on the last day of a generally eventful trip round the sun

One of the things my experience with life does is it makes me afraid of the future. Obsessing over what might be, what might happen. Most of the time I end up picking on the negative and magnifying it so that in the end my future looks like doomsday. Instead of being content with whatever I have, I obsess about what I don’t have, what I could have gotten and in the end I feel like a loser. So in the end I have all this fear of the future, like there’s nothing I can do to change it. That is, simply put, fear of novelty, fear of newness, fear of the future. For most people, the future is something to look forward to. Something to be all excited and happy about. At least they have something to look forward to. I’m not one of those people. I shrink at the hint of me tomorrow. I see failure, and in this I’m afraid to do anything that would improve my future. I go, “after all, it’s not like I have something to look forward to”. Obsession is unhealthy. Something that’s completely destructive. Damaging both to the body and the mind. But it happens so often and so regularly that it’s considered normal. With time, it becomes normal, it even becomes the thing that we do. Obsess. Over trivial things. Like clothes, looks, the opinions of others… Things that we otherwise wouldn’t care about given a choice. Like I don’t care what clothes I’m wearing or what the make of my phone is until I see something I perceive as better. That’s when the mind goes into overdrive and questions like why I’m not like that person, why I don’t have what he has and what I should do to become like that person become the focus of your thoughts, your actions. TV The lack of an opposing force makes it worse. It’s a career for some, advertising and induced peer pressure. To be perfectly honest, it involves thoughts of death and destruction of the person that is me, the individual, for the will of the world to be done. I wanted to be like other people. I hated me. I didn’t want to be me. I hated me. I’d imagine the world just moving on over my dead body, like the cog in the wheel, whose presence isn’t as important, because what’s one cog in an engine with six billion gears? I felt inconsequential. And this would get me angry and depressed. Hating the world and blaming it for what I thought it had made me. Turns out that that was one of the many things I had become obsessed with. Making the world “feel” me and who I was. But one thing I realized was that that was what I wanted me to believe. That the world was so bad that the only escape was to build an internal world. A place where I would be safe from other people. I wished I had an alternate that I could become whenever I wanted. Switching when the circumstances changed. In effect I became a me person. With the burden of all this I slowly cracked and obsessed about a future after a complete meltdown. With the world having deserted me, all that was left was for me to desert myself and whatever I decided would be the eventual outcome of my life. But I didn’t. I left the world to its devices and set to fixing myself. Becoming a person. Becoming real. All this time I was just toying with myself, moaning at failures, not realizing that eventually I had to come out of all that nonsense and define who I would be. So I set out to become who I wanted to be. No illusions, no ideas, no voices. Just me. And I set out to make my life something I would be proud of, not regret. I cut out all that thinking and set to getting things to do. That’s why I listen to so much music nowadays. And good music. And reading. I do read a lot now. Gives me things to think about.
I turn 24 tomorrow.
The world is still the same place, I have to grow within it.
It will change for me, not the other way round.
I will prevail.

rain

I dream of rain
I dream of freedom
I close my eyes
Take it all in
The world is my playground
I want nothing, I have it all
I know all, I am all
The luxury of time and space
The glory of the human race
The world is moving at my pace
My fears are gone, without a trace

But there are clouds in the distance
Lurking, menacing, dark
I cannot ignore them any longer
They grow, looming filling the sky
Blotting out the sun
The air grows cold, the winds pick up
I realize how alone I am
The skies pour, the rain falls
But this is not my dream

Soaking wet, I am swallowed whole
Rising mud where there once was solid ground
I cannot run, as much as I try
Sinking to the depths,
To forgotten, buried memories
To lessons not learned, to lost opportunities
To suffocation, to shame, to disappointment

‘But I am bigger than this’, I think
I realize there I let others define me
Drawing shapes, deriving comclusions
Holding me back
But I deserve much more than this
I have earned it
Breaking away, casting off the chains
Claiming my place
I own this, I am in control
So chain by chain is broken
Life at my own terms
Rising through the misery
The pain
The bad
Rising beyond it all
I am free

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Post-holiday Clarity

I had been on holiday for about 5 days somewhere between end of November and beginning of December, and during that time I had loads of time to think. Beach-walking, introspective thinking, that stuff.
So here’s what I have drawn from that.
My life is a massive spiderweb. In it are tangled very many individuals and things that either have an impact on me or that I have an impact on…
And usually what happens is these webs is that the impact of such people is soon forgotten, until, say, major crisis happens and there is a recollection. Or the disappeared person reappears and there is a recollection. Like a primary school buddy suddenly happens to be in the same school as me, and all the recollection about how we were the fiercest of rivals comes up… then I realize I kinda took my foot off the gas after that pressure was eased…
In my life I’ve had various pressures to succeed, some of which persist, others which wear off. With time I get used to the persistent pressures and just tune them out… But then they kick it up a notch and I end up beating myself up for generally sucking at something i should be good at.

I thought I had myself figured out at 19… The world was there for me to take over and completely pwn, but with time I realized there was way more than I could manage by myself. I’d always been the independent rebel-sans-cause type, the world couldgo hang for all I cared, but that came to change as well, having to factor in other people into my life and live with them and for them as it were… Not exactly the idal situatiom, but that’s how we’re programmed, to be social and everything…
So here we are, having barely lived our lives. What’s it to be? For one, I need to learn to stop taking things so seriously. It’s only life. And much as I have come to learn to live from regret to regret, there’s also the happy bits in between…I need to take those and learn from them. I also need to start working out how to move on to level 2. And to make use of what I have. And before that, to appreciate what I have.

Above all, I need to learn how to speak my truth.

I want my brain back please…

It’s getting harder and harder to think for myself… I have come to realize that my ability to think original, coherent thoughts has waned rather fast. Like now I have become too tired and occupied with getting over the intricacies of life, now I just let everything in…
I’m in a position of responsibility. That in itself means I have to do three people’s work. School’s closed. Add another five people. Budgets to do, emails to send out, sanity to keep… The usual.
And I’m interning. I’m supposed to be doing that now, but nobody’s watching… Cats and mice
I’ve been having interesting, intricate dreams… means I’m getting more REM sleep. Good sign. Like one where my uncles, all five of them, and me, were sitting down for a chat. There were other people I can’t remember. Getting life lessons. Ok, that’s where I was like, is my brain trying to tell me something, like perhaps I need a father figure, or worse, all those ‘getting married’ stories I was getting will come true sooner rather than later…