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.

Proximity vs Distance

So my roommate and his girlfriend have been going through some rather interesting phases of late, like they’ve broken up and made up several times. Yesterday was the calling-and-no-answering stage, and before that was the disowning of everything. Now my room is rather small, so I have become an unfortunate participant in these sharings, including being asked over and over again by roommate what roommate’s girlfriend’s texts mean. And they were rather cryptic. So basically it was me agreeing to whatever he said to get him off my case…
They seemed to be outdoing themselves in an attempt to prove that familiarity breeds contempt.
But no, now they’re back together.
So that got me thinking, is it a thing about familiarity, through proximity, that wears people down and makes relationships so weird?
Long distance relationships have the added strain of having to compensate for the physical closeness with other things, like communication. So i have the opposite problem… Miss Girl has been away for a while, and in the meantime I have sucked majorly at my attempts at communication with her.
Proximity makes everything trivial, like too much contact and such. And distance makes a difference. Bring in a relationship with someone you can’t see/be with is hard.
Somewhere along the great slide rule of life, a compromise has to be struck…

Flux

One thing that life assures is the on-off nature of most things, what is regular and standard now can turn and flee the next moment… The constant change, welcome or otherwise.
One of the things I have had as a constant is family. Like every day I wake up and they’re there, all up in my space, taking over stuff, but they’re mine… But now, seeing as I belong to a superficially gregarious family (meaning we just get together for show, otherwise it’s just hi and bye, not even ‘a plane crashed into your hood, hope your ok’), we’re getting together to celebrate our familiarity. And to catch up on things. And to smile and laugh with new additions (there’s two, a cousin and a nephew). And to catch up with long-lost relatives. And to remark at how tall/large/thin/lost/found/arbitrary adjective/educated you have become…
Now I’m all for family and relations and such, but I want to branch off and go on my own. That’s one of the consequences of having a small family, greater individual independence, once one has established that when they go off on their own, they will not starve, they’re good.
While my mother had several siblings to feed and clothe and educate after her mother passed, I have one brother, that’s it. I’ve become an individual, and as such I have formed my own private thoughts, feelings, understandings, opinions, attitudes, language and such. Which means I can survive for a while outside the family.
But she, on the other hand, is social, by choice as well as circumstance. Like she has to consider them when she’s deciding things, meaning she gets frustrated a lot, they’re not exactly a walk in the park to deal with, then there’s the fact that they, as well as her, have lives to live…
The things people do for family.
Does being my own person mean I have to cut off anyone that could stop me from being such? I don’t think so. While no man is an island, I would consider myself a tombolo (thank you, high school geography), an island connected to the mainland by an ever-so-slight sliver of rock and earth. I’m still connected, but come a storm strong enough and I break free…