I assure you I do not care if you are.
You are now in your forties. Your school of choice didn't really matter in the long run, but you met wonderful people at the bigger school, though your mom recents you for going there and studying something that wasn't medicine.
You don't know if she ever really got over that.
Sorry for your loss(?).
You got married. You got divorced, didn't have any kids. You made a lot of choices at this point in your life and you're not sure if maybe you had changed one or two, you'd be happier.
Maybe you would've been a better person.
You don't know.
Money is occassionally a problem.
You got a degree you didn't love, you work as a freelancer, sometimes you get jobs that land you a month or two of luxury, but more often than not you're looking around for a new opportunity, a new job.
Your mom says you should've been a doctor, gone to the smaller school and not let your group of friends corrupt you into studying something that didn't pay well. You don't like this. You hated the thought of studying medicine.
You also wish you had learned how to draw, or play an instrument but you can't help but feel like its too late now.
You miss the days where you worried about missing your mom while moving to college. You ended up moving and learning a lot of independence pretty fast, though you're sure this didn't change much. With old age she has become insufferable. She is also sick, and it pains you to think this because you know some day she'll die and you worry you never treated her well enough.
You send her a text and let her know you love her even if sometimes you doubt it.
You feel lost.
You think back to a philosophy class you took when you were a junior in college. You wonder what free will really is.
You made choices, no choices particularly weighted as intrinsically good or bad. But you never ended up where you wanted to end up in.
You had no way of foretelling the future, you made choices but didn't know where they would take you. You also didn't know if the choices someone else made got you here.