I think I've come to notice that most friends/ people in general, will listen to you complain about your problems to a certain extent. But not only that they will listen to certain problems for longer or shorter based on their level of interest. For example, they will listen to someone talk about relationship problems because that's seen as "juicy gossip" or "drama." The same reason many people tune into reality T.V. shows every week. The reason for this is because, IT'S INTERESTING. It's something you can tell someone else later. You can talk a lot more about someone having trouble with their boyfriend or the fact they're in a fight with their best friend than you can about their insecurities.
Often if I try to talk to anybody about being depressed or being insecure they will tell me I'm being "emo" or that it isn't a big deal or to just kinda get over it and that I'm being ridiculous. But in my opinion, these are the problems which effect us more. They could even be the underlying cause of the more interesting problems. No one wants to hear about my self worth issues but they are exactly the reason why I have been in almost non-stop relationships since high school. And since I don't really get to talk about it with anyone, I never get to the root of the problem and the cycle continues. But what can I expect, my friends aren't therapists and I wouldn't want them to be. So that's why I have this blog, so I can talk over my problems with myself, in a public space.
Hmm...If I wrote about my drama with other people would my blog get more views?
Thursday, November 17, 2011
Tuesday, November 15, 2011
The Future
The other day after I finished taking a piss I glanced into the toilet and noticed that it was filled with blood. Naturally being concerned about my urine being a dark red color from the amount of blood I went to the clinic. The doctor there told me that I passed a very small kidney stone, which was surprising because it didn't hurt at all. He went on to tell me that the cause for the kidney stone was probably genetics, which makes sense because my dad gets kidney stones from time to time.
So it made me think that I can look forward to moments of intense pain through out the rest of my life probably. Which made me reflect on a fear (more like a concern) I have of living in extreme agony. I'm not afraid of death because at least in death pain ends, but living in pain is something I would prefer to avoid. I wondered if a life in agony (not necessarily my situation, but a more extreme situation) was really worth living. Especially if it had to do with a genetic disorder. Because if you look at life from an evolutionary standpoint, the reason we exist is to mate and pass on our genetics to our children and other future generations and if I had serious, genetic health problems I feel as though I wouldn't want to pass on that suffering to my children. Like on top of the kidney stones the other great genes I have to pass on to my potential children include: high cholesterol/ blood pressure, acid reflux, depression (if that truly is genetic, I'm not entirely convinced of that, but regardless), baldness, asthma. These don't seem like much, but together these have given me a lot of grief and distress. I feel like I don't want to have kids because I don't want to subject them to all the things I suffer from. I essentially want to eugenics myself, if that makes any sense.
That's a pretty sad thought. Then I just felt like that had no reason for living if I was to take my genetics off the market and based on the other issues I've mentioned in my previous posts with my issues with closeness with other people. But I've never wanted to have kids so this shouldn't be as troubling a thought as it has become. Maybe I want to have kids. It would give meaning to my life, taking care of another living thing. But giving that child my health problems just so I can give myslef meaning is more than a little selfish. Because not only will they have avoidable suffering but their existance is completely based on my own insecurities with myself which means that those insecurities will spill over to them which will cause them further suffering which will continue the cycle. Maybe I should just adopt, try to give a child who doesn't have love in their life some stability and a person who cares about them, to make the best of a bad situation to benefit both of us. Or I could just get a cat.
So it made me think that I can look forward to moments of intense pain through out the rest of my life probably. Which made me reflect on a fear (more like a concern) I have of living in extreme agony. I'm not afraid of death because at least in death pain ends, but living in pain is something I would prefer to avoid. I wondered if a life in agony (not necessarily my situation, but a more extreme situation) was really worth living. Especially if it had to do with a genetic disorder. Because if you look at life from an evolutionary standpoint, the reason we exist is to mate and pass on our genetics to our children and other future generations and if I had serious, genetic health problems I feel as though I wouldn't want to pass on that suffering to my children. Like on top of the kidney stones the other great genes I have to pass on to my potential children include: high cholesterol/ blood pressure, acid reflux, depression (if that truly is genetic, I'm not entirely convinced of that, but regardless), baldness, asthma. These don't seem like much, but together these have given me a lot of grief and distress. I feel like I don't want to have kids because I don't want to subject them to all the things I suffer from. I essentially want to eugenics myself, if that makes any sense.
That's a pretty sad thought. Then I just felt like that had no reason for living if I was to take my genetics off the market and based on the other issues I've mentioned in my previous posts with my issues with closeness with other people. But I've never wanted to have kids so this shouldn't be as troubling a thought as it has become. Maybe I want to have kids. It would give meaning to my life, taking care of another living thing. But giving that child my health problems just so I can give myslef meaning is more than a little selfish. Because not only will they have avoidable suffering but their existance is completely based on my own insecurities with myself which means that those insecurities will spill over to them which will cause them further suffering which will continue the cycle. Maybe I should just adopt, try to give a child who doesn't have love in their life some stability and a person who cares about them, to make the best of a bad situation to benefit both of us. Or I could just get a cat.
Sunday, November 6, 2011
Ease of wanting that which you can't have.
I recently watched the film Brief Interviews with Hideous Men based on the David Foster Wallace book of the same name. In the movie, there are two waitor/ busboy charactors who discuss what women want from a man. This discussion made me ponder the same theme. I initially considered their argumaent that what women want was at odds with itself (to not need men but also want a passionate man) but then I decided that women could not be put into a catagory and say they all want this or that. But if you were to take a large cross section of women I thought that a good number of them would want exactly what I would want from a woman. That is someone who I get along with, treats me with respect, aknowledges my need for individuality and is caring, blah blah blah...
The point I'm to get to here is that in thinking about the fact that women would want the same thing from a man as I would from a woman made me question what I really wanted. And I realized I don't really know what I want. Making everything I've said thus far in this post a load of bullshit (well, I'm pretty full of shit so that isn't so surprising). I often think I know what I want but it often happens to be (what) at odds with itself. Since I often go through bouts of depression I want a girl who can comfort me and talk me off the ledge, so to speak. But this means I just want/need a therapist. I also want a girl who is independent but I'm incredibly insecure which makes me pretty needy. This also conflicts with my desire for personal space, and my relatively recent desire to not be in a relationship.
I also want a girl who is like me. Which has it's own good and aspects to it. She'll be fun (in my opinion of coarse), and she'll find the world to be fucked up and somewhat meaningless (that sounds like a bad thing but not to me, it's hard to explain). But she'll also come with all the stuff I mentioned above. So, we'll have two depressive, insecure, nihilistic people who want to make a deep emotional connection with one another but are too afraid to commit. I'm setting myself up for failure is what it's starting to sound like.
Another thing that doesn't help my search for a girl who I could potentially "spend my life with" is that I often fall for girls who I know it would be a terrible idea to try and be in a relationship with. My prime example right now is my roommate. She is beautiful. So I don't blame myself for being attracted to her but she and I don't really have much in common and there are aspects about her, were I to be in a relationship with her, I would find unbearable. Needless to say she isn't exactly my type and I'm not hers either. I tell myself this, far more often than I should have to. As I mentioned in my pervious post, I'm currently in an abondance of girls who are interested in me and I would think that this could be enough to distract me from my roommate (she has even encouraged me to and offered to help me hookup with some of these girls) but I still find myself trying to flirt with or just admiring her. I'm pathetic and a little creepy, I know. Another fine example of this is that I often fall for girls who are geographically very far away from me. And based on my previous experience with long distance relationships, that is not a road I want to go down again. I'm currently in a not relationship with a girl I went to college with who still lives back in NJ. She just got out of a relationship and has expressed to me that she doesn't want to get into another relationship and I told her how I felt. But that hasn't stopped us from chating via through Facebook and text message several times a week. And I'm actively trying to not get too close to her by trying to spend time with other girls.
The conclussion I've come to with all this is that the reason I covet what I can't have is because it's the safe thing for me to do. By falling for girls I know I shouldn't or don't want to be with I avoid the chance of getting hurt by a girl whom I think I could actually make a relationship work with. I'm just taking the easy way out. Which I hate doing but it's all I'm comfortable doing at this point in my life because I know, or I feel as though, I won't be in DC forever and if were I to try and take a relationship on the road would create a number of problems that I also don't want to deal with.
The point I'm to get to here is that in thinking about the fact that women would want the same thing from a man as I would from a woman made me question what I really wanted. And I realized I don't really know what I want. Making everything I've said thus far in this post a load of bullshit (well, I'm pretty full of shit so that isn't so surprising). I often think I know what I want but it often happens to be (what) at odds with itself. Since I often go through bouts of depression I want a girl who can comfort me and talk me off the ledge, so to speak. But this means I just want/need a therapist. I also want a girl who is independent but I'm incredibly insecure which makes me pretty needy. This also conflicts with my desire for personal space, and my relatively recent desire to not be in a relationship.
I also want a girl who is like me. Which has it's own good and aspects to it. She'll be fun (in my opinion of coarse), and she'll find the world to be fucked up and somewhat meaningless (that sounds like a bad thing but not to me, it's hard to explain). But she'll also come with all the stuff I mentioned above. So, we'll have two depressive, insecure, nihilistic people who want to make a deep emotional connection with one another but are too afraid to commit. I'm setting myself up for failure is what it's starting to sound like.
Another thing that doesn't help my search for a girl who I could potentially "spend my life with" is that I often fall for girls who I know it would be a terrible idea to try and be in a relationship with. My prime example right now is my roommate. She is beautiful. So I don't blame myself for being attracted to her but she and I don't really have much in common and there are aspects about her, were I to be in a relationship with her, I would find unbearable. Needless to say she isn't exactly my type and I'm not hers either. I tell myself this, far more often than I should have to. As I mentioned in my pervious post, I'm currently in an abondance of girls who are interested in me and I would think that this could be enough to distract me from my roommate (she has even encouraged me to and offered to help me hookup with some of these girls) but I still find myself trying to flirt with or just admiring her. I'm pathetic and a little creepy, I know. Another fine example of this is that I often fall for girls who are geographically very far away from me. And based on my previous experience with long distance relationships, that is not a road I want to go down again. I'm currently in a not relationship with a girl I went to college with who still lives back in NJ. She just got out of a relationship and has expressed to me that she doesn't want to get into another relationship and I told her how I felt. But that hasn't stopped us from chating via through Facebook and text message several times a week. And I'm actively trying to not get too close to her by trying to spend time with other girls.
The conclussion I've come to with all this is that the reason I covet what I can't have is because it's the safe thing for me to do. By falling for girls I know I shouldn't or don't want to be with I avoid the chance of getting hurt by a girl whom I think I could actually make a relationship work with. I'm just taking the easy way out. Which I hate doing but it's all I'm comfortable doing at this point in my life because I know, or I feel as though, I won't be in DC forever and if were I to try and take a relationship on the road would create a number of problems that I also don't want to deal with.
Thursday, November 3, 2011
As things come together, they always fall apart
So, to try and explain how I've come to my most recent internal conflict I should explain that I have never been the kind of guy who could get any girl he wanted. That's not to say I have trouble with women (eg talking to them or dating or otherwise). I'm just not what you'd call a ladies man. Because I'm awkward (I'm pretty OK with that and this is a little irrelevant to the story). Anyway, I've recently become, for lack of a better term, "Hot Shit." By that I mean that there are a number of girls who have been showing quite a bit of interest in me lately. This really isn't the problem, it's actually doing wonders for my self esteem, but actually the reason behind why I've been trying to entertain all these ladies simultaneously. The reason behind this coincidentally happens to be the same reason, I think, why I move around so much. I believe it is because since I was young I've faced a lot of feelings of abandonment and heartbreak after a break up or in the case of friends, they decide they don't want to be around me any more.
I have until recently been somewhat of a serial monogamist, where shortly after one relationship ended, I would find another girl to fill the loneliness void. And this put me in a cycle of depression and happiness (break up followed by the excitement of a new relationship and so on). This time last year was the middle of my last pseudo- relationship, which lasted for about three months. The three months we spent together were amazing, I often thought she was the girl version of me. But the prevailing problem that ultimately caused the relationship to fail was that she, like I currently, does not want to be in a relationship (thus the use of "pseudo-realtionship"). When we finally got to the point to where we realized that we wanted different things and the other wasn't going to change we called it quits. I then spent the next 4 months being depressed and nihilistic and generally no fun to hang out with. When I came to recognize the pattern I was in, I decided to take some time off from relationships so I could try and find a way to make myself happy. Which I found in the lifestyle of being nomadic which I had already begun not much earlier.
The thing that originally troubled me when I started to live nomadically I couldn't figure out if was running to something or from it. I know now that I'm running from it.
The problem with this is that it is extremely hard to keep in contact with all my old friends whom I also find happiness. But I recently came to the conclusion that they may be the thing that I'm running away from. After I graduated high school all of my friends stopped trying to hangout with me mostly because of the fact that I don't drink and they were all starting to get more into it. I spent the rest of that summer and the next year extremely depressed because I had felt abandoned by the people who I considered friends. This past summer when I was driving back to New Jersey from spending a year out on the west coast I stopped in Wisconsin to visit one of my best friends from college. When I saw him I was extremely excited because I hadn't seen him since I had dropped him off back at his parents' home in LA on our roadtrip after we graduated college, a year earlier. He on the other hand was very calm and stand off-ish, which is pretty normal for him, but I'd still would've liked a little more of a reaction (I mean he and I did live together for four years). I felt pretty let down and neglected (that's as close as I can get to explaining how I felt). Part of the reason I was so excited to see him was I had just spent the year in a National Service program and I had been through some really trying times (amongst them being the before mentioned pseudo-relationship) and it was just nice to see a familiar face. So then I moved on. I returned to my home state where I saw some more old college friends and my family. And they would ask me about about my year on the west coast. As I would try my best to explain all great and terrible things that had happened I could see on their faces that they had either stopped listening or would have prefered to heard an "It was great." Those who did actually want to hear about it couldn't relate to what I was going through but it would be naive to expect them to understand. This left me feeling extremely isolated (which from talking to my friends I had made over the previous year seemed to be the general concensous). So, I did what I always do, I moved again. This time to Washington D.C. But before I even moved there I was of the opinion, and still am, that I will not be spending more then a year in DC before I move again, considering my job that I have there only lasts that long.
I thus put a time limit on any relationships a might develope during that time (friends or otherwise). And this is where I recently came to the conclusion that I am running away from my friends. I believe that because I am affraid of being hurt by the friends I am going to make/made that I will leave them first, end the friendship on my own terms. So that I do not get hurt by them leaving me or by letting me down. This way I'm keeping them at a distance. I'm doing this same thing with the girls I'm "dating," where I keep them all at a distance and hang out with them all around the same time to force myself from getting to close with any one of them. I'm afaird of getting hurt, so I maintain a somewhat shallow relationship with everyone to prevent getting hurt by them.
This is where my internal crisis lies. I really enjoy spending time with my friends and having meaningful relationships but I also enjoy moving to new places and getting to know those places well and meeting new people and making new friends.
Do I continue my nomadic life or do I settle down and try to maintain long term relationships with people?
Each of these has it's draw backs:
I could either live a life where I can't form lasting relationships
or
one where I won't feel like I'm living my life to it's full potential by getting a lot of experiences and getting to see so many different places
Can I do both?
Which one will make me happier?
Which one do I feel will give my life better meaning?
How am I to decide?
I have until recently been somewhat of a serial monogamist, where shortly after one relationship ended, I would find another girl to fill the loneliness void. And this put me in a cycle of depression and happiness (break up followed by the excitement of a new relationship and so on). This time last year was the middle of my last pseudo- relationship, which lasted for about three months. The three months we spent together were amazing, I often thought she was the girl version of me. But the prevailing problem that ultimately caused the relationship to fail was that she, like I currently, does not want to be in a relationship (thus the use of "pseudo-realtionship"). When we finally got to the point to where we realized that we wanted different things and the other wasn't going to change we called it quits. I then spent the next 4 months being depressed and nihilistic and generally no fun to hang out with. When I came to recognize the pattern I was in, I decided to take some time off from relationships so I could try and find a way to make myself happy. Which I found in the lifestyle of being nomadic which I had already begun not much earlier.
The thing that originally troubled me when I started to live nomadically I couldn't figure out if was running to something or from it. I know now that I'm running from it.
The problem with this is that it is extremely hard to keep in contact with all my old friends whom I also find happiness. But I recently came to the conclusion that they may be the thing that I'm running away from. After I graduated high school all of my friends stopped trying to hangout with me mostly because of the fact that I don't drink and they were all starting to get more into it. I spent the rest of that summer and the next year extremely depressed because I had felt abandoned by the people who I considered friends. This past summer when I was driving back to New Jersey from spending a year out on the west coast I stopped in Wisconsin to visit one of my best friends from college. When I saw him I was extremely excited because I hadn't seen him since I had dropped him off back at his parents' home in LA on our roadtrip after we graduated college, a year earlier. He on the other hand was very calm and stand off-ish, which is pretty normal for him, but I'd still would've liked a little more of a reaction (I mean he and I did live together for four years). I felt pretty let down and neglected (that's as close as I can get to explaining how I felt). Part of the reason I was so excited to see him was I had just spent the year in a National Service program and I had been through some really trying times (amongst them being the before mentioned pseudo-relationship) and it was just nice to see a familiar face. So then I moved on. I returned to my home state where I saw some more old college friends and my family. And they would ask me about about my year on the west coast. As I would try my best to explain all great and terrible things that had happened I could see on their faces that they had either stopped listening or would have prefered to heard an "It was great." Those who did actually want to hear about it couldn't relate to what I was going through but it would be naive to expect them to understand. This left me feeling extremely isolated (which from talking to my friends I had made over the previous year seemed to be the general concensous). So, I did what I always do, I moved again. This time to Washington D.C. But before I even moved there I was of the opinion, and still am, that I will not be spending more then a year in DC before I move again, considering my job that I have there only lasts that long.
I thus put a time limit on any relationships a might develope during that time (friends or otherwise). And this is where I recently came to the conclusion that I am running away from my friends. I believe that because I am affraid of being hurt by the friends I am going to make/made that I will leave them first, end the friendship on my own terms. So that I do not get hurt by them leaving me or by letting me down. This way I'm keeping them at a distance. I'm doing this same thing with the girls I'm "dating," where I keep them all at a distance and hang out with them all around the same time to force myself from getting to close with any one of them. I'm afaird of getting hurt, so I maintain a somewhat shallow relationship with everyone to prevent getting hurt by them.
This is where my internal crisis lies. I really enjoy spending time with my friends and having meaningful relationships but I also enjoy moving to new places and getting to know those places well and meeting new people and making new friends.
Do I continue my nomadic life or do I settle down and try to maintain long term relationships with people?
Each of these has it's draw backs:
I could either live a life where I can't form lasting relationships
or
one where I won't feel like I'm living my life to it's full potential by getting a lot of experiences and getting to see so many different places
Can I do both?
Which one will make me happier?
Which one do I feel will give my life better meaning?
How am I to decide?
Subscribe to:
Comments (Atom)