Time keeps passing and things keep changing

I just realized that this weekend marks a fairly major turning point in my life. This was the weekend where I decided I wanted to hop on yet another Greyhound bus to meet up with another internet friend. I had no idea how much my life would change, all I knew was that life in Eugene had begun to be intolerable and I wanted OUT. My tendency to over-romanticize things is not lost on me, however somethings even looking back on them from this point still feel like fate.

Everything about me has changed. Well...the way I view and express myself has changed a lot. In many ways I feel like I've grown up and grown past a lot of the things that were weighing me down last year. I am more able to stand on my own two feet and I know that I can weather the storms in my life with a little help from my friends. I've learned that getting help from my friends is not a bad thing, that sometimes it's what you need in life. My lot in life is so much more stable than it was this time last year. I am so very grateful that I chose to come up here and meet someone who had been very important to me over the course of my self discovery.

And yet I just can't shake this feeling that I am so much less interesting as a Known Entity. That my ideal self is so far short of who I am. I've lost something dear to me and I'm not sure I can get it back. I'm not sure I actually want to as a matter of fact. I don't know why I feel this way. This weird patina of disappointment and disillusionment that colors all of my triumphs. Perhaps it's that I've let a lot of things go, some of my dreams have seemed to die. I've come to realize that always always dreaming and never doing is really depressing. I've also come to realize that my biggest problem is that I don't leap to take opportunities the moment they are presented to me.

I'm tired of it. I'm tired of passively accepting things. I'm tired of falling into depression and avoiding everything because it's too hard. I'm tired of feeling like I put on this fantastic first impression only to be a total let down later. Mostly though I'm tired of never getting anywhere with what I want to do with my life. I'm tired of this pervasive feeling of wrongness every time I let myself really shine. I'm tired of sitting in the background and taking whatever it is that people tell me. I wanna go. I wanna do. I want to be me. I want to feel like I'm actually experiencing life and gaining knowledge that makes me happy.

Fuck feeling like I'm disappointing people. Fuck feeling like my thoughts/opinions/talent are less important than those of others. I am doing better than I ever have in life and it's time to stop moping about the could haves, should haves and would haves in life. Tomorrow is another day and another chance to do what I've set out to do. Also I need to sleep. Good night brain.

Um...update? Wow it's been awhile

So writing a blog almost entirely for yourself means that it falls by the wayside for a few months...also it gets a bit silly talking to myself all the time, but I shall try to update this thing more often.

So in the last um...almost three months I have:
1.) Found a job at a Subway store.
2.) Got fed up with said Subway job and the various shit I had to put up with there (seriously no schedule  SERIOUSLY?!)
3.) Answered a call for emergency stage hand work.
4.) Got to go to a Lights concert!!!!
5.) Moved into a smaller apartment.
6.) Have managed to get enough work to pay not only this months rent, but next months as well. FINALLY.

And yet for all of that I still feel conflicted...things have settled down. For once in almost three years I feel like things are actually going right. I've managed to live here in Portland for six months which I believe is about two months longer than I have ever managed on my own before. And yet...I dunno something is missing. My life is not  yet as complete as I'd like it to be. I'm so far away from where I need and want to be. I'm still barely making rent so paying back debts is a bit out of the question.

I still haven't really found (nor have I honestly been looking) a church to call my own. I dunno every time I think about it I just freeze. Maybe it's just that I"m scared that whatever church I'm going to find is going to reinforce the damaging messages I've spent the better part of this year trying to get away from. Perhaps I'm still struggling with whether or not I actually want to continue to call myself a Christian at all. So much of what I hear from/about other Christians these days is such awful, hurtful, harmful things that I just can't help but turn my head away in disgust.

And then there's the guilt. I feel like my success is coming at the expense of a friend I care very much about. I don't like this feeling, and I can't shake the idea that if I weren't around he'd have a better chance at getting jobs. The one thing I'm still absolutely paralyzed about is being a burden, or somehow detrimental to people's lives. I know that I've shown up/taken the jobs because I really need the money and that I'd be screwed right now if I hadn't gotten extremely lucky, but I still just can't help the feeling that I'm somehow fucking up someone else's life. Like maybe I always do this to people. I drain them dry and leave them by the wayside once I move on with my life.

I hate this feeling. I wish I was a different person. One who didn't care about this stuff. One who could look on their choices and be proud that I'm making good ones and that I can at least support myself a little bit. Instead I'm the type of person who looks at someone else struggling and becomes plagued with guilt at the fact that I'm contributing to those struggles. AHHHH BRAIN. KNOCK IT OFF. YOU ARE RESPONSIBLE FOR YOU. NO ONE ELSE. YOU ARE NOT THE CAUSE OF SOMEONE ELSE'S MISERY. STOP BEING SO HARD ON YOURSELF FOR FUCKS SAKE.

... I don't think that capslocking to myself is going to work this time. *sigh* Oh well.

Life I don't understand you

OK so in the space of a week I got a great promising job, and then was let down when said job was nothing but empty promises and lies. I just...I don't understand. I'm a good person I try my hardest and yet somehow this keeps happening to me. I don't understand why. I do everything I should check in, apply, look nice, don't have a criminal background and yet no one seems to want to hire me. At least no one who would actually pay me a living wage that is.

I just don't understand. Why the hell am I here? Well I guess I'm  here for "finding myself" and getting away from toxic things back in Eugene, but still it'd be nice if every month I didn't have panic attacks about rent. It'd be nice if some place ANY place would hire me. I just what am I supposed to do? Where am I supposed to go? I've hit a wall. I don't know what I'm going to do with myself now. Blah later.

Leviathan

Going with the whole "my mind is an ocean" theory for a bit. I don't usually think about the things that populate said ocean. Oh I think about the people who just randomly show up in the middle of things, but while they have their place those people don't naturally belong there. Things like the Leviathan are the reason why I get freaked when I realize they exist.

Normally I like to ignore the creatures in my ocean, but they're there. And there's no way to deal with them but to drag them kicking and screaming to the surface and stare them in the eye. For too long this fucker has swam near the bottom of my ocean whispering about me. Telling me that if people could see him that no one would want me. No one would ever truly like me if they knew what a monster I had inside.

What a manipulative, abusive, temperamental, fickle, judgmental bitch I was. It's the part of me that drives me to self-destruct. How could I ever be happy if I was so dark and ugly inside. How could I ever want to take the spotlight from someone else? That's a shitty thing to do. Why can't you just be happy for someone else? Let other people shiny they deserve it more than you do. How could you feel envious of someone else getting to do what you wanted to do? Why can't you just be happy with what you have?

Even more insidious though are the things it says to me to keep me stuck. What's the point? It's all gonna turn out the same anyway. Whenever someone gets to close they run away screaming. You're too much. You're not enough. You can never be the person you want to be. People take one look into your soul and see me. They know the truth and you cannot hide me for long.

You know what Leviathan? I have named you. I have power over you. You are a part of me. And I will not be ashamed of who I am. Everyone has a darkside. Things they'd rather keep hidden. Everyone seeks the spotlight and feels envy when others have what you want. I am normal. I have a temper. Everyone has their bad days. The things they regret. It does me no good to keep you locked away at the bottom of my ocean where the only one who can see you is me.

People don't run screaming from you. No one I have ever shown you to has ever run away. They back off for awhile, but guess what? They're still in my life. The best parts of who I am, the caring compassionate, talented, wise parts of me FAR out strip your pathetic ass. You are a weakling who hides in shadows because you cannot face the glaring light of others. And you Will. Not. Hold. Me. Back.

Fuck you. I'm done with you. You are so very very small on the inside and I'm going to enjoy eating you for dinner.

"Finding Myself"

I've always hated that phrase. Finding yourself. Like who you are is something that you could lose or get rid of somehow. Then again I always kind of felt like I knew who I was. Sure I may have slipped between the cracks of life unnoticed by a great many people, but I have always felt like me. I know who I am, what I'm supposed to do with my life so whatever. But lately I've felt...adrift. All the things I thought I was have turned out to be rather shallow, or projections from other people.

The thought has occurred to me over the last year or so that I don't exactly know who "me" is. Who am I when no one is around? Do I really believe/think the things I've always claimed to? Or was that just a disguise so that everyone else would be fine with me. How much of who I am is a construct created out of necessity? Am I really the honest person I like to think I am? How often to I lie to myself, how often to I lie to others by proxy.

One of the things I've learned over the last month of living alone is that I crave control. I need a life that I can control a life that is entirely my own. Having a large community is nice, but I sort of lose me in the shuffle. To the point where when the life I had built for myself had come crashing down in Eugene I didn't really know who me was. I went nearly  catatonic and yeah most of the problems I have in life are entirely self inflicted. I don't deal with things the way I should. I need to fix this habit of mine. I am so tired of being absolutely disgusted with myself. With the way I waste my life. Almost doing great things isn't good enough. I need to get off my ass and actually do what I claimed I set out to do here in Portland. Find a job and study the thing that I want to. The only thing stopping me form moving forward is me. That's a very frightening and very empowering thought.

Here's to hoping that I follow through on this.

One Year

So...I meant to post this closer to my birthday (and by that I mean I just thought of writing this blog post like right now so grain of salt I guess?). My life has changed drastically over the last year. I am not the same person I was July 28th 2010 that I am sitting here in 2011. For example the "here" where I sit has changed quite a bit. I am now living in different city in my very own very tiny place. I owe much of the changes my life has seen to my friends and family back in Eugene without them none of this would be even remotely possible. As I sit and look back on my life I realize how much of who I am has been shaped by the circumstances of my past, both the pleasant and the really REALLY not so pleasant parts.

But there is another thing that has shaped my life dramatically in a much shorter time, and it's the one I want to talk about now. The internet. Yeah I've technically been an internet denizen since like 2005 or something, but it took me awhile to really connect to the world beyond the people I see face to face. Like I had various blogging things like Myspace and Facebook and LiveJournal, but by and large they were used to contact people within my own small community. I'd only really add and talk to people who knew me IRL. While that gave me the illusion of safety it also hemmed me in quite a bit.

And then I became unemployed in like 2009 and suddenly I had loads of time to poke around the big, dark, scary place known as The Internet. What I found in its depths whilst lurking as silently as I could was that The Internet was FILLED with people who were just like me. Some of them were shy and socially awkward, some of them were boisterous and probably have no trouble connecting with people IRL. All of them were just regular people. Sure there were the trolls and the creepy weirdos out there, but it seemed that they were no more prevalent online than they were in real life.

Which brings me to the thing that happened approximately a year ago. Around April of last year I got into my very first video game. Dragon Age. It was an awesome game made even more awesome by finding an entire community of people with common interests to talk about said game and the choices one makes therein. Now this wasn't my first brush with fandom I'd been fairly visable in the TGWTG fandom for awhile, but it was my first brush with being almost entirely comfortable being online and a part of a fandom. I started doing things like posting my fanfic (which sadly will probably never get finished) and branching out and talking to friends of my fandom friends.

Through shenanigans and joking I wound up taking a bus trip from Oregon to Texas to see Wicked on my birthday. That trip was quite frankly a disaster. Not the being in Texas part, but the getting there and back part. There were bus fires and delays and little food and sleep. The Greyhound tried to kill me twice...but through it all I learned a few things about myself. I learned that I am in fact a better judge of character than I thought I was. Both in the fact that I could trust my busmates and that I could trust the random internet stranger I had been planning to go see. I also learned that while life may throw me curve balls and things may or may not work out like I was expecting them to I can survive it. I have the ability to adjust and move forward no matter how difficult/damn near impossible the circumstances may be.

It also made one thing very clear. I couldn't live in Eugene for very much longer. I will always love the things that Eugene taught me about myself and the wonderful people I met there. They will forever have a place in my heart and Eugene will always be a place that I consider home. However it was high time that I look into getting the hell out of there.

Both of those experiences helped me find my place here in Portland. Without that trip to Texas and the epiphany I had about my life I would never have traveled to Portland to meet up with yet another random internet stranger. Said internet stranger has become one of my best friends and has been kind enough in introduce me to yet more really strange and awesome people. All of that had made moving very very far away from people that I've loved and shared my life with for a very very long time hurt just a little bit less.

So I guess this is a blog post to say thank you internet. Thank you for being the wonderful, humorous, dark, quirky, broken place that you are. Without you my life would be a vastly different and somewhat more depressing place to be. (Not that the internet is going to read this, but whatever it's the thought that counts right?)

Been awhile...

Ah it's been months since I decided to write in this thing. I actually almost forgot I had it. Oops. Oh well. A lot has been going on in my life. Certain sections of which I don't feel comfortable talking about on here. Others have passed and while their lessons remain the specific events are no longer of any consequence. Currently I find myself on the verge of moving to Portland finally.

There is of course a lot of chaos in this time. Literally nothing is going how I thought it would in the beginning of this year. That seems to be the way of my life though, a never ending stream of tumultuous events that I seem to survive. I am learning a lot about myself this year though. More than I thought possible. This current set back will not keep me down for long, and although everything about this move seems to be constantly shifting and changing and literally nothing is going how I wanted it to in the slightest I am growing from this. I feel called to be in Portland at least for a time. To start anew in a new place. I do feel like I have roots in Eugene. Deep parts of who I am have been shaped by my life here. I will never ever forget this city and its contributions to who I am.

I'm still in the midst of a spiritual existential crisis of sorts. I still don't seem to have resonance within my own faith. I cannot begin to describe how that makes me feel.  This faith has been part of who I am for so long, and now I feel like nothing more than an outsider. My faith has not been shaken. I still believe in God in the Christian sense. I still love the concept of Foursquare. But I've lost that connection to the people around me. They all seem content to listen to the songs and the pastor and go about their daily lives. I've become more inclined to listen and pick apart everything I hear. I cannot get into the aspect of worship that I had most cherished. The sermons don't speak to me and make me cry anymore. Now I just sit and skeptically pick apart everything that happens. It's a very unsettling and cold place to be.

I know that sounds like a lot of emotional gut reaction thinking. That maybe I shouldn't base everything on what I'm feeling. But that's never made any sense to me. The constant drumbeat in Christianity that you aren't supposed to base your faith on what you feel. I'm me I cannot fathom a life that isn't based on what I feel. Nearly everything about my life is rooted in my emotions. They are the core of who I am. I need to find a way to get back to feel, but I fear that finding the place that resonates with me will take me away from Christianity as it stands. I will never consider myself as anything other than Christian. I believe this to be true, but I dont' think that what I am becoming fits into the mold of traditional Christianity. It's an unsettling place to stand, but I think I'm going to be OK with it. Once all the dust and chaos of my life settles and I can gain a clearer picture (you know before more chaos gets kicked up) I think I'll like who I'm becoming. Now all I have to do is tame a tempest.