Soul searching without a map or compass
Life is a series of extremes at the moment. Forgive me if I go off into strange stream-of-consciousness type nonsense that will come across as ...
Anyway. Life's been a series of extremes, as I above mentioned. I'm either incredibly busy, or dead bored. Totally on demand by everyone, or a total loner. On top of the world or confused and sad. On the verge of epiphanic understanding of my life and who I am and what I want to do, bordering on Buddhist-like enlightenment, /or/ not knowing what I want to have for dinner causes a sudden flood of "what am I doing in Taiwan, in my life" thinking. Really, I'm all over the place. Right now I just feel awkward and expectant and uncomfortable all over.
I can attribute these strange mood swings to the following:
1) I'm extremely hormonal. I have hormone problems to begin with, and I went to the Chinese doctor here to try herbal treatment, which has worked very well. But unfortunately, my body's balance is still a bit off, causing me to PMS for nearly a week and then get my period for nearly a week and a half until now. It sucks.
2) Three cups of coffee today, two of them quite strong, plus a lot of chocolate. Way too much sugar and caffeine.
3) The last month has been filled with visa worries and money worries. It's harder these days to make as good money as English teachers used to even two years ago. I'm going to start saving money soon the way I planned before I came, but it's just taking a while for me to find my feet. This lack of feet phenomenon is totally normal to me now, since I'm bad at planning such things. I just assume it will all work out, and it does, but I never take into account this or that thing, I'm not realistic enough. Really, I just never take the time to think about it ahead of time. It all makes me nervous. (**coughanxietydisorder**) Or maybe more people are like that than I realize and I'm just too hard on myself (wouldn't be the first time).
4) Fourthly, I've been thinking a lot about who I am vs who I want to be, and where I want to be go in life. Those kinds of thoughts tend to put you off-balance.
I think this is the right place for me to be right now considering my goals for right now (travel, study foreign languages, make money) but something doesn't feel right. Maybe I should be somewhere else, but I don't know where because I don't really know what I want.
I had a minor revelation recently: You can't do anything, really, if you don't know what you want. It's one of those obvious-yet-not revelations, you know, the ones that are really common sense, but too simple for you to have really thought about and applied to your life? I'm treading water, because I don't know which direction to go in. Above I mentioned my goals, but my goals are all "right now" goals. They're more like ways of passing the time than destinations to reach. Treading water was fine for a long time, because I wasn't so much going nowhere as I was preparing for the journey, sharpening my tools for what might have awaited me.
But now I also see that I've just been afraid of committing to anything in my life because, (surprise) that would mean taking a risk (another one of those "obvious-yet-not revelations," I should write a book on them.) Risks mean being wrong and then having to admit that you were wrong and then backtracking, which would suck.
However, I really want to improve as a person. It's one of my few clear goals in life. I figure that our one real duty in life is just to be the best people we can be. Plus I have one of those guilt complexes because I'm luckier that 95% of the world's population, which has led me to believe that I need to use all my opportunities to become the best person I can be and do as many great things and general good for people as I can in order to prove my worth and worthiness of what I have.
I lost where I was going with this...
Ah yes, weird feelings I'm experiencing now.... So, I've realized that on my little path of self-improvement, the next thing I need to work on is courage. There're a lot of different kinds of courage. I'm not afraid of change, I'm afraid of anything that might hold me down. So I ask myself, what's courage? The answer I decided on is that courage is being afraid, but knowing that there's something more important, or something even worse, than what you're afraid of.
I'm not trying to be deep or pretentious, this is just where my thinking is right now.
So, this is what I need to figure out: What I want and how to achieve it. And then I need the courage to follow through with whatever decisions I come to. The thought of all this is rather overwhelming, like pointing at the horizon above the sea and telling someone to swim to /there/. It's also somewhat exciting. But like being told to swim to the horizon, I have no clear idea of where I'm going, how to get there, or even what the first step might be. It's ironic that what I want is to know what I want. So actually I know what I want, it's to know what I want... oh look I've gone cross-eyed... I have no idea what I'm talking about anymore. That can only mean that it's time for bed.
Life is like playing a violin in public and learning the instrument as one goes on.
Samuel Butler (1835 - 1902)
Anyway. Life's been a series of extremes, as I above mentioned. I'm either incredibly busy, or dead bored. Totally on demand by everyone, or a total loner. On top of the world or confused and sad. On the verge of epiphanic understanding of my life and who I am and what I want to do, bordering on Buddhist-like enlightenment, /or/ not knowing what I want to have for dinner causes a sudden flood of "what am I doing in Taiwan, in my life" thinking. Really, I'm all over the place. Right now I just feel awkward and expectant and uncomfortable all over.
I can attribute these strange mood swings to the following:
1) I'm extremely hormonal. I have hormone problems to begin with, and I went to the Chinese doctor here to try herbal treatment, which has worked very well. But unfortunately, my body's balance is still a bit off, causing me to PMS for nearly a week and then get my period for nearly a week and a half until now. It sucks.
2) Three cups of coffee today, two of them quite strong, plus a lot of chocolate. Way too much sugar and caffeine.
3) The last month has been filled with visa worries and money worries. It's harder these days to make as good money as English teachers used to even two years ago. I'm going to start saving money soon the way I planned before I came, but it's just taking a while for me to find my feet. This lack of feet phenomenon is totally normal to me now, since I'm bad at planning such things. I just assume it will all work out, and it does, but I never take into account this or that thing, I'm not realistic enough. Really, I just never take the time to think about it ahead of time. It all makes me nervous. (**coughanxietydisorder**) Or maybe more people are like that than I realize and I'm just too hard on myself (wouldn't be the first time).
4) Fourthly, I've been thinking a lot about who I am vs who I want to be, and where I want to be go in life. Those kinds of thoughts tend to put you off-balance.
I think this is the right place for me to be right now considering my goals for right now (travel, study foreign languages, make money) but something doesn't feel right. Maybe I should be somewhere else, but I don't know where because I don't really know what I want.
I had a minor revelation recently: You can't do anything, really, if you don't know what you want. It's one of those obvious-yet-not revelations, you know, the ones that are really common sense, but too simple for you to have really thought about and applied to your life? I'm treading water, because I don't know which direction to go in. Above I mentioned my goals, but my goals are all "right now" goals. They're more like ways of passing the time than destinations to reach. Treading water was fine for a long time, because I wasn't so much going nowhere as I was preparing for the journey, sharpening my tools for what might have awaited me.
But now I also see that I've just been afraid of committing to anything in my life because, (surprise) that would mean taking a risk (another one of those "obvious-yet-not revelations," I should write a book on them.) Risks mean being wrong and then having to admit that you were wrong and then backtracking, which would suck.
However, I really want to improve as a person. It's one of my few clear goals in life. I figure that our one real duty in life is just to be the best people we can be. Plus I have one of those guilt complexes because I'm luckier that 95% of the world's population, which has led me to believe that I need to use all my opportunities to become the best person I can be and do as many great things and general good for people as I can in order to prove my worth and worthiness of what I have.
I lost where I was going with this...
Ah yes, weird feelings I'm experiencing now.... So, I've realized that on my little path of self-improvement, the next thing I need to work on is courage. There're a lot of different kinds of courage. I'm not afraid of change, I'm afraid of anything that might hold me down. So I ask myself, what's courage? The answer I decided on is that courage is being afraid, but knowing that there's something more important, or something even worse, than what you're afraid of.
I'm not trying to be deep or pretentious, this is just where my thinking is right now.
So, this is what I need to figure out: What I want and how to achieve it. And then I need the courage to follow through with whatever decisions I come to. The thought of all this is rather overwhelming, like pointing at the horizon above the sea and telling someone to swim to /there/. It's also somewhat exciting. But like being told to swim to the horizon, I have no clear idea of where I'm going, how to get there, or even what the first step might be. It's ironic that what I want is to know what I want. So actually I know what I want, it's to know what I want... oh look I've gone cross-eyed... I have no idea what I'm talking about anymore. That can only mean that it's time for bed.
Life is like playing a violin in public and learning the instrument as one goes on.
Samuel Butler (1835 - 1902)