Again

It’s funny, I had the urge to come back to this, after nearly five years of absence, only to find I wanted to say almost the exact same things I left off saying five years ago. I’m astounded at how little I’ve managed to change in spite of all my efforts, without even realizing it. My job sucked so I got another one. My apartment was stifling and expensive so I got a house. I read a lot of books. I traveled. But I haven’t fixed a single thing.

I’m not even sure why I’m surprised. No matter what I do I am still myself, and my self has never been someone I particularly liked. There is some sort of fundamental disagreement there that I don’t think will ever get sorted out. It doesn’t eat away at me quite like it used to, I have no desire to kill myself anymore, but relations haven’t really improved much beyond that.

Sometimes it doesn’t matter, because I am doing something fun or distracting and I’m not thinking about myself at all. Other times I’ve been able to bear it by retreating into imaginings of being someone else, either through music, books, or just running off on some wild tangent in my mind. I’ve spent literal years of my life buried deep in my own head, pretending to be somewhere far away from my own head. However, this hasn’t been working as well lately, the knowledge of just how pathetic it is becoming a higher and higher hurdle to jump as time goes on.

I turned thirty this year, which seemed like a huge deal until it happened, at which point I realized that being thirty was exactly the same as being twenty-nine. Thirty-one will likely turn out similarly unless something changes, and I don’t know that it will. For all the accomplishments I’ve racked up over the past five years, I feel the only real result has been the growing awareness of just how little those accomplishments actually matter. I am still this same self that can’t sit still and can’t make friends and can’t figure anything out.

But there’s no harm in trying. Like I said before, I intend to keep living, so I might as well do something with my time. I went to a couple of concerts over the past few weeks, both bands I love and really enjoyed getting to see live. At one of said concerts a guy tried to talk to me, and I was so awkward and unpracticed at social interaction that I actually managed to convince him I wasn’t interested when I definitely was. Then I picked up some sort of virus right afterwards that knocked me on my ass the whole weekend. Definitely the kind of one-step-forwards-two-steps-back situation that makes me wonder why I ever tried to leave the house, but it’s something, and maybe next time I can be slightly less awkward, so that someday years from now I’ll be capable of talking to people I want to talk to. Maybe. Who knows.

My plan is to make myself do more things, both outside and inside my self, if that makes any kind of sense. I need to get out more, interact more, but I need to spend the time I’m on my own differently, as well. Which is why I’m going to try and take up this blog again. I’ve been using my alone time to ignore who I am for a while now, and I’ve finally reached a point where that just doesn’t cut it anymore. I used to write a lot, I got a master’s in poetry for god’s sake, but I dropped it due to what I told myself was fatigue from work and general stress, but was actually just apathy and laziness. Writing involves a lot of self reflection, and it’s hard, so I stopped. I don’t think I should have. I think that was likely the first step to my retreating into that wormhole in my mind where it was so easy to just pretend.

I want to believe that I can find a way to like myself, that I can live a life that isn’t totally insular and detached. So I’m going to try some stuff and see if it works. And I’m going to write about it here.