The Lucid Misfit's Handbook

One doesn't partake, you see, in the usual trifles: no smoking, no tippling, no illicit substances. Nor does one seek refuge in the raucous clamour of football, or dissolve into those bellowing throngs, all to paper over some existential void. The latest gadget? Utterly beside the point. Catalogued "experiences"? One finds them rather… vulgar. One takes care of oneself, of course. Not out of some tiresome moralistic bent, but purely, you understand, for self-preservation.

My singular indulgence — if one must insist on having one — is to think. To read. To doubt. To investigate. To scratch beneath the surface until it quite frankly burns. I know, I know how it sounds: frightfully elitist, terribly solemn, utterly insufferable. But no, not at all. There's no plinth here, no ivory tower. There's the grit of the street, the very skin of experience, and the rather fetching dark circles under one's eyes from philosophical insomnia.

One did try, mind you. Years spent masquerading as "normal," donning the guise of levity, forcing affiliations that pinched like an ill-fitting suit. I sampled insouciance, and it gave me rather ghastly indigestion. A resounding failure, then, in the art of feigning indifference.

And I've come to realise it's not some grand act of bravery or rebellion. It's simply an incapacity for anaesthesia. I cannot not feel, not think, not question. And in this rather peculiar world that applauds the distracted and quite simply punishes the intense, to be thus is almost a criminal act.

But here I am. No shortcuts. No tiresome charades. With consciousness as my sole addiction. Ready, as ever, to bring another challenge to a successful conclusion.

My name is Pablo Mera.

A man of Peñarol, a rugger bugger, A+ blood group, and, well, a bit of a stammerer.

None of which, you'll be pleased to hear, is likely to change.

In this life, I've had a few rather splendid successes… but I've also managed to commit nearly every conceivable blunder. And that, my dear fellow, is precisely why I write: so that some modicum of what I've learned, often through the sheer force of repeated stumbles, might serve someone else. Or, at the very least, to leave a record that one can indeed live with all this baggage, and yet, quite remarkably, continue to dream.