on and on and on

Oy to the vey. Life has been a bit of a manic dervish lately, what with me getting slammed with a tsunami of freelancing at the same time I’m planning my upcoming move. I feel like I’ve hardly had time to breathe.

Me taking a minute to freak the fuck out.

I’ve been feeling a bit angsty over the past few weeks, too. What it boils down to is that I feel like I’m fine with my life until I find out that former classmates/friends/acquaintances got married, spawned, got a master’s degree, etc. Times like that make me dislike my own life because there are no advances. Aside from buying the condo, I mean. My life is exactly the same now as it was five years ago. I’m in the same apartment, at the same job, in the same position. I’m still not dating anyone and still not doing anything different, new, or exciting. I’m exactly the same.

I dissected all of this with Missy, and since time is a bit tight right now, I think it’s easier to just copy parts of my emails to her here, rather than reinventing the wheel. Why share it? Well, why not? At least it will explain to folks why I haven’t been very communicative lately.

When stuff like that happens, I always go into a tizzy of questioning my life and wondering what’s missing. It’s odd because I never felt the need to keep up with the Joneses, and yet here I am, wondering if I should follow their lead and get my ass down the aisle and into the maternity ward, even if it’s not something I particularly want. At times like these I start to feel like an autistic person who is one step out of beat from the rest of society. It’s somewhat fitting that I’m hopelessly incapable of following sequences of steps (like with dancing and aerobics), because emotionally, that’s exactly how I feel sometimes: like I’m one or two steps behind everyone else, and no matter how carefully I try to do so, I’m unable to keep time with them. Not that I necessarily want to keep time with them...but having the ability to do so would be nice every once in a while.

***

Part of me wants to do something to shake off this stasis and another part of me is happy with things the way they are. After all, I’m not an ambitious person and therefore don’t want to climb any corporate ladders. And I tend to be a creature of habit—someone who takes great comfort in routines—so I actually like that life is pretty safe and predictable. Plus I have no desire to date anyone and I really do love my job. Honestly, the only thing sorely missing from my life is traveling, but it’s not like inertia or my lack of ambition is what’s keeping that from my life. I’m not traveling simply because I don’t have money to travel, but once I save up some money, I’ll begin traveling again. So...I don’t know. The part of me that wants to shake off this stasis really doesn’t make much sense, because I can’t imagine that living my life differently would really make me happy. I mean, dating wouldn’t make me happy and switching jobs wouldn’t make me happy. Maybe I just need to take a class or pick up a hobby—something that will prove to myself that I’m evolving, even if only in tiny increments.

***

I think part of the problem—part of what drives the angst I feel in these situations—is that I haven’t yet found a raison d’être. Not just a dream, but an actual reason for existing. Everybody needs something that fills them with joy. It’s that thing which is the luminous little spark inside of you. Something that eclipses everything else in its orbit. Something which gives you a reason to get out of bed in the morning (aside from obligation, chores, and that onward grinding push for survival). Something which will enable you to continue going onward after everything else has been taken from you. For some it’s a spouse and kids, for others it’s art, singing, creating, gardening, whatever. And I haven’t really found my “thing.” It used to be writing, but now...eh, not so much. So I look at so-and-so and I’m like, “Well, see, clearly he found his raison d’être, because now he’s a happy-looking family man, and meanwhile I’m still here standing here tracing my toe in the dirt, biding my time, just kind of...existing.” And it’s a stupid mentality, really, because you shouldn’t let one relationship or talent or hobby define who you are. You shouldn’t let one single thing be the pivot on which you spin. Besides, nobody knows what goes on behind closed doors. It’s easy to say that so-and-so must now be blissfully happy and feel utterly fulfilled because she found her so-called soulmate, and it’s easy to say that my Scranton classmates have found their raison d’être because they’re now all successful lawyers and corporate crusaders with spouses and two kids, but in reality, I don’t know what bodies might be beneath their floorboards. There could be marital tension or a feeling of emptiness from working at a soulless job. They could be feeling just as lost as I sometimes feel. Who knows.

***

I do feel like I need to inject something new into my life—something I’ll genuinely enjoy, like taking some kind of art class—as a means of trying to figure out what my raison d’être is. But I should also try to stop feeling like I need to fix other areas in my life that may not even be broken.

***

I’m not sure how, or if, I want my life to change. The only thing I’ve striven toward over the past two years was buying a house. Now that I have the condo, I wonder if it’s going to be terribly anticlimactic and I’ll be sitting in there thinking, “Now what?”

***

I never thought I’d stay in this area this long (it’ll be 10 years next month), and I’m not really happy with this area, yet I don’t feel compelled to go elsewhere, because the older I get, the more comfortable I get. I’m sure I’d love living in the Pacific Northwest, and 10 years ago I would’ve had the balls to do it if a job would’ve been available to me there, but I don’t think I have the balls anymore. I don’t even think I’d have the balls to move to London if the opportunity arose. I’m just so safe and comfortable where I am, and nowhere else in the US (aside from the Pacific Northwest and maybe Maine) appeal to me.

***

I’d be all for taking a class for fun, but doing a full stint in grad school? Never. Even if I wanted to, I wouldn’t know what to study. Nothing beyond my major ever appealed to me and my major itself didn’t exactly rock my world.

***

And I don’t want kids, but I also think about what will happen when I’m old and alone, with only nursing home companions to keep me company. (Why does that even matter? I love being alone!) And I think about what will happen before that point, when my family starts dying and I have nowhere to go for the holidays except to friends’ houses, where I’ll feel like I’m intruding in their lives. I always have to remind myself that having kids doesn’t guarantee that I won’t be alone when I’m old. My kids could disown me or die before me or just be such hateful shits, I wouldn’t want them around. Or they could turn out like [Ms. X]. That’s the big thing that scares me about having kids: the idea that I could do everything right and still end up with [Ms. X] or a serial killer or a rapist as my child.

***

I do spend a lot of time wondering what the point of everything is. Not in the same way I did before I was medicated, though. I’m just thinking of the big picture—why we sweat and toil and pay bills and wash dishes and do all this stuff that never leads anywhere, day after day until we die. Just thinking about it is exhausting. Like life is one big boulder and humans are Sisyphus permanently pushing it up that hill. It’s not that life necessarily seems bad—just futile. And yeah, I agree that most people will say that Christ is the point of life, and we’re here to do good works in his name and just savor the fact that we’ve been given the “gift of life,” etc, but that just doesn’t cut it for me. Sometimes being faithless makes life really freaking difficult.

So anyway, that’s how I’ve been feeling lately. After I move and get my condo set up, I just need to focus more attention on finding my raison d’être. The only things that even remotely appeal to me are traveling and photography, which means I should make more of a concerted effort to fit photo safaris into my life and save money for future trips. Actually, I’ve already begun the latter.

Ever since I got back from Iceland, I’ve plotted how I can get back there and see the entire country (as compared to my three days in Reykjavik and the Golden Circle). I figured the ideal scenario would be to rent a car with my dad and drive the entire perimeter of the country on its ring road. I thought it would be nice to spend some one-on-one time with him, and since he’s a massive hiking/nature enthusiast who doesn’t like being around people very much, I figured getting him to Iceland—with its sublime natural scenery and startling dearth of people—would be a slam-dunk case. But it turns out he’d prefer to go back to the western US and do more marathon hikes out there, which is totally understandable.

So I found myself back at square one. Going alone really wasn’t an option, because although I have no qualms with traveling alone to many places abroad, spending 2-2½ weeks alone in the empty wilds of Iceland ain’t one of them. I’d want to split driving duties with someone, and I also wouldn’t want to be alone if something went wrong, like if I got desperately lost or ended up with a flat tire or got into an accident.

That’s when I decided to ask Missy to join me. I knew she always wanted to see Iceland and the northern lights, and, like me, she’s been feeling a bit adrift lately, so the solution seemed simple. And it was. She eagerly accepted my invitation and now we’ve begun the long, arduous process of saving for it. Our tentative plan is to go in September 2009, if we manage to save enough money by then. Two years and counting...



song heard most recently before posting:
Sister Fatima—Don McLean