Turning, or maybe I've already turned, into something I am not. I'm also drying up in conversation. I'm not sure what I have to say, but I do feel like writing. Once again I wonder where I'm headed. I realize that I lack focus. I'm void of solid opinions on almost every matter I feel ... like I'll just go along just because it's easier to go along than it would be for me to really evaluate. That's awful to admit and I could curse myself for it, but there's power in acknowledgement, hope in realization. More often than not I find myself yielding - to other people's musical, literary, political, culinary, philosophical preferences and views - and I hear my mom singing circa 1984 to Yield Not to Temptation. I don't know why I do it, but I think it began out of a desire not to stick out, to be as amiable as possible.
I've become lazy, and the decline has been, shocker, imperceptible to me. I seem dangerously close to accepting the almost-dare all parents challenge their kids with: if others jump off the bridge will you follow? I can say that I won't follow the crowd, but I feel like I'm stuck in it anyways and jumping seems better than being where I am ... static.
I don't even know if this makes sense, but it's 4:36, and I should not have eaten those Tootsie Rolls at work, but I wasn't gonna make it at 12:30 when I still had 2 hours left so I ate them and now look ... wide awake.
I spend more time, too much time, thinking about what could or should or what can and will be than what actually is. The other day watching Oprah reach out to some misguided girl she said something about how your 20s are to be spent figuring out who you are, what you believe and everything ... coming from her, you weren't supposed to have anything figured out ... and I believe in Oprah. Not in the same way I believe in God, but I trust her judgment since most of what she says immediately registers with me. This definitely registered.
So I'm not supposed to have everything figured out? I asked myself incredulously, like the Candyman just opened up shop and said to have at it ... oh really?! Jeepers. Well why do I feel so many of us expend so much energy doing it (or in my case acting like it's being done)? Riddle me that.
Am I whining? I feel like I'm whining.
Anyways. Oh, I thought. I hadn't looked at it in that way before because for various reasons - namely society's hustling shuffle - I totally have been operating under the impression that I was already supposed to know who I was and what I was supposed to be doing. It was probably an Aha moment, but I'm not exactly present - this is the theme of this post - so how would I know an Aha moment when it bloody happened? I don't feel like I know much of anything. I do know some things certainly, but you know what I'm saying.
All in all it's just a-another brick in the wall . I'm in this Wall and the mortar may be starting to set in and I don't like it. I object. But how to redirect? What a friggin' paradox. I can't figure myself out and yet the world and time require it.
And I’m standing at the crossroads, believe I’m sinking down.
How it feels that the world has whipped me so. (This sounds more desperate than it should.) The world has hidden me from myself ... (so maybe I just need a weekend of camp?) I have done what I was supposed to do, what was expected ... yeah, I'm that kid ... but I have yet to really fully feel that I was in my place; nothing has ever gelled, not college, certainly not work, and all of this leaves me to suspect that I'm not as true to myself as I've often admonished. But it's hard to be true to that which is not seen.
I have lost my focus and drive and my ambitions have idled and I am at the stage where I believe that I'm torn between wanting to believe there is no such thing as a real world and being in ever present danger of drowning in it. But I hardly know what I'm getting at. This is just another draft, part rage against the machine that has us working our sun-up to sun-down schedules, part call to the gods who must be crazy if they think I'm gonna concede to succeed on their terms. I've wondered on this page before about the road less traveled and what it means to me. Have I taken the road less traveled? I don't feel like I've committed to one or the other. Maybe I'm still standing at the fork waiting for the dust to settle - the dust of everyone else scurrying by, but also my own dust that I've been kicking up as I've been digging myself into my very own trench.