I’m just so … ignorant. I don’t know much of anything. There is just so much of everything that I just have never learned. I have/had so much potential, but I’ve rarely applied myself, and in recent years have slipped even further. I hardly read books. Time slides over me and I hardly know it came and went. How did I get to be 23 years old so fast? How did I become so far removed from any form of regular education? It baffles me how long it has been since I have taken a complete course of any kind at any school. It doesn’t feel like long ago, but … someone with a lot more motivation could have earned an entire undergraduate degree in the time since I was disqualified from ASU. When I got out of HS at 16, I had a little advantage, but now I’m at a disadvantage. Most of the people my age who are ever going to hold a degree already do, or are working diligently on it. Somewhere along the line I think I just … lost track of where I was supposed to be going in life. Or maybe I just never had it clear in my mind.
I’m doing allright, I suppose. I make enough money to pay my bills and keep up on my existing debt (though I probably can’t afford to take on new debt, and at the rate I’m going will remain in debt for a couple/few years at the least). I feed and clothe myself. I even have extra money to entertain myself; I spend hundreds of dollars a month on music and movies and I’m building a library of DVDs I hardly find the time to watch most of. I’m not in dire straits, by any means. Still, there is something missing.
I … I’ve been working on trying to figure out what I want to do with my time and with my life for as long as people have been asking me (since childhood) to write down my “goals” … and I’m doing better. Still, I am finding that I have some deeply rooted, self-esteem issues that have been playing against me very subtly for a long time. I want to paint and write and make movies and write songs, sure, and I am aware that there are people doing these things and making a living, but … I don’t think I’ve ever even bothered to think that I could be one of them. I have always looked at the things that I like to do as things to do in the spare time between earning a living and sleep. The way I’ve been going, if I ever did end up successfull, I would probably still try to work a regular job (a la Andy Kaufman bussing tables), believeing that the success couldn’t be more than fleeting.
Mixed up in my weird belief that I could never be financially successful doing creative works is my weirder desire to be able to spend my time working on creative works without having to worry about financial interests at all. Like, I don’t want possible future value of my work (or anyone’s work) to change the way the work is created, or even to spur the work into existence. I like the idea of Art for the sake of Art, and I don’t like the idea of subverting a creative skill to enable financial success (that is: I like the idea of writing, but I want to write what I want to write, not what a magazine or book publisher thinks their demographic wants to read just because I need the paycheck.) So I end up having to address even my most ambitious creative endeavours as though they were simply hobbies: I budget for them almost as entertainment expenses, and then I usually don’t even think about trying to turn them into something more.
These things are things I am trying to change. I want to be able to get enough paintings that I consider good to be confident before I even begin to try to find a gallery that will show my work, but at least I’ve begun to think about being shown. I’ve been saying for the last decade that I would write songs/be part of a “band”, but before the last few weeks have never taken any action on it or formed specific plans for making such a thing come about; now I have begun to put together the digital tools I will need to create music despite my inability to play a physical instrument, and have set a date by which I will have at least one song completed. Then in May I’m going to write a novel (I’ll write more on this later, because I’m encouraging all of you to join me in writing a novel in a month, a la NaNoWriMo), and after that work on a screenplay and before the end of the year I’d like to be filming my first short films. My plan from there is to reach a point where I am confident enough in my ability to produce quality films that I actively begin approaching film festivals, and with luck from there, find ways to get actual budgets to make films.
Okay, well, I just accidentally spent a couple hours doing other things (ie:work) and have totally lost my train of thought/emotion. I guess I was feeling down because of all the stuff I don’t know, but reminding myself of all the ways I am doing some of the things I want with my life. Still, when I list off all these great and fulfilling things I’m doing, I tend to leave off the list whatever I wanted to do but am not. Like inventing or researching theoretical physics (I’ve wanted to come up with a unified field theory before they even called it a unified field theory) or finally getting to all that literature I’ve been putting off reading…
At a couple of points in the above text I paused to write on a different train of thought that ties in with what I was writing at that moment. You can read that by hitting the following link:
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So, I was reading along on one of the sites that I like to try to keep up with. Mostly a blog, but also about new online technologies. Except that most of it I don’t understand, because it refers to other online technologies I don’t know much/anything about, such as XML/RSS respectively. So I went to look those things up, and I just felt overwhelmingly behind the curve. Like, everything I could find about how to do RSS was related to a suggested change to it that was made back in 1999, and what I really needed to learn was about why you’re use it, or how other people were using it, and … I can’t find that, either. Though I do now know how to convert existing RSS files to a standard that was never adopted.
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There’s a problem with these little, dark moods I get into sometimes. Like this morning right before I started writing everything here I was feeling like there was nothing I could do in this world to keep up, let alone succeed. I felt as though I were a totaly failure, and that I had no real prospects for turning my life around any time soon. I found myself floundering to understand technical concepts that the writers of the documentation I could find seemed to assume was common knowledge, and knowing that this had happenned before; I wanted to just give up on the whole technical thing altogether because I felt like there was no way I could keep up with it. I wrote this on a post-it right before opening this window: “…I want to just stop and fall off the edge of the world right now.”
My immediate reactions to finding myself in a funk like this are the problem, though. One of them is okay; it wants to figure out what I’m doing wrong, why I feel like my life is a failure, and get myself on the right track so that eventually I won’t have to feel this way again. Then as I begin to examine why I feel the bad, I automatically begin to point out to myself all the ways my life is not bad, and in fact is increasingly in line with what I believe I want to do with it. Instead of being able to take the time and figure out what I can do so that I don’t feel like my life has derailed next week (or month, or whatever), I too, too quickly resolve my own emotional lows and erase them from my emotional and mental memory. This is good, because it helps prevent me from experiencing the long-term debilitating effects of depression, but it is bad at the same time because it makes it seem to me as though there is nothing I need to do to escape depression (even though nothing has been done to address the root causes). Unless perhaps all the work I’ve been doing to accomplish my goals and act out creatively are exactly what I wanted all along, and when I satisfactorily find myself accomplishing what I se out to, I won’t even notice I’m not depressed anymore, I’ll be so content.
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I went shopping yesterday afternoon. I needed some new pants and shorts. I wear through the crotch of pants and shorts far too quickly, due to friction from my bike seat as I ride back and forth to work every day. So I went down to the “local” Eddie Bauer and picked out some styles and colors I liked and did some trying-on to be sure everything fit. When I lifted my sirt to try on a new bright red button-down and saw my own body in the mirror, I was literally disgusted by what I saw. There is a whole ring of fat and skin around my middle that appears to be so fluid that it is sagging down, threatening to pool over my waistline. I put the shirt on quickly and found that it was not unflattering, and that I really appreciated the color. When I was trying on pants I found that I ought to buy pants with a 36″ waist to fit my current size, that I could fit reasonably well in 35″, and tightly in 34″. I refused to buy more clothes to fit an overweight body. I am going to lose that weight and keep it off. I went with the 35″ pants and shorts, because I don’t want to bust the pants or destroy my internal organs in the next couple months before I lose enough weight to make a difference in my waistline, and because every time I have trouble closing my pants it reminds me not to eat to much at the next meal. Being fat doesn’t make me happy when I end up seeing my own fat body.
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