Half-awake
Apr. 5th, 2011 07:07 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
xyzzysqrlI used to use Livejournal a lot more to write down my inner thoughts and less as a public showing-off place, and I'm going back to that now, because I just want to write some things down. So this is really for me more than anyone else, but I'm writing them here because I write things here. I'm going to cut it though, because... something. It's more private if you have to click TWO things. I dunno.
I think I'm certainly in a kind of after-the-magic era in a lot of ways lately.
I'm still very in love with the woof, but it's not that magic swirling "anything is right" love anymore, it's a solid comfortable "well, we're in this for good" love. The Internet has stopped being a wonderful magical place where anything can happen and started being the place with all the ads and a handful of sites I check daily. I don't go looking for new web sites to read anymore. Why would I do that? There are too many. I don't feel like I have an imagination anymore, I just think of things and stick ideas I've had in the past together. Anyone could do that. I don't have big dreams in the "Life Goals" sense anymore. I tried all the ones I could think of that I wanted. They weren't the right thing or I couldn't fulfill them, so I dumped them.
So I'm missing a real spark from my life, but things are okay. We have a place to live and money and each other, I just sat awake all night playing video games and eating Oreos. I'm nearly thirty, and I don't feel nearly thirty. I feel like I grew up until I was fifteen and then I just... extruded onward. Like if I blink wrong I'll suddenly snap backward and it'll be 1997 again. Oh god that thought scares the hell out of me. I never want to go back there.
I wonder sometimes what happened to the people I cared about back then, though. Chris joined the army to be a medic. I got staticky celphone calls from him for a while, but I never could make much sense of them and then he just vanished. Collin got a job inspecting machine parts. He's okay, somehow, this I'm sure of. Danny and Tim got into weed and wandered out of my social circle. I never minded but I was terrified of my parents and couldn't hang around them.
Then there's people I knew online. I could go back to where I met them in some cases and look for them again, but in some cases that's impossible and in other cases going back is too much like going BACK. Going -back-, you know? And in a lot of cases they wouldn't be there. Some of them have died. That hits me way too hard. It always has. My father once said "So someone you knew as eight letters on a screen died. It's not real." That used to be his thing, the Internet isn't a real place! I started to wonder if he still feels like that, then I decided I don't give a shit.
That's another thing. My father's ... really not doing well. Every time my mother calls she tells me about how he's been in the hospital again. He doesn't do much anymore but lay in bed apparently. I should feel bad about that. I don't know if I can. If I concentrate real hard I can make myself feel guilty for not caring, but I can't make myself care. There's reasons for that. It's really really hard to make me pissed off enough to hold a grudge, but I still hold one against him. If he dies I will feel worse about not feeling bad than I will because of his death. There's that guilt, actually.
In general I just feel like I've lost so much, and a lot of it is my fault. I never developed a work ethic. I was too busy rebelling against my teachers in school. I always demanded that they earn my respect before I allow them to teach me. Only a few of them did, and from those I learned every thing they could teach me. From the rest, teachers who just went "Well OBVIOUSLY you should respect me because I AM AN OFFICIALLY DESIGNATED AUTHORITY FIGURE", well, I didn't learn a thing and boy did it get me a lot. So much for values. Values meant I didn't learn crap. I feel ignorant and ill-prepared for adult life. Like I'm not even particularly a complete person.
I feel like I should've just let the system beat me down and break me like it did everyone else. I'd have no principles but I'd know how to meet a deadline. I'd never have read my textbooks cover to cover or fought for anything I believed in (if there was a student rebellion of any kind, I was there for it) but I'd be able to work a proper honest-to-god job and get paid for it. I'd never have stolen the microphone from a godawful motivational singer and stood on-stage in horribly mismatched clothing singing "Lean On Me", but I might have had a shot in college. Ah, it's way too late for any of that.
That's all a lie. I tell myself I should have just kept my head down and let myself be broken, but no. Fuck that. 16 year old me would set me straight. He had no foresight, but he had the right idea. If someone isn't willing to stop and figure out how another person works, to engage them on their own terms, they're just treating you like a tool. They're only authority figures if you -give- them authority and you have to have a good reason to do that. Fuck 'em otherwise.
(29 year old me points out that 16 year old me wants to be special and unique and precious. 16 year old me points out that -everybody- is in some way special and unique and precious, and anyone who says otherwise is a cynical asshole who's trying to make you feel bad about yourself. So, uh, fuck 29 year old me too I guess. I do feel bad about myself sometimes. You know sometimes I feel like I should push people away as hard as I can, be a worse person, stop caring about my friends, just so I can be alone more? I don't know how to feel about that. Fuck you, part of the brain that's responsible for me feeling like that. I may like being a recluse but I'm not gonna be a jerk about it.)
I think I'm done. I feel better anyway. I still don't have antidepressants (or glasses or a fix for sleep apnea or etc) but I think I'm doing okay. In a way it seems like I'm wanting some kind of big change, but I don't WANT a big change. Fuck change. I am genuinely okay with being a quiet shut-in, talking to himself via keyboard at seven in the morning after an all-nighter.
I just... I'm melancholy. I used to want so much. I used to see such awesome things. There's still a lot of awesome, but a lot of what WAS awesome is now mundane, and a lot of what I get excited about anymore is consumer goods and entertainment. Is that bad? I don't even know anymore.
At least a lot of things in my life make me happy for a while. I can hold on to that.
Okay, yeah, I need to sleep. Man, this post is gonna look embarrassing as hell when I wake up.
I think I'm certainly in a kind of after-the-magic era in a lot of ways lately.
I'm still very in love with the woof, but it's not that magic swirling "anything is right" love anymore, it's a solid comfortable "well, we're in this for good" love. The Internet has stopped being a wonderful magical place where anything can happen and started being the place with all the ads and a handful of sites I check daily. I don't go looking for new web sites to read anymore. Why would I do that? There are too many. I don't feel like I have an imagination anymore, I just think of things and stick ideas I've had in the past together. Anyone could do that. I don't have big dreams in the "Life Goals" sense anymore. I tried all the ones I could think of that I wanted. They weren't the right thing or I couldn't fulfill them, so I dumped them.
So I'm missing a real spark from my life, but things are okay. We have a place to live and money and each other, I just sat awake all night playing video games and eating Oreos. I'm nearly thirty, and I don't feel nearly thirty. I feel like I grew up until I was fifteen and then I just... extruded onward. Like if I blink wrong I'll suddenly snap backward and it'll be 1997 again. Oh god that thought scares the hell out of me. I never want to go back there.
I wonder sometimes what happened to the people I cared about back then, though. Chris joined the army to be a medic. I got staticky celphone calls from him for a while, but I never could make much sense of them and then he just vanished. Collin got a job inspecting machine parts. He's okay, somehow, this I'm sure of. Danny and Tim got into weed and wandered out of my social circle. I never minded but I was terrified of my parents and couldn't hang around them.
Then there's people I knew online. I could go back to where I met them in some cases and look for them again, but in some cases that's impossible and in other cases going back is too much like going BACK. Going -back-, you know? And in a lot of cases they wouldn't be there. Some of them have died. That hits me way too hard. It always has. My father once said "So someone you knew as eight letters on a screen died. It's not real." That used to be his thing, the Internet isn't a real place! I started to wonder if he still feels like that, then I decided I don't give a shit.
That's another thing. My father's ... really not doing well. Every time my mother calls she tells me about how he's been in the hospital again. He doesn't do much anymore but lay in bed apparently. I should feel bad about that. I don't know if I can. If I concentrate real hard I can make myself feel guilty for not caring, but I can't make myself care. There's reasons for that. It's really really hard to make me pissed off enough to hold a grudge, but I still hold one against him. If he dies I will feel worse about not feeling bad than I will because of his death. There's that guilt, actually.
In general I just feel like I've lost so much, and a lot of it is my fault. I never developed a work ethic. I was too busy rebelling against my teachers in school. I always demanded that they earn my respect before I allow them to teach me. Only a few of them did, and from those I learned every thing they could teach me. From the rest, teachers who just went "Well OBVIOUSLY you should respect me because I AM AN OFFICIALLY DESIGNATED AUTHORITY FIGURE", well, I didn't learn a thing and boy did it get me a lot. So much for values. Values meant I didn't learn crap. I feel ignorant and ill-prepared for adult life. Like I'm not even particularly a complete person.
I feel like I should've just let the system beat me down and break me like it did everyone else. I'd have no principles but I'd know how to meet a deadline. I'd never have read my textbooks cover to cover or fought for anything I believed in (if there was a student rebellion of any kind, I was there for it) but I'd be able to work a proper honest-to-god job and get paid for it. I'd never have stolen the microphone from a godawful motivational singer and stood on-stage in horribly mismatched clothing singing "Lean On Me", but I might have had a shot in college. Ah, it's way too late for any of that.
That's all a lie. I tell myself I should have just kept my head down and let myself be broken, but no. Fuck that. 16 year old me would set me straight. He had no foresight, but he had the right idea. If someone isn't willing to stop and figure out how another person works, to engage them on their own terms, they're just treating you like a tool. They're only authority figures if you -give- them authority and you have to have a good reason to do that. Fuck 'em otherwise.
(29 year old me points out that 16 year old me wants to be special and unique and precious. 16 year old me points out that -everybody- is in some way special and unique and precious, and anyone who says otherwise is a cynical asshole who's trying to make you feel bad about yourself. So, uh, fuck 29 year old me too I guess. I do feel bad about myself sometimes. You know sometimes I feel like I should push people away as hard as I can, be a worse person, stop caring about my friends, just so I can be alone more? I don't know how to feel about that. Fuck you, part of the brain that's responsible for me feeling like that. I may like being a recluse but I'm not gonna be a jerk about it.)
I think I'm done. I feel better anyway. I still don't have antidepressants (or glasses or a fix for sleep apnea or etc) but I think I'm doing okay. In a way it seems like I'm wanting some kind of big change, but I don't WANT a big change. Fuck change. I am genuinely okay with being a quiet shut-in, talking to himself via keyboard at seven in the morning after an all-nighter.
I just... I'm melancholy. I used to want so much. I used to see such awesome things. There's still a lot of awesome, but a lot of what WAS awesome is now mundane, and a lot of what I get excited about anymore is consumer goods and entertainment. Is that bad? I don't even know anymore.
At least a lot of things in my life make me happy for a while. I can hold on to that.
Okay, yeah, I need to sleep. Man, this post is gonna look embarrassing as hell when I wake up.
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
no subject
Date: 2011-04-05 11:47 am (UTC)and a lot of what I get excited about anymore is consumer goods and entertainment. Is that bad?
Speaking as someone who has devoted countless hours, dollars, and units of stress (whatever those are) to producing and trying to sell entertainment, even though no matter how successful I am I'll never make as much as I already make at my boring 9-to-5 job, I'm very, very, very glad there are other people who get excited about consumer good and entertainment.
no subject
Date: 2011-04-05 08:31 pm (UTC)So keep trying to sell it, sooner or later I'll buy!
no subject
Date: 2011-04-06 01:53 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-04-05 08:57 pm (UTC)*hugs* Hang in there, sqrl.
no subject
Date: 2011-04-05 09:55 pm (UTC)Kind of obvious, but inspiring anyway. Just gotta keep at it, right?
I am, indeed, hanging in there. Last night was ... moody.
no subject
Date: 2011-04-06 03:25 am (UTC)I know it exists, because they always do.
They, however, do not know to any degree of certainty, that I exist.
I did not keep in touch. I did not call. I did not write. I did not leave feelers out there, or a forwarding address. I do not use my real name or face online in passages to be found by ghosts of people who didn't actually know me in the past just to have them lie to my face about how good it is to see me again after all of these years.
Who I was back then was crushed by the "truth" of reality and broken into a small room with nurses checking on me and a single window that had restraining posts so that I could open it up to breathe, but couldn't open it up far enough to crawl out.
Broken, because I did not fit into the molds that were set out for me; because I did not fall in line with how those "truths" told me things had to be.
... but I grew up anyway, despite those "truths", which turned out to be truths for someone else, but not me, and it took me well over a decade to figure that out.
No one else can actually tell you what you are going to be... it hasn't ever stopped them from trying, but it has also never made them actually right.
I know you have regrets about how your life hasn't turned out how others thought it ought to... and I say I know, only because I know I have those doubts every day of my life, and I've developed the assumption that those thoughts are universal and its simply a matter of not everyone is capable of admitting it to themselves... but I believe it to be true.
And, of that "truth"... I believe it to be false.
You are who you have become. Your lessons learned are not always the ones you were taught, but the ones that meant something to you. Your causes and dreams, however grand or simple, are what drives you and they are, as 16-year-old-you would say, what makes you unique, precious, and special.
The only regrets involved are the ones other people told you that you should have, because you didn't live up to their "truths".
When they get to have to live your life, then they'll have their chance to turn it into what they think it ought to be. Until then... be who you have become, and be what makes you happy.
no subject
Date: 2011-04-06 04:23 pm (UTC)Wanna talk about it sometime? *nother hug*
no subject
Date: 2011-04-06 08:07 pm (UTC)I'm not sure what's left to say, although it would be nice to talk to you sometime. If nothing else, we can appreciate each other and reaffirm that it's probably best that The Man did not Keep Us Down.
no subject
Date: 2011-04-07 05:36 am (UTC)I also feel weird about being older now too. In my head I'm permanently 18 and the numbers beginning with 3 just don't compute at all.
Comfort is pretty keen.
Date: 2011-04-07 05:30 pm (UTC)Being thirty'ish is one of those neat times to try different stuff, even though you don't want to. You figure, if you do it for a long while... then you can say 'thirty years of doing X!' or something to that effect. You don't get that same sorta freedom when you're 40'ish (where I am) ... Keeping on keeping on is good, and there will be tons of life sherpas to give direction when you're ready to peek out.