The sun will shine again

Please. Thankyou.

***

LATELY…

I find that I have become quite anti-social. I shrink around groups of new people, and feel painfully timid and isolated, or sometimes, just plain bored. I have always had this tendency. Contrary to how I appear on the outside, I’ve always been a natural loner. But now I find that this side of me is starting to dominate my personality. I am becoming such a loner.

And I find that I just have zero talent for small talk. I feel like my mind just can’t grab a toe-hold when I’m engaging in idle talk or chit-chat. I also find that most of the time, I have nothing to say about anything. I don’t know why. In conversation (particularly with group conversations), I often feel like a small child on the edge of a playground trying to join a game being played by kids bigger and faster than me.

But I think at least a part of it has to do with my ADHD. That’s not all of it, though. I just find I am unable to relate to most things people talk about.

Lately, I do better with one-on-ones, and even then, I’d rather listen than talk. But I think I actually do have things to say, it’s just that the things I want to talk about are pretty introspective topics and I don’t know anyone who’d have the patience for that, especially since I haven’t quite figured myself out properly.

I’ve been going through something, I don’t quite know what it is. Something that is causing me to stagnate and become numb. I would love to be in some monastery on a mountain top right now spending my days in solitude, which makes me sound even more anti-social now. Super.

***

Okay, some Spring 2011 resolutions:

1) To start basing my self-worth not just on my achievements, but on being a loving person, and nurturing relationships that are important to me. This includes reaching out to people and letting them know that I care, which is something I pretty much neglect every year.

2) To stop being depressed about not being able to move out. The universe will deliver the resources for me to move out when the time is right, when I am ready for it. There is a reason why I am still meant to live with my family. Right now, this is something I cannot change, and so I will accept it and appreciate the situation I’m in.

3) To live within my means. To make smart purchases.

4) To buy a DSLR (if finances allow it).

5) Fly to TX this April or May to visit my Mama K.

6) KEEP IN TOUCH!

7) Two words: ‘listen’ and ‘love’.

***

As detached as I am right now, I really do miss my friends.

My name is Funky, and I’m a fuck-up.

I heard somewhere that when your personal life starts going haywire, then you must be doing something right. Fuck yeah, my personal life is definitely in shambles. So, how come I feel I’m making all the wrong moves? Am I supposed to comfort myself with the cliche that everything will get better without reasonable proof that it really would? Or should I just reconcile, finally, with the truth that I am indeed a fuck-up, and that all this… all this madness and optimistic pathological lies are all somatic garbage I make myself swallow to escape living with the reality of my being. Ultimately, no one escapes from their selves. Not even me. So, where do I start? I know. I’ll start with a big FUCKYOU to the universe. Now I wait. Since everything’s a boomerang anyway.

What is it that I’ll want from you?

Not love: that would be too much to ask. Not forgiveness, which isn’t yours to bestow. Only a listener, perhaps; only someone who will see me. Don’t prettify me though, whatever else you do: I have no wish to be a decorated skull.
But I leave myself in your hands. What choice do I have? By the time you read this last page, that- if anywhere- is the only place I will be.

Amen.

Everything is more complicated than you think. You only see a tenth of what is true. There are a million little strings attached to every choice you make; you can destroy your life every time you choose. But maybe you won’t know for twenty years. And you may never ever trace it to its source. And you only get one chance to play it out. Just try and figure out your own divorce. And they say there is no fate, but there is: it’s what you create. And even though the world goes on for eons and eons, you are only here for a fraction of a fraction of a second. Most of your time is spent being dead or not yet born. But while alive, you wait in vain, wasting years, for a phone call or a letter or a look from someone or something to make it all right. And it never comes or it seems to but it doesn’t really. And so you spend your time in vague regret or vaguer hope that something good will come along. Something to make you feel connected, something to make you feel whole, something to make you feel loved. And the truth is I feel so angry, and the truth is I feel so fucking sad, and the truth is I’ve felt so fucking hurt for so fucking long and for just as long I’ve been pretending I’m OK, just to get along, just for, I don’t know why, maybe because no one wants to hear about my misery, because they have their own. Well, fuck everybody. Amen.

-Synecdoche, New York (2008)

Fuck, I mean, forget you.

I am not a passive person. I may have a long fuse, but once I reach my limit, I don’t hesitate going into confrontation mode. It took a lifetime of being passive-aggressive and offering the other cheek to make me realize that I can’t let things slide at the expense of my feelings and what I think is right. Praise be for the long fuse because it allows me to have that window of time to examine if I’m really in the right.

Once I reach confrontation mode, I then have the choice whether to act upon it or not. When you ruminate over something long enough, you can figure out if it’s worth the fight or if you should just let it go. More often than not, I breathe easy when I decide to just let go because once my head is cleared, I know the drama is never worth it. Though the journey to getting there can be arduous and painful.

I let go if I have absolute faith that things will sort themselves out over time. Maybe people just need a time out. Maybe I need the time out. Eventually when the dust has settled, we can get back into resuming the friendship. Yet this is rare and this is a gift; it can only work when both parties take it upon themselves to right the wrongs while managing with finesse to keep it on the down low.

The reality is that the real world can be a lot like high school. Some people never grow up, some people will forge alliances against people, some people still take great joy in talking about other people’s lives, and some people will show no mercy in acting like a total douche.

I’m not saying I’m perfect. I’ve gone through life wearing all sorts of unflattering labels. But I’m no more psycho, bitchy, or unstable than you, or you, and you, or YOU. So get off your high horse!

The difference is that I have long ceased caring about what people think and I decided to start caring about what I am as a person. The people I listen to, should be people worth listening to. I may let things go, but I don’t take shit lying down.

I left high school years ago, and I have no intention of going back or having its mentality cripple the present and the future. I’m learning to recognize where I’ve gone wrong and the difference now is that I’m all about bettering the self and trimming the fat.

Alright, I do feel better now.

***

Eventually I ran out of tears.

I never thought that day would come. It came to a point that I learned to be scared of emotion, to the point of developing a huge mistrust for it. I learned to fear things I couldn’t understand or take apart. If my reason gets stumped, I give up on what I’m feeling entirely. I sleep it off, take a nice long hit, or make something.

I can’t do emotion anymore. As a good friend told me, she’s tired of the love songs. Lonely. Sad. Depressed. Anxious. Helpless. Great, I’m feeling a certain way, but these days, I automatically follow the feeling with the question of “Well, what do you plan to do about it?” Either you do something or you quit whining. That’s what I tell myself now.

I’m alright. It’s just that today, I don’t know what to do. I don’t know how to do hugs anymore, I struggle listening to drawn out problems that don’t offer solutions. I don’t know how to drop the guards anymore.

I’ve outgrown the theatrics, but I wonder if being in the land of the zero emotion can be just as bad.

Sometimes I feel like a ghost — though I guess I’d rather not feel anything, than to feel everything all at once. I feel like I’m in between moments, in between one consciousness and another.

Urgency

I cannot count the times I have cursed our lack of urgency. If I ever love again, I will not wait to love as best as I can. We thought we were young and that there would be time to love well sometime in the future. This is a terrible way to think. It is no way to live, to wait to love.

-Dave Eggers (What is the What: The Autobiography of Valentino Achak Deng)