I think I'm perpetually in the wrong. I don't mean in the matter-of-fact way of just being a small-minded human who doesn't know anything. It's more that my perspective seems to lend itself to whatever is exactly wrong about any given moment, and then I find myself drowning either from my own blindness or, of course, small-mindedness.
I've complained about it for a while, but I never know what to make of it. I'm not over the top "woe is me" about my capacity or number of friends, but I do feel as though were I to stop insisting on being so "active" in sharing things I've read or writing bitchy blogs, it would take a rather long time for any of them to reach out to me for a drink or for lunch or to check in if I was okay.
I don't know how to feel about that. One, I haven't run the experiment, though I'm writing this here and not on facebook because I think it's about to commence. Two, I don't know what I, or why I, bother to expect anything from them anymore. It's like, for the purposes of remaining sane, I need to "calm down" and "remain normal" and just do stupid shit, share stupid pictures, and make every conversation about ingratiating ourselves towards some time passing activity. Hear that? I might finally be able to see the cum-your-pants beauty of the mountains after all.
Of course ironically, when I feel I should just shut up and be watching, I can't seem to clean out my head. I've written every day for like the last five, and I don't think any second of it has sounded particularly happy or suggestive that I'm living under anything but outright hellish conditions. I don't have a mind that lets things go easily. So when I get an idea and can't see it come to fruition, it eats at me. When I make a statement about who I am or wish to be, and can't see it manifest soon enough, I feel like a total fraud.
In reality, I'm significantly more concerned with "life in general" than I am myself though. The only reason I feel so dramatic is because I genuinely believe and expect people to be doing better than they are. I expect them to communicate. I expect them to follow through and be honest and real. It can't be "naive" or "stupid" or "pointless" to expect these things of people, despite, and perhaps especially because of these trying times. But I just get silence. I get likes. It takes a friend flying in from across the country to get 4 people in the same room together having drinks or watching a movie. I didn't see a ton of side eye and angry comments directed my way. It's not something stupid like, "Well, they just hate me!"
It easy enough for me to conjure a dozen reasons "no one would want to hang out with me." I rarely express an interest in the things they like. I just don't care about Rocket League or whatever the newest Halo-adjacent game is. I'm sorry, but I stopped caring about those things when I got a car. My opinion hasn't improved nor is my head stimulated. I can't rejoice in the office politics of the job you all share. I can't empathize with the drama of wasting my time around people I hate for less money than I'm worth. I've moved on from that level of connectedness. I want more to come from my money and effort than stress and cliches. I don't ever want the motivated edge to ever really be taken off. I want to remain guilting myself every day that I didn't inch forward. That's no fun when all you care to do is get-by and have a meager escape on the weekends.
But I watch myself too. I recall when we went to Colorado. I had one of my friends reflexively say I thought everything we did sucked or said something negative about the trip. I hadn't, and I specifically and deliberately hadn't because it's not a secret that I'm not spending most of my time wandering up mountains or getting eaten by bugs in the woods. No one needed to hear that, and I had a significantly good time just being around friends, which is usually my only point of seeing them. But just the fact that she reflexively thought and said that was telling. She retracted when I called it out, but still. There's a, not necessarily helpful cloud around me even when I'm doing nothing to contribute to it.
My concern for myself is the feeling of being trapped. I don't always want to feel stuck. And it really is stuck. I can do the math that says I can create a quasi-livable place in my field in a month or two where I'm likely still shitting in a bucket and waking up every hour to the sound of dueling banjos in my dreams. But every day I don't get pinged on to work, is another I'm literally waiting around to get pinged on to work. I can "research" things I'll have to look up again anyway. I can read soul-crushing world news. But it's mostly wheel spinning.
People say that when they have overwhelming anxiety or depression, it's like they aren't even them. They lose a certain kind of control. I have that same sense about me without all of the chemical fuckery. I haven't felt like me in a long ass time. I've felt like a bunker version of me. I've stockpiled a pragmatic philosophy and enough solipsistic proclamations to sustain me indefinitely, but what does that have to do with "me?" How is that living? It's not enough for me to get by or simply achieve. I excel. I crush it. I do it the fastest. I try insanely hard to never simply talk about it, but be about it.
I remember a final test in one of my psychology/history classes. I'd spent most of it like I usually do, dicking around on my computer and taking a handful of bad notes. I'd managed to spend the entire class doing this and gotten by well enough. The final comes along and I decide to actually study. I line up all the names we had to know and the things they accomplished. I played little memory games and made associations. It took maybe around an hour. The next day in class we sit down to take the test and I burn through it. I burned through it fast enough that I thought I had done something wrong. This was a 400 level class my senior year of something within my major, there were plenty of smart, engaged kids who were still working and not nearing the end. After looking around and doing a quick once over, I turned it in and felt like I did in elementary school.
The point of that story is only to highlight that school doesn't set the conditions for you to excel and that test wasn't particularly hard; I did get an A. It's that the feeling of being first, of finding the "cheat" to better remember something or do the work or put exactly the amount of time required without wasting has been a staple of my being since childhood. On paper, I'll look like that cliche "smart kid" "who just gets things easily or faster than others." No, I've played a game of wrote memorization my entire life. It's not enough to quantify whether someone has the capacity to be a wise or productive individual.
But moments like that make me look like an outlier. They make me feel different. No one else treated the class as callously. When I was in class, no one else even picked up their fucking heads and looked around the goddamn room. That being a phenomenon that still scares the shit out of me. You're in a room with 40 to 200 people, and over the course of an hour, sitting in the corner looking back at them all, not a single one will catch your eye? How does that not make you feel fucking weird or "outside" of something? I know there are hardly proper definitions of "normal," but I've ran that particular experiment in dozens of classrooms and haven't found the other person looking back.
Part of me feels like a giant portion of my life is a total accident. I found drug studies by accident and managed to accumulate more wealth than, at least what the statistics state, most people on the planet let alone my cohort despite all of the useless soulless jobs everyone barely survives. I found a job that let's me take indefinite amounts of time off and pays more than any delivery job should. I have the framework for my own completely owned livable space that costs me next to nothing that will allow me the freedom to explore my interests. Part of it feels like an accident, but a larger part feels like it's from my intense relationship to "reality."
It was real for me that I wasn't going to get that "normal" job and be able to save and create on the weekends. It's real for me that I don't want to watch my dad suffer like my grandma in my living room one day with mounting idiots and resentment piling on around me. It's real for me the utility of people who listen to what I say and mutually invest in ideas. I have concrete dollar amounts. I have concrete time frames. I have practical failings. I'm not a dreamer. I try in spite of myself every single day. I choke down the "wasted" time and "self-indulgence" of media. I poorly practice instruments and pray my car won't die. It's real for me the rot that sets in when you give up on being extraordinary. It's real how much faster I can still operate while the rest of the world doesn't want to even lift their head up.
And it hurts. And it's insanely lonely. Even the ones who believe in me and would cheer me on aren't "there." They aren't next to me. They aren't budgeting to help. They aren't weed whacking. I'm the "hands off creative A-type personality" that's either too intense or too guilt-inducing. Again, even if I go out of my way to avoid any suggestion of being as such. I don't know where I exist in the social space because I always have to either be inserting myself into one or find myself lamenting no one cares to invite me into the seemingly most obvious ones. I do have friends that come out and invite me to things, of course. Never let those kinds of sentiments ring too loud. I think it's that we both know I want more than a beer though.
A big part of it is that I don't feel I contribute. I want to provide and no one wants what I'm offering. Moreover, I start appealing to "the masses" and they take what I have and find every way possible to denigrate it or me or reconfigure it to something not worth their time. That part gets so fucking ridiculous. I know it's a small portion of people who ever choose to open their mouths, but why does it always have to be the angriest and the dumbest? If you're not willing to translate what you're saying into "reddit speak" or "humble braggart" no one seems to understand direct explicit speech. Or, they don't want to understand it because that would betray the times. That might obligate them to take responsibility for the wrong "interpretations." The world is such a clusterfuck of ill-defined words and teeter-tottering between truthful self-respect and entertainment, how many people exist like me who just give a shit about accuracy and accountability? 2 politicians?
I don't want to be so pent up. I don't want the headache. I don't want to resent my circumstances when every other minute of my day is reading about someone else's who are dramatically, so dramatically worse. Again, it's not "me." It's not "my life" that is the problem. It's my audience, or lack thereof. I'm a comic whose constantly bombing, not because the jokes aren't funny, but because the audience is high on the fumes of social decay. They're in their smartphones looking for another distraction, not an opportunity to be bothered about all it is they aren't doing to fix it. And given that's all I seem to be able to offer myself, and you can rate my capacity to keep hanging on by reading the last 5 blogs or so, what sheer hell would that cause a "normal" person?
Part of the reason I persist is that I think I'm magic. I think consciousness is the most intriguing thing. I think the capacity for language and the ability to create are inexhaustible and undefinable until you capture then, somehow, in words, in dance, in music, and in the interaction only you can have with the people you surround yourself with. So every "arbitrary" day waiting around is me watching the magic die. Every moment I have the motivation to run into my next project or fixing an obvious issue, but can't, I feel helpless and crippled. Every fucking moment. This is the drama of my mind. All of this bullshit about "be in the now." I AM! I'm too in the now. Right now I want to be making the garage livable. Right now I want to be drunk with a dozen friends. Right now I want to be in a music lesson on one of my dozen instruments. Right now, every day right now, and instead I have to sit for 11 hours and take rich people their over-priced food, averaging $50 a day that in 2 months will set me up well enough to still have to shit in a bucket, provided my car doesn't explode, I don't get sick, or some other bullshit life thing kicks in.
It's never been about "can" for me. It's always when. When is it my turn to shine as bright as I can? When do I get to set pinnacle examples of what's in my head? When do I get to work efficiently and methodically until I'm lost in the task having exhausted any further thought or tweak to it? When can I stop writing because I'm doing such a damn good job doing? When can my statements stop being these tepid hopes and dreams and again return to actionable consequences. "Would you, maybe, kinda, like to come out to a fire sometime?" Fuck that, I've got this dope ass fire everyone should be at, fuck you if you can't make it. That's how the party house was. That was the pride I took in creating the coffee shop. That's the rush I'm using to cope with picking ticks out of my hair and the foreign landscape that is a field in cousin-fuck Indiana where I'll be able to build any number of things and experiment indefinitely.
Why am I the only one that finds that exciting?
