Day: September 6, 2020

Sitting here watching the morning’s ocean I am stuck wondering what I am doing with my life. I exist as a series of contradictions. My partner is a woman born of hard and fast music (punk rock) but exists in a very slowed, focused, and relaxed bubble of life. I am born of slow jams and exist in a bubble of overworked, overexcited, and jargon-driven madness. It is only when I am loaded up on coffee and staring at the horizon that any of it seems to balance out. Perhaps that is the issue–balance.

I watch the people moving to and from the beach in the mornings and I wonder what sort of lives they lead. Do they come and surf before work, put in the hours, and then come back to surf again? Is the beach their center? What is my center? What is my goal? The only sensation I tend to return to is overstimulation. I binge. Be it on TV or audiobooks or videogames, etc. Even sex for me is a rush of energy and excitement sustained for as long as possible followed by perhaps a day of refraction. I go all into everything I do, which feels at odds with the idea of being a jack of all trades, as I have expressed in the past.

In short, I feel this beach experience has allowed me to recognize some things about my life that are problematic and as a result start to sort some of that stuff out. It is very difficult to exist in this mental and physical space which is so fundamentally different than how I, long ago, decided life was to be lived. I do have a great deal of mental restructuring that needs to be done in order to become the person I want to be. However I need to decide to commit to that pursuit of first understanding who that person is and what ultimately will make me happy and how to balance that against the reality of the life I live and choose to lead from this moment on.

What matters is more important right now than deciding what matters most. I believe that is a key starting point in working towards a future that both satisfies and enriches me. If I feel satisfied and enriched I will be a better partner and less of an enraged soul.

Some Thoughts:

1. Last of the football drafts in a little over an hour. I am writing this down right now primarily to remember that it is happening.
2. I also need to write more. Much much more.

There is nothing more frustrating than being told by the person who you think (and thinks) knows you best that you don’t know yourself. At some point you either start to think that you are loosing your mind and are suffering from all facets of mental breakdown, are being utterly manipulated by that person, or that they don’t know you or don’t fully understand you or are not willing to come to grips with the differences between their interpretation and who you are in your thoughts and actions.

The hardest part for me in all of this is the separation between thoughts and actions and guiding those actions by what you think the other person is going to think or feel. After a while you stop feeling like any behaviors are ‘yours’ vs. cultured by the perceived expectations of the outside world. Moreover the less and less time you spend actually examining yourself the less and less you ever get a chance to reflect on what this ‘self’ actually is anymore.

So, in this fashion, I am starting to feel lost and angry and sad and alone and directed and unsafe and insecure and really unable to be myself without having a real sense of who that self is anymore coupled with a feeling that the self I still recognize is unacceptable and behaviors should be reshaped in order to suit the expectations of the people I want to be around.

After a while you get so used to being told you are wrong that you forget you ever had the ability to be right.