John Trimble
9 January 2003
How Fight Club Changed My Life
Once, I was a young boy who believed everything I heard, yet I knew nothing. I was impressionable and weak. Above all else, I was confused. I did not understand myself, and I did not realize why I wasn’t happy. Everything always went wrong. I felt my life slipping away into oblivion with no palpable meaning. My life was an endless array of homework, band camp, theater, girls, and a myriad other things that were not making me happy. Day after day, like a tumor, I felt weakness and futility grow inside me. Author Chuck Palahniuk writes, “This is your life, and it’s ending one minute at a time (29).” I was lost with no map to guide me…until I read Fight Club, by Chuck
Without a looming cloud of grief or a tempest of sorrow, I can sail without restraint across the seven seas, even to the ends of the earth. Today, right now, I am free.
Thus, here I am on my epic journey. But where am I going? A doorman in Fight
Club says, “A lot of young people don’t know that they want…they think they want the whole world. If you don’t know what you want, you end up with a lot you don’t (46).”
This could not describe me better; I am the love-child of too many desires. I need to find my one true passion. I am trying, but I often stumble upon my own feet. My mind moves too fast for my body to keep up, or is it the other way around? I confuse myself, often running in endless circles, and as the novel predicts, I have much in my life I do not want or need.
I feel like I am crossing a long, narrow bridge while a tempest rages about me in the night. Aside from an occasional flash of lightning, I usually find myself blindly wandering down that bridge with no end in sight. Palahniuk talks of how young generations have no purpose or place in society. He writes, “I see the strongest and smartest men who have ever lived…and they want to give their lives to something…We don’t have a great war in our generation, or a great depression…the great depression is our lives (149).” For now, all I can do is make the best of the path I am on, for when I reach the end, there will be no turning back.
Fight Club means much more to me than I can explain in so