Last week, I took a holiday that wasn’t good for me. And I mean really wasn’t good for me. A perfectly horrible nightmare to round off a perfectly horrible term. An absolute, undiluted regret. I wish I was exaggerating. Or kidding. I am not. But if one single, worthwhile thing came out of that trip, it was when someone showed me an essay. This essay, to be exact. And as I skimmed it, I fell in love.

“Survival is not inspiring, it is repulsive, and it is always the rats that run first, the cockroachs that survive. I am a rat. A cockroach. A parasite…. And Charlie crawls around the sewers of Philadephia with no clothes on.”

(The spelling errors are in the original piece and I refuse to let autocorrect change them).

Yes, I fell in love, though I’m not sure who or what with!

Because like Charlie, our irredeemable hero and perpetually undermined Rat-King of It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia, and like the author of the original article, I am a survivor in the most parasitic, depressing sense. I drink too much. I smoke too much. I sleep too little. I forget to shower. I forge relationships with unreliable, compromised people. I have a lot of daddy issues. True, I don’t hide dead pigeons under my army jacket, but once I kept a live mouse in my car for a period of time that I still refuse to specify. I, too, have difficulty navigating the admirer-stalker divide. I am similarly prone to the excessive employment of keyboards and crayons, and not always to the desired effect. I like words, but they usually come out in the wrong order. I’m notoriously hard to get rid of. In fact, I am such a relentlessly present presence, regardless of whether or not I am wanted, that I strongly suspect that I would also have survived my own abortion (and yes–that is a canonical fact of the show). I mean, who fucking knows? I don’t have a goddamn clue what’s going on most of the time, I find that I have more in common with spiders than with people, and I would absolutely bring spaghetti into a movie theatre in my purse.

But it’s also more than that. Like Charlie, I seldom feel welcome. I love too sincerely and usually at the wrong times. I keep unacceptable habits and I hurt people in all kinds of ways. I cry and scream and hit things and bleed. I storm out of my house with two packs of cigarettes and no shoes on. I feel lonely. I love cats and small, dark spaces. Sometimes I panic, and when I do, I fuck up everything.

If there’s one mistake I can’t seem to stop making, it’s that I never admit how disgusting my own existence feels. I usually try to aestheticize everything, especially myself, but no amount of charcoal sketches or feminist photoshoots or verbose writing has ever made me feel any cleaner. I went back to Oxford all full of hope and excitement, and by the fourth week I barely spoke to anyone. By the fifth week I was losing my memory. By the sixth I had forgotten how to spell “forgiveness.” By the time I came home, my family and my health were in total disarray, most of my relationships were worth next to nothing, my friend was dead, my dog was older than I ever remembered her being, my body was in wretched condition, and I had an uncontrollable nervous tremor in my right hand. Even now, typing is difficult.

My present life feels so despondent, so unfortunate, so perpetually disappointing, that at some point I have to stop pretending that it is beautiful or sad, or beautiful and sad. I have to get my hands dirty. When things get ugly, I have to match them. And I will. My survival is abject because of course it is. This is the form that survival takes. It is filthy and uninspiring and we all get fucking tired of it. Not all of us will make it, but I am going to, and it probably won’t be pretty. I think I am okay with that.

That is why I love the damn show, and the bizarre little man who informs and invigorates it. Survivors and narcissists and sociopaths and episodic tragedy abound—the only difference between their lives and mine is whether or not I can find some way to keep laughing. (Of course, sometimes, I remember that most of the people watching Always Sunny are not like me, which is fucking terrifying, but that’s a topic for another day.)

For me, Charlie is a mimetic horror, he is all the weird, gross parts of myself that I cannot admit: my dermatillomania, my PTSD, my addictive tendencies, my obsessive compulsions, my social ineptitudes, my delusions of grandeur, my occasionally questionable standards of hygiene, and my very, very low opinion of who I really am. Charlie is everything I am most reluctant to acknowledge or explain to you, and laughing at him is laughing at myself, is finding something worth smiling at in this absolute shitshow, this tired and half-assed existence I’ve salvaged from my many skirmishes with illness, abuse, suicidality, mania, and lots and lots and lots of disappointment.

I might not be slithering naked through the sewers (yet), but if that is what it takes to carve a life for myself, or a home for myself, then I’ll do it. I’ll fucking do it. I am desperate for something better than this: I don’t care what I have to do to get there, and I don’t care what form it takes.

I am not going anywhere, and you better fucking believe that. I am surviving. It seems disgusting sometimes, or hopeless, or inane, but I am surviving. I am not a fiction, but my god do I feel like one. And sometimes a made-up, semi-maniacal janitor at an indiscriminate Philadelphia pub is exactly what it takes to remind me that this is what my survival looks like. And every time I find myself I find myself sitting alone in an empty bathtub filled with bottles, or dissociating on a home-bound train, or pouring mouthwash on the floor because cleaning it up gives me something do–I try to remember that, if we ever met, Charlie and I would have a lot to scream about.