Day: August 4, 2020

While this Covid experience has many drawbacks it also has many benefits. It also has many unintended side effects. One of which is the strain it puts on individuals from an existential standpoint. I feel it in my household where everyone over the age of 20 is struggling with the ancient questions of who am I, and what am I doing with this gift of existence? The rest are playing Fortnite.

Honestly, I wish I had the mindset to be in the latter category. It is so easy to fall into the rhythm of gaming and other distractions and not consider life itself and by extension, death. I’ve found in my household that such considerations lead inexorably to disappointment. Everyone here of a certain age is sad or lost or some combination of the two. My own sadness comes from their sadness, because I feel very differently about this entire thing. I feel as though this is in many ways an opportunity to grow and to probe deeper into discovering myself as a writer (for as long as I continue being such) and, yeah, to enjoy the distraction of video games and new old shows from time to time. We established yesterday that I am selfish, but I am not an unfeeling swine, so I am quite fully sad at all of what is happening around me and feeling a great deal of guilt at the very idea of wanting to be happy and from the moments of happiness I do find be it through story, or game, or show, or what have you.

Overall, the arc of my life is trending towards disappointment, but maybe that is entirely my fault and the quicker I abandon the things I believe matter (but nobody else does) the quicker I will adopt a new life and level of joy.

Some Thoughts:

1. I missed freewrite friday.

I don’t consider myself a selfish person. However, if you look at my life then I appear extremely selfish to those around me. Buying this house next to my partner was, in its way, selfish. My actions in general are selfish. I have done a number of things and continue to fill my life with a number of things that I enjoy and do not in any way correlate to my partners wants and needs, and that is selfish. So what now? Now I suppose I finish my selfish ways. I go about my business and slowly change the direction of my life until that point where it aligns with an opportunity to stop.

In five years I will quit my jobs. All of them. That quitting may come sooner, but I am fearful that it won’t come soon enough. The years will continue to represent a shedding of responsibilities. I will leave behind the majority of these selfish things and explore what may come.

I don’t know what may come. I don’t have expectations and I have discovered that I have fewer and fewer desires in life and that is okay. I want to experience what it is that makes my partner happy and I recognize that how I live is a barrier to that. So, change has to come as soon as it can.

Why wait? Because I am selfish. I don’t want to feel like I didn’t do the things I wanted to do or create the opportunities I wanted to create. In truth I have terrible fears about money and I need a few more years of employment to get to the point where I can survive and live the life I think my partner and I want without needing to have the type of job(s) I do on a daily basis.

One sad truth: I have abandoned any real sense of work goals or even writing goals. I suppose what I want most is to make it to the finish line and present the best version of myself that I can on the way to that end. It is not who I was or who I ever planned to be, but it is who I am and that is the truth.

Some Thoughts:

1. I waited a full minute before I started the blog. I watched the clock turn to 8:37 and then I waited. I allowed the silence to fill me and focused on the idea of what I wanted to say.
2. I needed to say it, if only here.