Shell

I spend my days now drowning in music and making promises to myself I know I can't keep.  I can count my ribs when I look in the mirror without even trying now.  At one point, I think I would have been proud.  Now, I'm just indifferent.  It feels like I've aged a few years in the past two weeks.  But that's not exactly unusual anymore.

Life has decided that it no longer favors me.  Which is fine, I guess.  I've had a good year.  I'm just not looking forward to a bad one.  With age for me has come the realization that the rest of my life will be spent cleaning up the messes and picking up the pieces.  I never thought my life would amount to anything extraordinary, but I always hoped I'd escape the mundane.

It seems, though, that the mundane is inescapable.  That it is omnipresent.  That it is precisely what I am doomed to spend the rest of my life tending.  Perhaps this is the price I pay for having had extravagant dreams.  Or perhaps it is simply the price of failure in everything else.

I'm getting an awful lot of advice for someone who doesn't really like it altogether that much.  And it's all the same as it was two years ago.  Except it's more pointed, more insistent.  So here I am, the stereotypical idiot not taking it.  It's not even that I don't know what's good advice.  I just don't want to take it.  And I'm not sure if it's because I feel strongly against it or if I simply don't care anymore.

Lying on a sofa all day thinking about things I can't change and things that tear me to pieces is easier than resuming my life.  It is easier to lose myself in hopelessness than to bring my life around.  I'll be forced to my feet in a few days anyway.  I lose nothing now by allowing myself to slowly fade away.

The best of me has come and gone and all that's left is this shell of a human picking up the pieces.  I don't think there's anything left inside.

I'll Never Learn...

You'd think I'd know by now that I should never go back and reread old things when I'm in this mood.  In any mood, really, because no matter where I start out, these things always put me into this emotional state, no exceptions.  I do know though, but that never seems to stop me.  When I'm in this mood it seems, it's hard to stop me doing anything...if I ever get started.  Unfortunately, it's entirely too easy to get me started reading these things.

Some years ago, I promised myself I'd never again live in the past.  I said I'd move forward with my life and never dwell on what happened.  And it's funny because I think of that promise to myself every few months and I'm never sure what to think.  I obviously haven't kept it.  I've tried again and again, but I always come back to the past.  I can't escape it.  Which is a perfectly reasonable phrase, until it means what it does here--I can't stop reading things from years ago, I can't change the person it made me become.

I don't regret.  In a way, it's another policy I made for myself.  But also, it's a reflection of the fact that everything that's happened in my life has put me precisely where I am today.  I generally find myself in a pretty damn good place, even if it doesn't seem like it, so I really can't want to change anything.  But if there's nothing that I regret, then why can't I move forward?  What keeps drawing me back to the dark sanctuary of a few years back?

Small Fortunes

Wisdom is determined by experience, not just by age.

A fortune cookie I happened to break open somewhere around seven years ago said that.  It's the one fortune that stuck with me, despite the extensive collection of fortune cookie slips in my wallet.

I was an arrogant child.  And an arrogant teenager.  Hell, I'm still arrogant, but hopefully significantly less so.  I always thought that I was special, unique, that I was in every way more experienced than anyone around me.  To a point I know that it's adolescent egocentrism.  But it goes beyond that.  I thought that everyone was beneath me.  It's thoroughly embarrassing by now, but that's the sort of person I was at the time.

Looking back on that child, I sometimes wonder how the hell I ended up here.  I think I have a pretty good idea of what (or who, as the case may be) finally knocked me off that high horse, thoroughly unintentionally, but I'm glad it happened.  I think I acquired more wisdom in discarding this ridiculous notion that I know everything than I ever could have walled in by pride as much as I was.

It's odd for me to think of the things I've been through.  I like scars.  They tell stories.  I like the record of the past that they convey.  And sometimes I feel like I'm supposed to teach the lessons I've learned.  In less than a week, I will be faced with someone who has never done this before, who is probably hoping that I'll be helpful and insightful.  But I've never been good at teaching.  I learned everything from my own mistakes, and even though I'm not sure I should be, I'm proud of it.

I'm proud that I could fall so far down and break so many things but still come out okay in the end.  Because I am okay.  Even if I don't believe it sometimes.  But I can't explain how I got here.  I can't explain the things I've learned because they're not things you can put into words.  You can try, but you'll never really get it.  The things you learn by living you don't explain or pass on, they're things you feel.

Life is preparation.  Every piece is preparing us for the next.  Every failure and every success is molding and shaping you to face the next challenge.  And it's different for everyone.  I can no more teach someone to live their life than I could teach my dog to eat with a knife and fork.  All of the wisdom that I have accumulated is my wisdom, and I don't say that to be selfish.  But everything I have learned and become applies only to me.  Every lesson in my life was specific to the person I am and the specific circumstances I was in.

I used to think I'd grow up to write a memoir.  To explain my successes and failures, to outline how I dealt with life, so that perhaps someone who read it could learn from me.  I always enjoyed reading memoirs, so this occurred to me as a logical next step, even if it wasn't a bestseller, even if it never got published by any big company.  I felt that it had to be written.  But I'm starting to understand that it doesn't.  Because to anyone else, my life is a story.  Perhaps in some places it intersects with theirs, but for the rest, it doesn't matter if it's just fact or really convincing fiction.

My "secrets" of success are nothing to anyone else, because they only apply to me.  My triumphs and crushing defeats bring lessons only to me for having lived through them, fought against them, and looked back on them.

I guess what I'm trying to say is that I don't want to let people down by giving faulty advice.  By saying things that might have helped me but could very well do more harm than good for anyone else.  And I'm not sure why that bothers me right now, but it's been gently nagging for some time, and I think it needed to be said.

Don't shake the hands of fate

I don't want to stop writing.  There are all of these ideas bouncing around my brain, all of these thoughts and ideas coming together and falling apart like water molecules transitioning between the liquid and solid state.  Somewhere between writing and reading, my mood shattered.  Everything that had been so fixed and crystallized only moments before fell to pieces.

And I walked out of the shards of glass and blinked in the bright sunlight.  I don't know what it was or how it happened, but I went from one extreme to the other...in a favorable direction for once.  And now I can't stop thinking about things to put down.  Phrases that sound nice.  Sentences that seem to convey meaning.  Sentiments that would do wonders in a memoir.

I read Palahniuk's collection of non-fiction stories over the course of the past few days.  That might very well be what sparked this need to keep writing.  Some things he said though really rang a bell.  I won't go back to find the specific quote, but he mentioned that life is never laughable when you're living it, that it can be downright unbearable.  And in this way, going back and writing about it makes it bearable...interesting, even.  At another point, he mentioned that Fight Club was a smattering of his life and the lives of his friends, that it was a lot of nonfiction tied together with strings of make-believe to make it all flow.

That struck me.  Because I've spent a lot of my free time lately (since I'm so unaccustomed to it) thinking about my life, and it doesn't seem like much of anything special.  I'm not much of a story-teller on the whole.  But I can find things even in my boring, ordinary life that can be put together into something people marvel at and laugh at.  I forget that this is what happens when getting to know new friends.  The stories of my adventures between the ages of fifteen and eighteen have been my go-to icebreakers for introducing myself in a more meaningful way to people who are in the process of becoming friends for quite some time.

There's something about this location that isn't good for me.  Maybe it's the slightly increased air pollution, or the harder water.  I generally think it's mostly a matter of the environment bringing back unfavorable memories from nights spent plastered against this very wall, clinging to this pillow and trying to muffle my crying so as not to wake anyone at 2 am.  That was a very specific example, but there are many like it, from everywhere in the vicinity, and it feels like every time I come back, there's something that brings all of these negative emotions out in me again.

I don't think there really was a point to this.  But I want to write.  I want to keep putting these pieces down.  I'm out for the moment, or my fingers grow tired (don't they always, though), and I have other things to do.  So perhaps I will come back.  Perhaps this mood will breathe some much-needed life that's been missing for quite some time into this blog.  I doubt it, unfortunately, but we will see.

And you will ruin me just as surely as everyone who came before.

You write for an audience, I write to get away

I hate compartmentalization.  I'm good at it, which I think is the root of the problem.  Because if I wasn't, there's no way it could bother me so damn much.  But as a result of my unholy successes with the thing, I can't do certain things anymore, no matter how much I want to.

For instance, it takes every bit of willpower I have to sit down and write, even here.  It never flows, always feels completely forced, and I haven't been happy with anything I've written in a very long time now.  I can't run.  The thought of putting on athletic clothing and walking out the door to run disgusts me.  And to think I used to love doing both of those things so much.  But it seems that my compartmentalized mind has decided that they belong in the past, permanently attached to points in my life that they are particularly closely associated with.

Is my entire life going to slip away like this?  Where I can't do one thing or another because it is so closely associated with a past environment, a past set of circumstances or habits?  It's only become this pronounced fairly recently.  It may have affected my behavior before as well, but never like this.  Now there are just things I can't bring myself to do, even if it seems like it may be a good idea.

To be fair, locking things away got me through quite a few messes.  Cryptic writing was enough of an outlet to keep me sane and that was well and good.  But it has also started to mean the loss of things I know for a fact I once enjoyed.

--seemingly random change of topic--

It's funny that writing was presumably created to communicate.  It was made so that people could spread information, not so that they could hide it.  And yet the predominant use it has seen beneath my fingertips has been precisely that: hiding life, hiding emotion, hiding whatever was going through my brain at the time.  Because let's be perfectly honest, though I write informatively as part of my profession, the vast majority of the writing I do has been for me and me alone.

Sometimes it's been for you, to you, about you.  Or other people occasionally.  But it was rarely if ever meant to be read.  Would I appreciate feedback on my ideas, my writing, my topic choices?  Sure, of course I would, it would be good for me.  But that was never the primary purpose.  Unlike you who wrote to get ideas out, to get them to people because either they came at the wrong time or they couldn't be said, I always wrote to escape.  I wrote to keep myself sane.  I wrote to put just enough of the hurt outside of me so that I could function.

And I'm not sure how well I'm doing with the sanity anymore.  Maybe I'm not sane because I don't write, or maybe I don't write because I am finally sane.  It's an incredibly fine line to be drawn between sanity and lack thereof, so I don't feel as though I am at all qualified to make that judgment about myself.  I'm not sure what story my writing tells anymore because it isn't meant to tell anyone else a story.  Only me.  The beautiful thing there is that a single phrase will often tell me exactly what I was thinking, what I was worried about, without giving anyone else the slightest inkling of an idea.

I'm sorry I made this record public.  I know it's worthless to anyone else to read.  But it had to go somewhere.  No reason for it not to go everywhere.

Drowning

Have you ever been in a sea of people and found yourself drowning?  Sitting in a crowded room, surrounded by people laughing and talking and having a good time, and found yourself falling through the cracks, losing yourself in the midst of the people?

It's like the world is rushing around you, and everyone is moving forward with their lives, doing great and wonderful things, and you're the island in the middle.  That small, unmoving piece of land that has nowhere to go.  You're rooted in your disconnect from other people.  Stranded in your isolation.

And it is worst, perhaps, when you know precisely why you can't become one with the water and rush alongside the rest of the world.  I've heard it said that it takes courage to stay true to yourself.  Or something equally sappy.  But the thing is, it doesn't take courage at all.  It takes stubbornness, it takes arrogance, and sometimes it even takes an awful lot of pride.  But definitely not courage.

Social isolation, and I think I can speak from quite a bit of experience here, is not always the miserable reality that people make it out to be.  It doesn't always consist of wishing you could be like everyone else.  It certainly doesn't involve wanting to be liked by the people who meander around you every single day.  What it does involve, however, is a lot of solitude.  And with solitude come two things: reflection and destruction.  Or maybe that's just how it always was for me.  Because after a while, there's nothing more to reflect on, and because there's nothing to be created, the only choice is to destroy everything and anything.

But one thing said about isolation is definitely true.  The loneliness.  Because even the most self-sufficient individuals find themselves wanting company sometimes.  And past a certain stage, this loneliness is not a loneliness of wanting to be accepted, but a loneliness of not having people that one can accept.

I used to find my upbringing wanting, because the values I was raised with are so atypical for this country.  But with time, I learned to accept it, and even be thankful for it.  I was never taught to seek approval, to alter myself to make a good impression.  I was raised to do things for myself, to not allow myself to be changed for other people's benefits unless it was also in my best interest.  And that is largely how I wound up on the outskirts of standard social groups.

I do not have (and never have had) opinions on designer clothing or popular sporting events.  I do not attend events that I am not interested in or partake in activities that bother me simply for the sake of being accepted.  So here I am, a lonely island in the midst of this society.  And I do not find myself wanting to be like the people who surround me, but I only wish that there were more people who I could connect with.  Who weren't so shallow as to be defined by the opinions of others.

This has been, of course, a terribly selfish post, but this is where my thoughts are lately.  This is where my solitary reflections lead me to.  I do hope that I will meet more interesting people in the near future, though.

Like I said

It's a twisted game with cruel rules and crueler consequences.  Perhaps it's better, then, that my self-control has improved.  Or perhaps it will just bite me in the end.

Not that it matters.

Alive for the First Time

Remember that the best relationship is one where your love for each other is greater than your need for each other.

This quote has floated around the internet repeatedly, and as such it's difficult for me to find a source to attribute it to.  Forgive me, and let me know if you know the source, I will add it immediately.

In any case, moving forward with the point of this post.  Every relationship I've been in, I spent some time thinking about this quote, because of all the various quotes on the subject of love (believe me, I used to collect them), this one always rang the most true to me.  It simply makes sense.  If a relationship is primarily taken up by need, then there is a constant push-pull between the partners, a delicate balance.  If, however, love, rather than need, is more dominant in the relationship, there is less tension.  There are fewer "I need you right now, please," "I can't, I'm busy" moments.  Or at least, that's what makes sense to me.  I can't say much from experience.  Or rather, I'd prefer not to try to generalize it.

For the past two years, since I've been in this particular relationship, I've spent a lot of time thinking about this concept of need vs. love in a relationship.  Interestingly enough, unlike all of my past relationships, this relationship, for me at least, began more out of need than out of love.  There was plenty of both (which could explain the intense emotional tension of that part of my life), but I needed it.  I needed things to work in one way or another.  And my selfishness, my neediness, is the only reason this relationship started the way it did.

So every time I went back to think about that quote, there was always some doubt.  I was never sure which was dominant: need or love?  Our lives have become so intertwined that it's difficult to pick out our purely pleasant, affectionate interactions from our supportive, necessary ones.  In light of this, it seems my brain has recently taken to ignoring this thought entirely.  I had no answer for the longest time, so I didn't think much about it.

But I have an answer, finally.  I realized something today.  I can do this on my own.  I don't need all of this.  Which is precisely the reason it's so wonderful.  I've finally come to terms with my own independence, and that answers for me the question of which is the dominant force in this relationship (from my perspective, anyway).  And that makes me very happy.  It also gives me one less thing to be completely and utterly confused about.  Which is good.