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.

regurgitations #3, or the innocence of youth

This is the last in our series, “regurgitations, the re-blogs from when I was on MySpace.”
Enjoy.

Happy Birthday to me
Current mood: accomplished
Being 20 feels just like being 19, only this time I feel guilty when I’m watching TV instead of going out and finding focus in my life.
Thanks for all the happy birthdays and hope you all are having a great time. I know I am.
And a huge thanks goes to one of my biggest friends ever.
He’s got a massive brain and an absolutely brilliant insight into life in general.
Thanks Nick at www.cannotfindserver.net
And now I’ll make a list of things to do when I’m 20, do them then look back at this moment, say something like “It’s been real”, then proceed to carry on with life.
I like birthdays for one reason. They’re like this really cool chance to retrospect and collect whatever baggage is still pending and move on to the next step.
And at some point there’s baggage sorting, so all the junk and unnecessary stuff is left behind and all the good stuff is grouped together for stock taking.
So they’re like this portal that we all drift towards at some point, like a toll bridge you pay to get across, and as you’re crossing you get an unbelievably clear view of what’s behind and what’s ahead.
Ok, enough said. Time for cake (or in my case, a Mars bar and soda).
Take care of yourselves.
One love, one world.
Eric )

Currently listening:
When You Were Young
By The Killers
Release date: 26 September, 2006