The end is just the beginning
I've been reading through some of my old journal entries and it amazes me how often I come to the same conclusion. I must have had the same revelations 50 times in my life, promptly forgotten them, and then had them again. While this is nice in that I constantly get this sense of discovery, I kind of wish I didn't have to reinvent the wheel.
I suspect this happens because I have no trouble understanding and discovering things on a theoretical level, but when it comes to putting them into practice I am a hopeless case. The circumstances of my life don't reflect these revelations, so I can conveniently forget them and rediscover them, cyclically.
So here I am at nearly 30 years of age (I've been rounding up to 30 for about 2 years now, perhaps because I need to accustom myself to the sound of it, even though 90 percent of the time I am not troubled by the digits of my age... at least, I don't think I am, but lately I've come to mistrust my own assessment of my feelings considerably) wondering if I've learned a damn thing in three decades of life.
In some regards it seems like I've backtracked, because I went through some pretty intense suffering, rejection, ennui, and other unpleasantness and managed to keep truckin', but now I find myself facing much smaller obstacles and being completely bamboozled by them. (And to give myself some credit, I have also been pretty damn witty and articulate in my time, and now I struggle to find words. I am very out of practice with being an introspective blogger, which I thought was a good thing because it's evidence that I'm not so preoccupied with my own thoughts and feelings.) Turns out I'm still preoccupied with my own thoughts and feelings, but now instead of pouring them out onto the internet I have to pay someone to listen to me talk about them. Or, more accurately, my parents have to pay someone... which is just embarrassing. I let them because 1) I have very little choice in the matter, and 2) I think that maybe I haven't ever managed to rely on people and have therefore emotionally crippled myself and by allowing my parents to bail me out now I will somehow undo all of that damaging work I've done to myself. I'm not sure it's working. And there's always the possibility that the reason little obstacles are getting the better of me now whereas train wrecks in the past were insufficient to stop me is that I got derailed a long time ago and have only cobbled together the pieces and deluded myself into thinking that I'd somehow managed to re-assemble the whole train because it kept going, when in fact I was steadily picking up speed on a downhill course atop disintegrating shambles that even misplaced blades of grass threaten to destroy.
That's probably far more melodramatic than it is true, but I like images.
And the fact remains that all my thinking still leaves me in a place of the most remarkable confusion.
I feel a bit like Alice in Wonderland, where strange things keep happening that are neither cumulative nor realistic and are instead like some protracted pipe dream, except I haven't taken any psychotropic drugs that would explain it all or render meaning meaningless. Well there were those mushrooms in Thailand, but that was only once and I didn't hallucinate disembodied cat smiles or anthropomorphic playing cards or frumious bandersnatches or irate rulers obsessed with decapitation.
Still, this blog exists as fodder for what might be a similarly entertaining, if nonsensical, autobiography.
I think "Diary of a Crazy Lady" has already been taken, though. I never was any good with titles.
I suspect this happens because I have no trouble understanding and discovering things on a theoretical level, but when it comes to putting them into practice I am a hopeless case. The circumstances of my life don't reflect these revelations, so I can conveniently forget them and rediscover them, cyclically.
So here I am at nearly 30 years of age (I've been rounding up to 30 for about 2 years now, perhaps because I need to accustom myself to the sound of it, even though 90 percent of the time I am not troubled by the digits of my age... at least, I don't think I am, but lately I've come to mistrust my own assessment of my feelings considerably) wondering if I've learned a damn thing in three decades of life.
In some regards it seems like I've backtracked, because I went through some pretty intense suffering, rejection, ennui, and other unpleasantness and managed to keep truckin', but now I find myself facing much smaller obstacles and being completely bamboozled by them. (And to give myself some credit, I have also been pretty damn witty and articulate in my time, and now I struggle to find words. I am very out of practice with being an introspective blogger, which I thought was a good thing because it's evidence that I'm not so preoccupied with my own thoughts and feelings.) Turns out I'm still preoccupied with my own thoughts and feelings, but now instead of pouring them out onto the internet I have to pay someone to listen to me talk about them. Or, more accurately, my parents have to pay someone... which is just embarrassing. I let them because 1) I have very little choice in the matter, and 2) I think that maybe I haven't ever managed to rely on people and have therefore emotionally crippled myself and by allowing my parents to bail me out now I will somehow undo all of that damaging work I've done to myself. I'm not sure it's working. And there's always the possibility that the reason little obstacles are getting the better of me now whereas train wrecks in the past were insufficient to stop me is that I got derailed a long time ago and have only cobbled together the pieces and deluded myself into thinking that I'd somehow managed to re-assemble the whole train because it kept going, when in fact I was steadily picking up speed on a downhill course atop disintegrating shambles that even misplaced blades of grass threaten to destroy.
That's probably far more melodramatic than it is true, but I like images.
And the fact remains that all my thinking still leaves me in a place of the most remarkable confusion.
I feel a bit like Alice in Wonderland, where strange things keep happening that are neither cumulative nor realistic and are instead like some protracted pipe dream, except I haven't taken any psychotropic drugs that would explain it all or render meaning meaningless. Well there were those mushrooms in Thailand, but that was only once and I didn't hallucinate disembodied cat smiles or anthropomorphic playing cards or frumious bandersnatches or irate rulers obsessed with decapitation.
Still, this blog exists as fodder for what might be a similarly entertaining, if nonsensical, autobiography.
I think "Diary of a Crazy Lady" has already been taken, though. I never was any good with titles.