I think I'm worn out.
Emotionally I feel a little drained. Physically, I feel tired all the time. Creatively, I feel constipated. I managed to get by the work week with a constant source of caffeine streaming through my body. But even diet coke (gasp) is losing its battle with my creative apathy and general fatigue.
I'm twenty nine years old. You know what I hate most about facebook? You get to see where people that you once knew are. And for me, a twenty nine year old that doesn't have a clue to really where he's going with his life, seeing people arriving at destinations and going directions; I hate to admit it, but it stirs up feelings of envy and jealousy. Like the thought that that could be me beatifically smiling in these pictures with girlfriends, fiancés, and wives in exotic locales and destinations.
Instead, I find myself single and lonely, and lacking inspiration to finish anything I start. I'm stuck in the same place, running circles in my mind. I've just gotten fatter.
This scares me. I feel myself growing bitter and resentful for my status, but in the end, I have no one else in the world to blame for where and who I am but myself. Thus begins the long and often bumpy downward spiral into self loathing and self destructive behavior, one that I have somehow managed to side step thus far (then again, taking oneself not so seriously is a talent in itself). But I feel myself slipping. I feel myself lashing out. I feel angry and resentful to the people I love the most. I feel emptiest around the people that know me best.
Is it bad that I feel more comfortable around strangers sometime rather than people that I've known for more than half my life? I don't know what this says about me. I sometimes feel as if my childhood friends are more friends of my brother and that know me by association rather than the shared experiences of growing up together.
I don't know why I feel this way. I wonder if I always have. Whatever the case, I realize that I need to let go of this bitterness that I'm seemingly clinging to before it really does rip me asunder, emotionally, physically, spiritually and creatively.
As a self loathing adolescent, I used to hold on to these emotions. I was always felt intense, passionate feelings and emotions. I learn to cope with the intensity of what I felt by internalizing them, burying what I felt, how strongly I felt, letting myself float into a void. This, of course, manifested itself into deep cycles of depression soon after. It's so funny how these things work – we create these defense mechanisms to protect ourselves from pain and hurt, but these defense mechanisms that we create turn out to be greater monsters than we originally set out to protect ourselves from. My depression turned to be a greater detriment to any pain or hurt that I would feel. It was suffocating. The loneliness I felt. I remember writing a poem as a teenager (yes, I was THAT guy that wrote poetry) describing the way I felt as standing knee deep in a stream of water, but still dying of thirst. Happiness was all around me. I had great friends. Functional parents that, although were not well equipped to handle me, still loved me none the less. Yet I let myself fall into this void and not recognized these things. Or feel these things. I would find things to hate about myself, hate about my situation, and cling to them, intensify them, let my subconscious coalesce with them, all in order to numb myself from feeling.
God. It sounds so stupid now. The stupidest thing is sometimes, I still find myself repeating this behavior. Finding things to numb myself with emotionally. Whenever something goes well in my life, I find fault in it as for it not to threaten this imperfect void I have around me. I guess some habits are hard to break.
But now the things that I hold onto are beginning to embitter me. Rather, they have embittered me. I think each of us is born with a darkness inside of us. It's some nasty side of our personalities that we don't let other people see and for good reason. You hide it under smiling masks and chivalry and polite manners and joking tones, but it's still there, lurking to rear its ugly face. I only bring this up is as I'm slipping deeper into my void, I feel like that part of me, my own darkness, is manifesting more and more in my personality. Needless to say, I don't like it being there.
So the trick is to just let go. Life is too short, right? Now, just to figure out how to do all this without the aid of alcohol.
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