What's changed?
and what's stayed the same?
Insomnia. Real shit. It is impossible to get the circus in my head to shut up most nights. I don't have trouble falling asleep, I have trouble staying asleep. Frequently at 330am I wake up and it's anyone's guess if I make it back to sleep.
I'm still schmoking. I'd like to consider myself and my contemporaries some of the last of the old guard, making moves like a criminal just to get the mind right. Out here ducking from one-time and all that good shit. It's not legal everywhere yet, but it is getting there. I wouldn't have imagined my state to be so progressive in changing their laws, but I fucks with it.
I don't drink anymore, really. I haven't had alcohol in going on 2 years. I don't NOT drink...I just don't really drink anymore. It's less like "I'm a recovering alcoholic and I can't touch the stuff." and more like "I feel like shit after I drink and I hate it, so why bother?" I'm also not one of those people that can still hang around people when they are drunk. Drunk people get on my nerves. I'm not judging, that's just not my shit.
I'm private to a fault. Which makes me dabbling in LJ super out of character and I only think it's because it's mostly a dead medium. I could always set these to private, but I think it'd be really funny if someone from back in the day popped in like "holy shit this jackass is still posting to LJ wtf." lol. At some point I realized putting my business out there resulted in people feeling open to discuss my business like it was their own business, and that annoyed me, so I stopped sharing. But I like the idea of trying to maintain this LJ in some capacity until its servers close or I die, whichever comes first.
It's still Hip Hop over everything. I still write rhymes. I still work on music, mostly privately.
There's like all this mostly superficial shit, and then there is my entire headspace.
I can put a name on some of my bullshit now...depression, anxiety, impulse control issues, poor emotional intelligence, etc. I've spent a little over 10 years trying to fix all that shit by now. No meds outside the herbs, just a lot of reading and a lot of retraining my brain and how I interpret my reality.
Only this year experiencing heavy grief over the loss of my grandma and working through the trauma of being next to her for the better part of two months while she died did I finally identify the last little bastion of baggage to finally let go of some of the issues was just beginning to experience towards the start of this LJ in 2003.
It all boiled down to grief. A lot of my friends turned their back on me, I lost my girlfriend, my whole world went into upheaval over the course of a couple months. And I was grieving and didn't know it, got stuck on the anger phase, and it sent me spiraling for years afterward. That may not seem like as big a revelation as it was when I write it here, but it was absolutely huge for me. It blindsided me, I just felt all sorts of empathy for what the young man was going through mostly alone back then, and the burden flew away. Felt lighter. Still feel lighter.
I don't have time for toxic positivity, but at the same time, I'm not really entertaining general negativity anymore. Miss me with that shit.
Despite COVID, despite politricks, despite spending my 20s desperately lost...the biggest change from back then to right now is....all things considered...life is fucking good, jack.
Insomnia. Real shit. It is impossible to get the circus in my head to shut up most nights. I don't have trouble falling asleep, I have trouble staying asleep. Frequently at 330am I wake up and it's anyone's guess if I make it back to sleep.
I'm still schmoking. I'd like to consider myself and my contemporaries some of the last of the old guard, making moves like a criminal just to get the mind right. Out here ducking from one-time and all that good shit. It's not legal everywhere yet, but it is getting there. I wouldn't have imagined my state to be so progressive in changing their laws, but I fucks with it.
I don't drink anymore, really. I haven't had alcohol in going on 2 years. I don't NOT drink...I just don't really drink anymore. It's less like "I'm a recovering alcoholic and I can't touch the stuff." and more like "I feel like shit after I drink and I hate it, so why bother?" I'm also not one of those people that can still hang around people when they are drunk. Drunk people get on my nerves. I'm not judging, that's just not my shit.
I'm private to a fault. Which makes me dabbling in LJ super out of character and I only think it's because it's mostly a dead medium. I could always set these to private, but I think it'd be really funny if someone from back in the day popped in like "holy shit this jackass is still posting to LJ wtf." lol. At some point I realized putting my business out there resulted in people feeling open to discuss my business like it was their own business, and that annoyed me, so I stopped sharing. But I like the idea of trying to maintain this LJ in some capacity until its servers close or I die, whichever comes first.
It's still Hip Hop over everything. I still write rhymes. I still work on music, mostly privately.
There's like all this mostly superficial shit, and then there is my entire headspace.
I can put a name on some of my bullshit now...depression, anxiety, impulse control issues, poor emotional intelligence, etc. I've spent a little over 10 years trying to fix all that shit by now. No meds outside the herbs, just a lot of reading and a lot of retraining my brain and how I interpret my reality.
Only this year experiencing heavy grief over the loss of my grandma and working through the trauma of being next to her for the better part of two months while she died did I finally identify the last little bastion of baggage to finally let go of some of the issues was just beginning to experience towards the start of this LJ in 2003.
It all boiled down to grief. A lot of my friends turned their back on me, I lost my girlfriend, my whole world went into upheaval over the course of a couple months. And I was grieving and didn't know it, got stuck on the anger phase, and it sent me spiraling for years afterward. That may not seem like as big a revelation as it was when I write it here, but it was absolutely huge for me. It blindsided me, I just felt all sorts of empathy for what the young man was going through mostly alone back then, and the burden flew away. Felt lighter. Still feel lighter.
I don't have time for toxic positivity, but at the same time, I'm not really entertaining general negativity anymore. Miss me with that shit.
Despite COVID, despite politricks, despite spending my 20s desperately lost...the biggest change from back then to right now is....all things considered...life is fucking good, jack.