Hell is life drying up

When I first read this line, “hell is life drying up,“ it sounded odd, like I had to re-read it again to understand what it was saying. And I took it to mean that when you let your life dry up, you’re in hell. I’ve also read the line, “hell is other people,” which could relate to this too, but let’s stay on topic. 

I wondered, What does life look like all dried up? What is a dried up life? Well, for me, it’s one that lacks excitement, joy, peace, happiness, fun, adventure. It’s a life of only eating vegetables and drinking water. There’s no sugar or alcohol or sex or laughter. It’s lukewarm black coffee or green tea. 

It’s doing the same fucking shit over and over again: wake up, turn off blaring alarm, piss, shit, drink water, eat the same breakfast you eat every day, unenthusiastically kiss your husband who feels like a roommate, commute to work like Peter in Office Space, eat your packed lunch, work some more, get lost in social media, work a little more, commute to the gym, tune everyone out with a random playlist, go home, microwave a frozen meal, eat dinner in front of the TV with your roommate of a husband, ask the same shit over and over again, “How was your day?“, “How was the gym?“, “What do you want to watch?“ It’s chewing gum after it’s lost its flavor. Kiss each other good night with tight lips—the same way you’d kiss your grandmother, push in earplugs and bite into mouthguard, sleep on separate sides of the king bed, recount the last time you had sex, like counting sheep, and you fall asleep before you reach your last sexual encounter. 

And then doing it all over again. 

That is a dried up life. It’s fucking dry and sad and it’s hell. There’s a joke that goes, if I wanted to feel like I was going to live forever, I’d go to the DMV“ or something. That is Hell. It’s having to be somewhere you don’t want to be and finding yourself succumbing to the slow movement of the clock. Watching the little hand drag its way around and around the edges of the circle. The overhead fluorescent lights flickering just enough to give you a headache.

Joseph Campbell said, “hell is life drying up.” For context, there’s more to this line: 

“We must be willing to get rid of the life we planned, so as to have the life that is waiting for us. The old skin has to be shed before the new one can come. If we fix on the old, we get stuck. When we hang onto any form, we are in danger of putrefaction. Hell is life drying up. The hoarder, the one in us that wants to keep, to hold on, must be killed. If we are hanging onto the form now, we’re not going to have the form next. You can’t make an omelette without breaking eggs. Destruction before creation.”

Part of this dried of life is not letting go. It’s when we grasp onto some thing so tightly it can’t breathe and then it eventually dies. 

I had a micro-epiphany when I was floating in a sensory deprivation tank that this is not the life I wanted to have. I knew if I didn’t “crack a few eggs,” then I’d be coming to the dried up Hell of a life Joseph Campbell talks about. I had kept it going for so long because it was familiar, it was a form I knew, and could expect. 

I’m realizing I’m shedding my old life. The life I found myself in where I wasn’t happy or intrigued or mystified or adventurous or satisfied. It became a layer of toxicity, stagnation, and settling. Hope, like life, had dried up. And there’s nothing worse than accepting a life you don’t want to live. 

This next phase is greeting the life that’s waiting for me – whatever that looks like.

So, my dear reader, I ask you: how are you letting your life dry up? And what can you do to break some eggs?