In Which I Remember How I Used to Be

I had a sort of dream last night in which I was having a conversation, but it was more that the other person was asking questions and I was answering them.

In it, I figured out that I was still in pain from my first relationship not because I miss the person, but because I loved freely.  No holding back, no reservations.  An unfettered heart.

I felt that feeling once after all the hurt and whatnot of that first relationship.  It was three days I spent in this elevated state of perception, the three most glorious days of this entire lifetime that showed me how else we could live.  I loved all, because it was all God, or whatever you want to call it.

It was me with a shining sun for a heart, beaming.  It was the most myself I could ever be, and I wanted to stay that way.  It was also right when my partner was returning from his study abroad, and I was afraid he wouldn't be able to accept me in this state, so I lost it.

And for a moment, last night, in a dreamy in-between, the sun was my heart again.  I actually have a great deal of love--scratch that--I am a great deal of love, and I don't need a specific outlet for it. 

I tend to shut myself off and look away because people are so demanding of my energy and I feel like I don't have anything left to give, but it's still there.  I'm still alive inside.  There is still at least a spark.  There is still a light to hold against the darkness.

In Which I Blather Excessively

I have been undergoing what some might call a crisis of faith for a couple years now.  I used to be nearly obsessive about the nature of reality, about seeing everything beneath the physical, about finding God within me.

I read a Course in Miracles cover to cover; nonduality dressed in Christian terminology--it changed the way in which I thought about the world.  It stripped away the insistence that I am here for something special.  It destroyed the me I always wanted to believe I was.

But now I'm empty.  Everything is empty.  The world is an empty masquerade. There is no joy to be had; there are few people who reach me.  There is also no reason to do anything.

I switched on autopilot.  I am sleepwalking.  I crave distraction and don't even spin my wheels in attempt to escape the rut I'm in.  Why bother?  There's nothing out there for me.

Some insist I need a relationship to cheer me up.  What then?  What would I do with a relationship except use it to dull the intensity of my isolation?  What can it be besides another distraction?  What are any relationships besides attempts at being special?

The want for specialness is still there, but I feel I am far too tolerant of mental noise, of permissiveness for useless things, and when the thoughts come, I talk myself out of them.  I don't try to talk myself out of them;  I ruthlessly excise them.  I am not terribly kind to myself.

And that's all there is to it.  I have no solutions.  I see no way out.  I'm stuck.

In Which... Aw Hell, I'll Figure it Out

I read something rather quotable in a Cracked.com article the other day, about how people tend to seek external validation rather than personal growth.

It struck me because I'm pretty sure I'm backsliding; at the very least, I am not evolving in the direction I wish to be. 

Until very recently--okay, I'll be honest--I really wanted life as I know it to dramatically shift at the end of 2012.  I knew it was too much to hope for, but all the logistics in the world did not keep me from hoping and hoping.  When nothing happened at all, at least in the visible world, there was nothing left for me to hope for (perhaps I simply have unreasonable expectations).

See, I don't really want to live in this world.  And I am so dissatisfied that absolutely nothing seems to matter.  The feeling of fatedness has vanished.  There is no longer meaning awaiting me, no messages from higher selves, nothing but the bleak monotony of an illusionary world that will slip and fade into the nothing from which it came.

Science affords much of the greatest awe I have experienced in recent years, but I don't really believe our universe is real.  Holographic, perhaps, even hallucinatory.  But real?  I don't sense it. 

Perhaps I should simply face my worst fear by submerging myself into it:  becoming a hopeless, dreamless, self-medicating, self-absorbed muggle for whom all the lights have gone out. 

At least then there will be no direction left to go but out.  At least then the delusions of my own grandeur will wash away, leaving the grasping desire to-be-recognized-for-how-very-special-I-am exposed to be scoured away by the elements. 

Perhaps then I would be able to surrender the delusional mind that insists it has good ideas about what I am and what I should be doing/thinking/feeling.  I know it's mistaken.  I know it has no more clue about my identity than a goldfish has about its own.  Yet I value it undeservedly, identify with it, believe it to be Me.

If we are not our minds, what are we? I ask, because I'm sure there is an answer.  I'm also sure the answer will never come in words or thoughts, but those are the only places I find myself looking.

In Flatland, a 2D polygon encounters a 3D sphere and is brought up into 3D.  Upon his return, he is seen as a madman and tries to remember what direction he had gone in.  Not North, East, West, or South, but Up.

Maybe I just need to find my Up.

In Which I Capitalize Things of Importance

I really don't know who or what I am.  I don't think anyone else does either, but a lot of folks believe they do, and that's enough for them.  But what does any of it mean? It's likely to be totally inconsequential, and this entire paragraph is a pretty good illustration of how seemingly impossible it is for me to really, truly relate to people.

I seem to be pretty open minded, and by that I mean that I very much enjoy pondering all sorts of ideas about the nature of reality.  I was raised as a Christian, but it didn't explain a damn thing about anything to my satisfaction.  Besides, nobody seemed to really care about the "love each other" bit, so I moved on with my time and focus.

Actually, I spent the tail end of my Christian worldview as a self-styled Satanist, but when I got to a place that considered that the mythology was simply not the case, I stopped being so murderously hateful toward myself. 

I went through being a pagan, but I couldn't really believe any of that either, and it's hard to distinguish the culture from the philosophy so often that it would have felt like appropriation, and I'd rather avoid that can of worms. 

So where did that leave me?  Questioning.  Everything.  I am an extremely mental creature, and any belief system I consider for long has to make sense, has to incorporate the evidence and take into consideration universal tendencies.

I can't say that I envy people who have faith in things they can't prove (mostly because it seems to be blinding them to other possibilities) partly because I have some unprovable ideas myself.  Ultimately, all of it could be wishful thinking in a purely physical brain, or (more likely), delusional projections from a broken mind dreaming the entire universe and all its alternate realities and its infinities of rebirth. 

There are no answers to be found in the world because I'd have to be out of the world to see the bigger picture.  Brighter minds have pondered the same questions for depressingly ever, and the only way out seems to be from Realization.  It's such an important term that I am going to Capitalize the Shit Out of It.

This is how I used to visualize the Apocalypse:  it was the journey we take as we die.  I thought it happened to each person as they passed away, back when I still believed in an afterlife.  I thought there might be one big one during my lifetime (because, like so many who have come before and will come after, I came to Earth for something Important), but I didn't think people had to wait around to get into heaven.

I thought it was something intensely personal and specific to each individual, because it had to be. Two people can commit the same act for vastly different reasons, and it can't be judged so narrowly as to be black and white.  We can see our errors and change our ways, or we can keep our pride and justify our actions to ourselves and keep going. 

It's funny to say that reincarnation saved my life, but really, I would have offed myself a hundred years ago if I didn't believe I'd just come back again.  But the purpose of reincarnation cannot be to just keep coming back as other people.  Hell no. 

We can get out of here, stop the merry go round, and fly away.  And there can really be only one ultimate goal.  I mean sure, you could keep cavorting about the universe in a myriad of forms and lives, but what's the point if you don't figure out what you are?

Realization.  If you know, you stop not knowing.  You don't look for the things you're holding in your hands unless you don't recognize you have them. 

In Which I Maybe Overshare

Ever since that dude decided that females deserved to die because they didn't openly invite him to play with their junk, I've been paying much more attention and noticing--aghast at times--how obsessed people are with gender.

I find it really bizarre. Period. Personally, it makes no sense to me whatsoever, although I care enough that I have actually asked people to think of me as not being female because I don't think of myself as being female.  At all.  Or male. I don't know what either of those things mean because it seems to be cultural and arbitrary.

Thinking of someone as a gender brings all these predefined conditions along with it, and I don't think anyone should be subjected to someone else's ignorance.

To add to the frustration, people have trouble differentiating gender from sexuality, so gay couples constantly get this "which one is the man" thing.  That's like asking two apples which one is pretending to be an orange, or two oranges which one is pretending not to be an orange.  It makes no sense.

And then, if you're a genderless pan- or bisexual who often has long periods of being rather unconcerned about anything of the sort, people just think you're confused.  But I'm not confused, at least, not about that.  I see beings.  Beings who have particular bodies for a little while.  What does the form matter? What do the pieces matter?  When you take away the arbitrary, what do you have left?

When I was little, I overheard this talk show featuring people who had had gender reassignment surgery.  It made me really relieved that it was a possibility because I did not like being a girl.  I had to wear skirts even though boys tried to look up them, and I'd get admonished about not being lady-like.

For a really long time, I really didn't like many girls.  Girls (with some exceptions, of course) were horrible to me my entire childhood.  I wasn't thin or pretty, I didn't have nice clothes, and I was pretty quiet.  It was a lot easier to talk to boys because they were a lot less judgemental.  I wasn't trying to be anything.

All of this made me feel like there was something wrong with with me.  Throughout childhood, it felt like there was a lot of stress on gender.  People freaked out about boys being in the same places as girls or girls doing the same thing as boys.  God forbid there be a mixed gender sleepover.

I only had one He-Man figure and it was Tila. No Ninja Turtles, no Transformers; She-Ra, My Little Pony and Skipper because my mom didn't think Barbie was good for a little girl to play with. 

But then things change. When kids start "liking" each other and if it's a boy and you're supposed to be a girl, it's automatically seen as a crush.  It's absurd. Maybe they were just totally rad folks and we just wanted to enjoy totally rad times.

At some point, the girls around me seemed to go boy-crazy and everything became about how they looked, being attractive and clothing and acting cool. 

I was seriously falling behind.  I was also acutely aware that I was never going to be any of those things.  Firstly, I wasn't allowed pretty much anything I might have asked for, which is okay, because it would have been me ridiculously trying to be something for social purposes.

I'm not sure when my mom started thinking I was gay, but I remember that she tried to get me interested in a movie by telling me it was Sara Gilbert playing a lesbian.  But I wasn't particularly interested in girls either. 

The girls I knew were generally pretty awful to me besides the little band of misfits I hung out with in middle school.  But eventually, they all seemed to get better at being girls than I did.  Whatever that meant.  They went out with dudes, got married, had kids, and I... didn't.

Eventually, I did fall in love with someone, who happened to be a male, but it really could have been either way, since we met online.  We were instantly head over heels, and we were just talking about a video game.  There really was no reason for it except some kind of past-life/fate thing. We talked at least six hours a day most of the time, and it was super awesome.  After about a year, I hopped on a plane, crossed the country and stayed with him and his family.

The two of us were fine--really incredibly happy when we were alone.  But his parentals wanted him with a pretty Latina girl who would have lots of babies and stay home.  Turned out, that's what he wanted too (minus the Latina part) and we went our separate ways.  I'm not going to play housewife broodmare for anyone.

I had once mentioned to him the high probability that I was bisexual (I definitely find females more physically attractive) and he kind of freaked out.  "Women are for men" was his attitude, and it was very much not mine.

People are for themselves. And much of the time, it's good for the self to share with other selves.  Sharing.  Not control. Not guilt trips. Not possessiveness.  Not any of the horrible things people do to each other out of their own misguided fears.

I'm no longer convinced that there is some special person out there for everyone.  I'm not convinced there's one for me or for you or for that guy over there.  Every single entity manifesting in this plane has its own reasons for doing so.  Some people might have come to experience femininity or masculinity, to be straight or gay or something non-exclusive.

You can never know how someone thinks, feels or what they've experienced.  Be kind.  There is no point in picking out a few external characteristics to base how you treat someone.  I thought, when I was little, that it was a silly thing children do, and they learn to stop when they grow up.  Instead, it's turned out that I should have been thinking that just because someone looks like an adult doesn't means they aren't still children.

And all of it, all the selfishness and the fighting and the killing--all of these intense reactions--are all based on things that are socially arbitrary and completely made up. 

I still don't understand.

In Which I am Vaguely Empty

I am pretty sure... of nothing. 

Generally it's a good starting point, but I have undergone this almost catastrophic loss of what I suppose we could call faith.

I don't really feel as though there is a point in doing anything.  I mean, I work so I can pay bills and have a roof over my head, but the only things I really get into are escapes.

Video games, movie marathons, not even much reading or writing.  I don't think I'm special anymore, and the person I pretend to be languishes. 

Do people really make it through their entire lives in this state of ignorance that is so profound it is crippling to me?  I suppose so.

Here we are, coming up on thirty one, and I'm alive--whatever good that does me--and I haven't stopped being, as far as I know, except for that rough third of a day where I forget everything entirely, even consciousness.  And I am completely lost.

I understand why people look for things to believe in--and I have had too many experiences beyond the material to consider the possibility that the material is what really exists--and I think a great many things about the state of existence, but I am stuck on what it means.

What difference does it make?  What does it matter?  What does it mean?

The first time I watched the double rainbow video, I cried a little.  I laughed too, when it got beyond me, but I totally "get" the question.  What does it mean?

We assign importance to experiences in our lives, and by far, the most meaningful, the most important, and the most life affirming experiences I had were all years ago, when I believed I had a role to play in the world.

It's easy to imagine myself as some author of some books, be it fantasy or metaphysics, making a living, absorbed in the reality I was describing.  Whether it's real or not isn't really the issue as much as "does it matter?"

But I want both. I want truth and meaning.  I want my stomach's nausea and my moving across the country to be meaningful.  I want messages from inter-dimensional guardians encrypted into everything I see.  I want to feel loved and guided because I feel blind and alone.

I am like everyone else, but I can't accept things that don't make sense or concepts that are so ill fitting with my experiences that it would be delusional to attempt to subscribe to them. 

So here I am, existing and adrift.

In Which I Lack Cohesion

We're wrapping up our fourth month in Florida, and moving into a new apartment at the end of May, just my cousin and I.

I'm not surprised that we're staying longer, though I suppose I want both things kind of equally.  There's really nothing for me in Saginaw but family, and nothing for me in Florida but my cousin and opportunities I don't know how to take. They are there, though, even though I am too exhausted to seek them out.

I want to want to write.  I feel stuck, even though I know what is going to happen.  Maybe I have too much going on.  I have a timeline several thousands of years before the main line, one a couple hundred years before the present with the current characters, and the present.

There's also one character who is aware of all of the timelines simultaneously, and remains in an interdimensional state for thousands and thousands of years observing the progression of life on Phant, preserving it until it is time for it to end. 

I am at the end, where everything comes together in a bizarre crashing of times and space.  It's hard.  And I continuously doubt my abilities.  And I really need to just sit down and puzzle through everything. I want to start over again. Tighten and neaten and really get ahold of my characters again.  This was always one of the hardest of the stories to write. Smooth sailing after this

In Which I Quote A Song Almost as Old as I Am

There's this song from back in the day  about how if you love somebody, set them free. 

I puzzled over this in my pre-relationship state, because I somehow felt it was true, maybe because I am all about love and freedom, and when I've been in a relationship, I always wanted my partner to feel free to do anything whenever they liked, even if that involved leaving me behind and tralalaing with someone else.

The unintended consequences of that practice for me:  I will never fight for anyone.  I let my partner choose and step back to let them do so.  I become even more of an observer in my own life, and eventually, when I am worn down from not driving my own bus, they will say something about how I've changed and feel like their world is coming to an end because I dared voice a preference.

So I let them go, not because I don't love them, but because I do (infinitely more than I love myself), and I want them to go have their best possible lives and I'd never want to hold them back.

Also because I need to feel free too.  I really do.  I mean, I feel stifled just from living in the same place for too long.  I could chalk this up to being a mutable Gemini, but it's also because I don't want to make a living in this world, I want to live in it.  And I have no idea how to manage both simultaneously.  The mundane might be fine on auto-pilot, but I'm not on auto-pilot enough to be okay with it.

Relationships, man.  What are they all about?  I've been in a relationship for pretty much all of my adult life except for the last year or two, and I'm wondering about why people willfully get into them, even seek them out.  I've never been much of a seeker, except that I have always had my eyes open, in some hopelessly romantic fashion, thinking one day this person is going to show up, and they will know me.  On sight.  And I will know them.

I only still believe it's possible because it happened.  And it was too painful in so many ways, and too wonderful in so many others.  If it's not fate knocking at my heart, it's not enough to pique my interest.  It did happen again, but this time it wasn't immediately mutual.  Eventually we were together for many years, but I began feeling like I really shouldn't be subjecting anyone to a relationship with me.  There is a lot of subconscious programming I haven't yet figured out how to rewrite.

Truth is, I am really, truly, and intensively self absorbed.  I feel like I have to become a better person before I'd ever be ready for another relationship.  I know I'm not really that messed up, comparatively (because daaayum, people are insane), but the difference is that I know many of my faults, and while I know they're not such a big deal, I would much rather fix them without hurting anyone else.

I think one of the better relationship structures would be of a polyamorous design, mostly because I don't think I'm capable of being solely responsible for someone's heart.  I'm very much a one person at a time kind of person, but it's really just too much pressure for me to be solely responsible for someone else's feelings.

Really, any sort of expectation has become too much pressure for me outside of the workplace.  Work is a meaningless sort of cycle.  It doesn't really matter one way or the other what I do there.  Everything else seems like a crushing lot of responsibility I feel incapable of handling.

Logically, I know that I'm a pretty decent person to be in a relationship with.  I'm occasionally funny, generally kind, and I can, on occasion, be sort of sweet.  It is much easier and more fun to do things for and with someone else than it is to do for or by myself.

In Which I Get Honest About Writing

Writing is the thing for me.  It is the only thing that I have ever always wanted to do.  I went to school for it, I am tens of thousands of dollars in debt for it, I am dedicated.  It is the meaning of life for me, and I don't think I ever let myself state that in such a way and really feel the repercussions of that realization.

I have this series of stories that part of me is pretty convinced is an alternate reality (well, it would have to be) that an aspect of my soul is/has/will experienc/ing/ed/e.

It's... gosh, I don't know, nine or ten stories, maybe more.  The series follows a family of souls across various incarnations, planets and planes.  It mostly focuses on the Elder of Sight/Seer, who is just fated to be intrinsically linked to the Oracle of Laki, the Lady of Light.  S/he is plagued by the Oracle of Daki, the force of the darkness/unknown/fear/illusion, is drawn to the Elder of Fire, and sees himself in the Elder of Water, the first mirror.

It all fits with the aspect of how these things relate to sight, and it happened without my ever planning it consciously.  The subconscious is beastly with this stuff.  I've found foreshadowing for a storyline I started writing last year in a story I wrote fifteen years ago.  I mean.  Dude.

If I get this series to a state of satisfactory perfection, I can die without regrets.  Seriously, and jokingly, that is how I really think, deep down.  I don't know how I can let myself talk me out of thinking about this being the meaning of my life, because it is the visible story to my invisible journey.  This is how my spirit evolves, right along with the characters.

I do have the part of my mind that likes to dismiss all sorts of meaning into the obliterating clear light of nothingness, knowing how much my success at accomplishing this series is tied into ego satisfaction.  But you know what? So what?  It doesn't matter if my ego likes it or not, because the ego doesn't matter.

This is what I feel I came to Earth to do, and deep down, I am always going to believe that until I have done it.

In Which I Realize it's Been Months

It isn't really the case that much has happened. I did move from Michigan to Florida at the tail end of 2013, spending all of 2014 thus far sleeping on the floor again, spending an inordinate time on busses, and not realizing that time is going by because the weather goes unchanged for months in South Florida.

It's near the end of March, and it's a little terrifying how very little I've been managing to do.  They schedule me to work forty hours, which makes me want to cry, not only because it consumes my life, but also because even then I have no money. Ever. And I got a raise when I moved here.  Any additional money I'm making now goes to rent and bus passes.

I added up my bills and such, and seven hundred of what I make goes to bills.  Before rent.  Next February, I will have my loan completely paid off, and then I fully intend to get another loan, pay off the credit cards (again) and maintain a balance on them of no more than I could pay off all at once.  No more, "oh sure, friend/family member, I can swing that."  No you can't, past self.  You couldn't swing it. I still can't swing it.

Make more than ever before; have less than ever. Ha.  Especially since our stuff from Michigan hasn't made it here.  Hence my sleeping on the floor and my roommates sleeping on the sectional they bought from the bomb-ass Salvation Army across the street.  We're working on getting the rest of our stuff, methinks, soon.

Also, the man in front of me on the bus is wearing Real 3D glasses and showing fellow in-transitors a newspaper article about a play about Martin Luther King Jr. that he may think is actually about MLK Jr. I have no way of knowing.