Sunday, November 24, 2002

I’m a terrible escapist, I always have been. But sometimes I wish I could be more of one. I take pains to keep myself from developing certain addictions because I know I have an addictive personality. Sometimes I wish I’d give up the ghost on that because addiction can be so very lovely at times.

I wish I could be an alcoholic and drown my sorrows in liquor. But I’m not an alcoholic; I feed my troubles sober. I wish I could be a drug addict and tell the world to go hell and dedicate myself to pleasing myself. But I can’t. I’m not a drug addict because I can’t stand ceding that much control to anything. I wish I could love someone so I’d have something worthy to talk about all of the time. But I don’t love anyone because I’m detached and egotistical.

Two very different motivations guide my path in life. The first urge is solitude and the second is solidarity. I want to be with people. I want to love and be loved. But I also want to be individual. I want to be better than other people and have them envy me. Sometimes I want to dedicate my life to serving God and man and all of the noble causes. And other times, I want to hole myself up in a cave somewhere and never talk to anyone ever again.

I always feel torn apart. And contrary to my last post, I haven’t trained all my parts so well that they can operate on their own. I just can’t find the golden mean. So my behaviors are nearly always spastic. Sometimes I’m quiet, conservative and uncommunicative to an extreme. I won’t let anyone know anything about me at all. Not even very trite irrelevant things like my favorite color or food. And then, suddenly, I’m loud, outgoing and I can’t shut up. I tell embarrassing stories about my past, and the pasts of my loved ones, just to get a laugh. You’ll go from knowing nothing about me one minute, to knowing far more about me than you’ve ever wanted to know the next. And then back again, though you know some terrible dark secret from my childhood, I may still refuse to tell you something trite like my middle name.

I’m regretting my assertiveness training. I’ve been trying to be more outgoing and happy and open. It always backfires. Either I say something incredibly stupid, or I put myself in a position in which I’m easily trampled on, or I manage to allow someone who I don’t really want closer to me to become much closer to me. On the other hand, I always regret my passiveness as well. I know it isn’t fair that my will should always be trampled on just to appease the will of others.

I’m a little freaked out about something someone did to me the other day. A way someone was acting toward me to be more precise. It made me extremely uncomfortable and now I’m trying to figure out what was going on and whether or not I contributed to the problem. This friend of mine who acted the way I didn’t like, he/she is a messed up kid. That’s probably why it disturbs me. But I’ve known this person for a really long time and I never really noticed it before, so I don’t want to jump to conclusions. And I don’t really want to think about whether or not I’ve been just ignoring this thing forever because it was uncomfortable and I didn’t want to think about it. And additionally, of course, I might have misjudged the whole thing all along.

In a related story, I’m tired of being judged all the time myself. I don’t think I’ve uttered that phrase since I was fourteen years old. But I’m really just tired of expectations. There’s no excuse for sitting around in judgment on somebody. It’s not cool to inspect someone for flaws all of the time and it isn’t okay to watch them just to see the mistakes they make. I have no need to live up to anyone’s expectations, and very little will to live up to the expectations of anyone who’d behave that way towards me.

I’m bitter and tired again. But maybe less depressed than before. I’m less explicitly sad than simply dissatisfied and lonely. I don’t have anyone to talk to sometimes. It’s rare that I try to. But lately all of my attempts have been shot down in their embryonic stage. I hope I’m a better listener than I am a talker. My talking never works out so well.

This is the most tired I've been in a while. I think I fell asleep for a second at the keyboard. Yeah, I've missed that.