Because I haven't felt myself moved to have much by way of “new” things to say, I have been enjoying myself in reading old blogs, and particularly the conversations I saved that used to come with them. Luckily, the dates are there, so I know September of my Sophomore year I was saying the exact phrases that have become staples of my being today. I can see the advice on how better to engage with people. I addressed more charges of being called a “dick” instead of “negative.” The reasons for my behavior remain the same, and the “lying masks,” as one friend put it, people wear to protect themselves from reality are as strong as ever.
I still struggle with having an internal mechanism that responds to ideas of “progress.” I still want to see more money. I want to see the land developed. I want to be playing some complicated piece I've been practicing for months. But, as my writing keeps informing me, part of the reason I haven't “made more progress” is that I've been in a really good place for a really long time. The people I've gotten into arguments with or broken off friendships with, I was happy to, and am still happy about it. The things I complained about have often gotten worse with regard to school or how people socialize. You may call it an easy target, but I even spoke to our eventual fight with North Korea after I listed the countries we were currently blowing up in 2008.
It's an indescribable feeling reading these things because I'm not “remembering.” Those words were, are, that exact moment, like as intimately as if a camera were rolling and you didn't know it. I'm still there. I'm still in college. I'm still dating everyone I've ever dated. I'm still happy and hate everything. Or, I'm experiencing my “perpetual meh-ness.” I've craved reality from my social interactions forever.
I'm pressed to say, “it doesn't matter.” For all of the caution I'm offered in how I engage with the world, for all of the hurt feelings, for the warnings about the fallout of people doubling down without enough empathy and understanding, or for every piece of offered advice that wasn't lived or thought through, it didn't matter. They were just wrong. People who want to label and judge you and ride their feelings into justified heaven will do so whether you hold their hand or beat them with a stick. Your relationships will live or die by the mutual commitment to honesty and shared goals. The places you'll get to in life are about the places you allow yourself to inhabit while you're getting there. How do I retain my “attitude?” I've lived the consequences of it. I've reaped rewards. I've learned as hard-and-fast lessons as they come. I've actually thought about it and have the list prepared of things you'll need to refute in order to change my mind and thus my behavior.
It's a dual accountability bred from a level of self-respect and awareness. It's the old person staring blankly at the screaming children, literally. It's becoming the confused Finnish person who's language is literally unable to house sarcasm. If you mean what you say, if you can prove what you say, and if you can live by it, it won't be a surprise when “new” things happen or you hear the same tired ideas from people who let their reasoning stop at the one-liner from the TV show.
I've urged people in the past to channel their inner “dick.” To say the inappropriate things so I don't have to anymore. Maybe a thousand genuinely angry and informed statements about the value of your time and life would change your job's shitty pay policy overnight. Maybe we'd stop bringing extra baggage than life already comes with into our relationships and could manage a conversation without a “fuck you” that comes from a lashing-out place. Maybe you can treat each day as practice instead of something to be overcome or blacked-out of. I have all this “dick” energy with few places to stick it, but I know it will be absolutely vital for the tasks in mind later; the task right now.
“My” thoughts are hardly that. They're often the most obvious baseline “reasonable person” thing anyone should say if they have pain receptors or the idea there's anything else in the world they'd rather be doing or talking about. It's why I don't need to become a comedian, or a doctor. I'm an aggregator and organizer, not so much a specialist. I'd rather know “at-large” if we're genuinely fucked or generally communicating terribly. Having a handle on that provides the ground for everything else to stand on, much as I'm trying to model my personal life on the same ethos in living cheap and sustainably. My job title won't matter if I'm exhausted, hate my coworkers or nature of the job, and am taking home $50 a week because everyone else's hands are in my pocket. Everything else wrong with that scenario will speak louder and cause a greater problem than whatever good I'm pretending to contribute or try to squeeze out in justification.
To speak to the last two lines of the last paragraph more explicitly, you always need the other side of the coin. You're never “just doing good.” You're doing it at the expense of something else, perhaps something better. It's often hard, but not always impossible, to know. What you're doing isn't, as well, “all bad” either. But think about how fluidly we accept the, “This is what I do; stop.” pattern of our morality. We don't think we're stomping across nesting grounds as we rush to save the animal across the way. To twist a famous quote, “Step lightly, and carry a big sign that says Caution.”
While I can see me back then, I wonder who you are. Until you fight with me over how “whiny” I sound, or blow me off when I text you when you're in town, I never learn about how you've changed with a polite 3 page logging of your thoughts about how curly-haired people are actually the devil. People lie to me, steal from me, call me names and gossip before I find myself having to cut them off. I'm doing what to them? Being a “dick” in pointing out how their actions have nothing to do with their words, and the same sad stuck superficial jack-about asshole they were in college has turned them into a fatter bitchier and even more insecure version today. Who knew? It certainly wasn't those who were unwilling to pay attention.
Double points to me given that, you really have no excuse to throw my character under the bus YEARS later as I literally have all of this out there on dates before we ever hung out, or dated, or worked together. It really is you who changed or never was in the first place. I feel bad for the other people in your life that will find out the hard way as well. You may think you've figured something out or get who you are. You're wrong. I'm wrong. You exist in your work, not your struggle. Your identity reflects back, not shies away. Turn up the light. Capture it. Practice it. Maybe let's be friends again and talk more or figure out something to work on together. If you're part of the ever-dwindling 50-something “friends” I have left, in the thousands I've met in life, you shined the brightest. Where'd you go?
