november resolution: be less useless

I want to start doubling down on the things that I'm good at. I've written this before, and I'll probably write it again, but I lack confidence in my abilities. It's taken me a ridiculously long time to just write these three sentences. I know I've become sloppier as a writer. For one thing I no longer really see myself as a writer, as a person who writes, as a person with writing in his future. This is a bad thing! I shouldn't have let that happen. The idea of being good at something seems to scare me.

Note I am not claiming a fear of success. "I could have been an author if I had wanted, you know." No, no, nothing like that. It's a fear of failure if anything, a fear of trying and then failing, a fear of being seen to try and then fail, a fear of being seen as less than anything but super-competent at all aspects of human existence.

But still, writing gives me pleasure, and I am capable of stringing words together. Why did I ever stop? For a long time I felt like I had nothing of import to say. The idea of writing for the sake of writing is a little onanistic and I generally dislike self-indulgence (though I can think of no other word to describe the last three or so months of my life). I think I thought that I would put the figurative pen down until such time as I was compelled to pick up again in service of some cause. I gradually came around to the quiet joys of essay writing in school, or rather I grew to appreciate the appreciation a well written paper could net me from professors and TAs.

I want to be good at writing, but I also don't want to put in the legwork necessary to get there. I AM GENERATION Y. I want instant gratification. I know that if I stuck to a routine (routine! that's what my life is missing) improvement would come gradually. But right now my writing skills are as flabby as my arms (exercise! another thing my life is missing) and the thought of exercising mind or body is daunting.

I am afraid of hard work! Please give me a job!
     

a list of bad things and some good things (not as many) about myself

I've been thinking a lot lately, because I don't have much else to do, and video games can only be so distracting, but I've been thinking that I don't know myself very well, that maybe this self-loathing partially stems from a lack of understanding. We fear the unknown, etc. I'm bad at hypotheticals, I'm bad at conjecture, I'm bad at doing anything that requires projecting myself into new and unknown places because I lack a fundamental understanding of how I behave in the here and now. I rarely stop to to consider my actions, preferring to leave it unconsidered. If I don't quantify it, it can't be measured, and yet still retains some great possibility of potential. It's not opening a letter from the university you want to go to. Potential remains unlimited, but also: disappointment.

Try this: Let's quantify some shit. I'm passive, generally content to float on the whims of others. I dislike confrontation and try to make people around me happy, or failing that, not angry at me at least. I have trouble displaying enthusiasm. I can be selfish and solipsistic (Exhibit A: this blog). I want to be perceived as smart by those around me, especially by those whose opinions I respect. I have trouble with criticism. I come off as pleasant in lieu of personable. I fear failure. I worry that I am a fraud, that I am not as smart as I think I am, that I am not as capable as I think I am. I worry that my entire self-perception of myself as a person is at any given time completely off and wrong and that said self-perception bears little resemblance to any recognizable form of reality. I am awkward in social situations. I procrastinate due to said fear of failure and find not-trying-and-not-failing preferable to trying-and-failing. I have trouble forming close friendships. I find emotional intimacy terrifying and avoid it wherever possible. I treat people who express interest in forming an emotional bond with me with skepticism. I tend to run away from relationships, and difficult things in general (opening the mail, replying to emails, initiating conversations &c.). Following from that, I am not always a great friend. I have difficulty saying positive things about myself.

For example: I am a good writer (debatable [is this self-deprecation or self-loathing?? Hard to tell]). I possess a good sense of humour, and am capable of making people laugh (while still worrying that I may have been funnier at an earlier age, that my comedy chops may have peaked at 17). I am patient, and rarely make rash, or hasty decisions (not that there is a strong correlation between time taken and quality of decision made necessarily). I try to treat all people with respect and kindness, regardless of age, sex, gender or socioeconomic status or background (but then again I do have a general need to please. Where does genuine human decency end and general obsequiousness begin?).      

Again: trouble writing positive things. Part of me feels like if I even have to write it, how true can it be? Shouldn't these facts about myself just "be"? And what if I'm wrong? What if they stem out of my wonky sense of self-perception?

And then I feel like the answer to everything above is just "ugh get over yourself." But I feel like this is important. That it happens to be in blog form is incidental. No one is reading this and yet it is the public exhibitionist aspect that makes it even possible for me to write these. It's why I stopped keeping a regular pen and paper journal. Anyway.  

Post Script: It is bothering me that it is so easy for me to ascribe ulterior, negative rationals for the positive traits I listed.  Why is it so easy to see the worst in yourself? I am not a fundamentally terrible person, yet I cannot write anything nice without ascribing some darker meaning to it. Why is that?

might be depressed, news at 11

I might be depressed. I hope I am. That would solve some problems, or at least alleviate some my non-stop self-loathing. It's not my fault, it's my faulty brain chemistry, I'll shout triumphantly. But I can't be sure. I do this sometimes, a sort of brain specific hypochondria. Like how people on the internet latch onto Asperger's as the explanation for their lack of social skills. Clinical depression would absolve me of a lot of the guilt I've been feeling lately. Is it weird to hope for depression? It's certainly a better explanation than, no, sorry your just an awful person.

Great. Now I want to be depressed. To clarify, I want someone to tell me I'm depressed. But that would require going to my doctor. And telling her about my constant feelings of inadequacy. And how the thought of leaving the house is exhausting, forget dealing with other people. I've never been great in social situations, but lately the act of interacting has become especially mentally and physically draining. Jokes seem less funny. I'm more irritable, and my tolerance for other people's shenanigans has dropped. Am I just becoming a humourless old man at the age of 23? Or is this just a phase, a dark moment that will soon pass?

The internet says I may be suffering from moderate depression! Success! There is a test for everything online.

Here's where my doubt stems from: it's a catch-22. Literally, like from the book, where Yossarian can't get out of flying missions precisely because he has the presence of mind to not want to fly missions. If I can step back and say, hey, maybe I'm depressed, how depressed can I really be? Self-awareness is a bitch. But also: I generally lack the courage of my convictions. It would take a lot for me to stand up and say definitively, I'm a guy with depression. Because what if I'm wrong and I don't? Then I'm just a whiny first (rhymes with worst)-worlder with too much time to stew in my own bubbling juices.

(Side-bar: I feel like my growing humourlessness has been a thing for good long while now, and I'm going to blame David Foster Wallace, who presented to me an example of a guy who was at times achingly sincere and poetic and beautiful and who let whatever comedy there was in his situations flow out organically. For a guy like me looking for some way to move past cheap irony and jokey-jokes in his own writing, DFW was like this shining paragon of what a sincere writer could look like in a post-ironic world. DFW was also massively talented and so my ability to synthesize some version of what DFW has come out uneven and probably tilting too heavily to one side. I seem to have come away with the idea that sincerity can be a powerful thing in an insincere world, and that humour can spring from it as well, but with no tangible idea of how to actually go about that. So that maybe I come across as over-serious, as no fun or a buzzkill. I don't want to be a buzzkill. Have I mistaken sincerity for a stale bread form of rationalism? Does that even make sense?)

Other thoughts: I say "I don't know" a lot. It prefaces most of my sentences these days. I think it started out as a false humility thing, as in, "I do know, but I don't want to seem like a know-it-all" but now it's more of a disclaimer. "What I'm about to say is of little value, please feel free to ignore/dismiss it at your leisure." Maybe it's just my way of lowering expectations, my way of making sure I don't disappoint any one. I know I've written elsewhere, probably on this blog but who knows, a defense of the phrase "I don't know." It felt radical at one time, an admission that I didn't have all the answers and that's ok too. But it's a crutch now. It's become a proclamation of total ignorance, rather than partial.

Back to sincerity. The more I think about it the more I realize I screwed up somewhere. I mistook seriousness for sincerity. And not a good seriousness (there is a time and place for itobviously) but a humourless, can't-laugh-at-himself brand of seriousness that I find kind of off putting in abstract. I used to be a lot more self-deprecating, I think. But that requires a certain level of confidence to pull off. If I were to self-deprecate now it would only come off as sad and the desperation would be palpable. Not because there is nothing inherently funny about my situation, but because I don't know how to find the comedy in my situation. I don't find my present circumstances very funny. I might one day, but somehow I don't think that will happen. (I can barely muster the conviction necessary to write that). I feel like a poor judge of what is and what is not funny. I am confidant of that much.

Self-discovery

I learned some stuff about myself in Newfoundland. Not good things, not things that make me feel good about myself, but then I haven't felt good about myself in a while so maybe this is a good thing. Self-knowledge is important.The night is darkest etc.

I have trouble getting close to people. I preemptively shut down as a defense mechanism. I am afraid of exposing myself and being hurt. I am afraid that if I allow the real me (whoever that is) to show, people will like me less, find me odd, or form an otherwise unfavourable impression of me. So I keep quiet. I am reluctant to volunteer information about myself, share anecdotes that might add a measure of characterization. I feel like if I can control the narrative sufficiently, I can shape others' perceptions of me, and trick them into thinking I'm a normal, well-adjusted human being with few-to-no hang-ups regarding the every day act of living. But I have lots of hang-ups. I am a collection of neuroses. Where others seem to be able to play these off as cute, charming, Woody Allenish tics, I worry that these will repel people. And so I remain a quiet person who eschews boat rocking. In this way I feel comfortable. People are not repelled. But then, they are also not attracted (the introvert's dilemma?).

I want to own my introversion. I want to understand it. I want to conquer it. I still have such a murky idea of who I am. I manage to achieve the dual feat of being very introverted and rarely introspective. I don't like labeling myself, for example. I used to think this was because I found labels constricting and arbitrary, but I realize it has more to do with how little I know about myself. I can't classify that which I don't understand.

This is in danger of traveling much too far up my own ass. Let's stop here.

Went to the east coast so now I'm writing about it

My memory is no good, so I write this down for posterity. It's already been like three weeks since the trip so I've likely forgotten details already I'm sure, and I'll probably end up relying on photos to augment my memory anyway. But the point is, I made it to Halifax and back in under a week, and now I'm writing about it.

Halifax is a fantastic place. I say this with zero reservations. It manages to mix a certain big city-ness (eg it has a financial core of bank towers) with an intimacy only found in smaller towns. Downtown Halifax is like if you took West Queen West, the UofT campus and King and Bay and mushed them right next to each other, maybe.

But let me start somewhere else. We left on Sunday night, aiming to reach Quebec City by morning. There were six of us in one minivan, and four of us were capable enough drivers that we weren't worried about anyone burning out on the way there. It's about twenty-one hours from Toronto to Halifax, approx., and we split the travel there into stages. Ten hours to Quebec City. Six to Fredericton. Another five to Halifax.

Side-bar comment: Canada is really big. Like huge. I hesitate to say, for example, that there is literally nothing between Quebec City and Fredericton, for fear of aligning myself with age of discovery era arguments of terra nullis and etc, but really, Canada sometimes seems like a lot of nothing only broken occasionally by the odd urban aberration (see "garrison mentality").

So we drove all night and watched bleary-eyed as the sun rose over the Quebec country-side (it was more semi-industrial/suburban than rural but that is less romantic for my purposes). I didn't sleep much and I don't think anyone really did. We arrived at our motel, a generic road-side place a good distance outside the city proper, around nine and we all promptly crashed for a good few hours. We managed to get our act together eventually and we staggered into a crepe place in the old city where we took advantage of some all day breakfast (stagger's not the right word, because we first had to drive for ten minutes into the city and then wander around for fifteen minutes trying to make a decision but for all intents and purposes, it felt like we staggered in)

And another thing: arriving at a consensus between six people is difficult and often-times unrewarding. Because I was the most "Canadian," (read: whitest and also possessing an interest in and knowledge of Canadian history, I think?) itinerary planning generally fell on my shoulders. This had pros and cons. I admit I prefer my vactionary exercises to be more active than passive, and being in charge of planning allowed me a certain latitude to plan for stuff that I liked (eg. long walks, sightseeing, eating in non-chain restos, finding cheap/free ways to entertain ourselves) and to that end our trip was successful. I saw what I wanted to see, did what I wanted to do. If you don't like soaking up local ambiance, why don't you figure out what you want to do, you know?

What I found frustrating was when people who took no responsibility for planning ("Is the GPS programmed yet?" "Have you picked where we're eating yet?") also complained about what we were doing. I took an active role in planning primarily because no one else would. Did that allow my personal biases to shape our trip in significant ways? Maybe!

I feel like Richard Nixon suddenly. Who am I defending myself against? If the President does it, it's not illegal! Anytime you put yourself in that close contact for any extended period of time, minor grievances are bound to magnify themselves. I'm still working through some of them I guess.

So we spent Monday afternoon walking around old Quebec, which is beautiful and historical and etc. I love Quebec City but the language issue makes me feel uncomfortably imperial, ie forcing the locals to speak my language of choice rather than their own. But no matter, we didn't stay long in Quebec. We supped on poutine from an upscale looking but still affordable little restaurant tucked away along an alley. It was not as messy as I had hoped. Actually, it was fairly refined, with thin frites and oversized cheese curds that were too big too melt.

We returned to our motel and had a collective religious moment (or something) when we discovered Extreme Couponing on TV. What a show! (An ok joke I made, preserved for posterity: They should make a special crossover episode between Extreme Couponing and Hoarders).

But the most surprising development of the night was in our ability to rouse ourselves from our inertia, and head out again, into the night, for drinks. Past experience from our New York trip suggested that once we returned to our fort, our day would be done, based on the difficulty of affecting collective action among large groups. But leave our motel twice in one day we did. I picked a place using the internet on Rue St. Jean (iirc) outside the old city called Le Sacrilege, which was a bar with a good ambience (dark, but mellow, and not too loud which based on my reaction to it, is apparently all I've ever wanted in bar). They served no food, only salted cheese, which delivered what it promised: it was salted cheese.

We had a couple of drinks (another welcome change from New York: we were all of age to drink) and wandered out to find food. It was late though and things were closing and we ran into our old nemesis, the problem of affecting collective action, and so we dithered and dallied and no one could make any head way towards make a decision that everyone could agree on so eventually we ended up in a supermarket where those who needed them bought shrink wrapped sandwiches, and also we picked up material for assembling PB&J. I think we also stopped at a McDonald's too on the way back to our home-base. The night had started promisingly and ended poorly.

TUESDAY

Day Two saw us heading east towards Fredericton, a stop off destination picked based on convenience and geography, not on any overwhelming desire to visit New Brunswick's capital. Our hotel was located on the north side of the St. Lawrence, and so our GPS took us through the old city again, which is always nice to see, and then to the ferry, because no one had bothered to check the GPS's planned route. (The day before we watched a news report on a couple who had to be rescued from their car after their GPS had led them astray). Anyway, the drive to Fredericton was uneventful. There is a lot of nothing between the two cities, and the state of Maine just acts as a big roadblock really.

In Fredericton we stayed in a Howard Johnson, which was acceptable. I should say something about how we picked our accommodation. Obviously price was a factor, and I don't think we ever payed much more than $100 a night but even more important was exterior access to our room. As poor college-aged kids, our major cost-cutting move was to pack more than the designated occupancy limit into each room. $100 a night divided between six people becomes suddenly much more affordable. So being able to come and go as we pleased without arousing front desk suspicion or raised-eyebrows was a major selling point (In New York we stayed in a Best Western, and having to stagger ourselves every time we wanted to go out was kind of a hassle).

It was raining and fairly late in the day by the time we reached the Fred (actually, our entire time in NB, there and back, it was raining), so we resolved only to go out for food, and not spend anytime exploring the city. I picked the place using the East Coast guide book I took out from the library back home. The Lunar Rogue Pub is a pretty pubby pub, and I had my first fish and chips of the trip (not my last) and though the tartar sauce came in Kraft packets, the experience was not a bad one. Our waiter was nice, and offered not only to split our bills, but to split a certain order among a only a few of us. Unnecessarily nice waiters were something of a theme on the East Coast.

WEDNESDAY

Wednesday was our designated day for reaching Halifax, but I pushed for some sightseeing along the way. We set out for the Hopewell Rocks, the site of those distinctive Flowerpot Rocks that reveal themselves in low tide, which is located due south of Moncton . Our GPS gave us some screwy directions however, and sent us blindly into NB's back roads, until we ended up in logging camp where a road should have been. Anyway we found them eventually, and it was worth it. The park was still closed for the season, and it was cold and drizzly, but that only meant there were fewer people there to get in the way of our pictures. We timed it well too, arriving as the tide was at its furthest out. New Brunswick doesn't have like a whole lot going for it, but the Bay of Fundy is worth a visit.

After that we buckled down and got down to the business of reaching Halifax, our ostensible goal from the start. Our motel, a sprawling Days Inn, was actually in Dartmouth, not Halifax. Dartmouth is Halifax's scuzzier sister, from what I could gather, but I hesitate to judge to harshly because we made zero effort to find out if Dartmouth had a gentler side or what (Confirmation bias and etc).

That night we were pretty tired and also gravity was pretty strong, so we had KFC and I ate a gross amount of it. I think we watched Modern Family? Sitting in our hotel not doing anything became, predictably, something of our default position.

I'm going to finish this later because yowzah this is getting long.

gonna get stuff done

Feel like the best thing to do right now is just throw myself into school work, like just compltely bury my head in books and research and studying and not come for air until april 16 and hope that things will work out. You hear about people throwing themselves into their work to distract from other shit in their lives so why can't I be that guy? It used to be I would bury myself in video games and awesome tv shows to distract myself but I've abused that long enough to know how hollow and unfulfilling that can be. So! Why not try something novel, like accomplishing shit in lieu of worrying about all the question marks and minor disappointments that constitute my life?

girl talk

ok I want to get this out of the way quick. I want some catharsis but I don't want to work very hard for it ok?

so girls, I'm bad with them. There is such a gulf between what I think should happen and my ability to get there that it is not really funny. Like I can talk to girls, that's not really the problem. I am capable of having a functional, healthy conversation with a person I am attracted to. So that's one hurdle cleared.

But ok, there's this girl and I was working on small project with her for class so we were thrown into close contact with each other for a good 48 hour period and obviously I am incapable of being around any moderately attractive female person for any extended period of time without developing a major crush. She's cute and smart and confidant which is like, hello, three checks off my 3 point criteria for the Perfect Woman. I mean its not even fair how attractive she was, but also just comfortable with herself as a person which I find kind of irresistible in the right circumstances. Probably because I lack that same comfort with myself? Am I some sort of confidence vampire? Feeding off their strong feminine sexuality?? Undoubtedly.

So there's a tension, I'm attracted to confidant girls because I lack confidence in myself (you always want you can't have?) but that lack of confidence cripples my ability to even conceive of a reality in which a Hypothetical Confidant Woman would be even interested in me. Like if I'm not even crazy about myself what right do I have to go around foisting myself on others?

So we finished our assignment, and our little contract basically dissolved and suddenly there was like zero reason for us to really even know each other anymore. Like we had a couple good convos where we just shot the breeze talking about school and classes and whatever and it's not like she wasn't engaged but it's like does that constitute enough to form some sort of lasting relationship around? Really don't want to be the pervy guy who hits on everything that moves but I think I might be too respectful of women? If that makes sense? She's so hot she's making me sexist etc.

Is our relationship close enough to add her on facebook? Like I also don't want to be the guy who friends you on facebook after knowing you for 5 minutes. I don't want to be a lot of things. I'm pretty clear on what I don't want to be. Everything else is question marks.

We parted ways after class today and I just had this sinking feeling, like my heart was just filled with a mopey sort of lethargy. They always say that the worst thing that could happen if you ask someone out is s/he'll say "no" and what's so bad about that? Um, everything? Rejection is the fucking worst, especially when it comes from someone you've put on a pedestal. I can't deal with rejection, especially not from somebody I already know (even if its only been a few days). That's even worse because she's not rejecting a stranger but some one she knows and has formed opinions about. Really don't know if I could take the revelation that we've built up asymmetrical opinions of each other in our heads. And how could we not have? I've basically conceived her as a dream girl incapable of wrongdoing (well she is from alberta so...) which is a dumb and probably unhealthy way to conceptualize of anyone.

And its so frustrating because yesterday I felt on top of the world, like capable of anything and possibly indestructible and today I have a dull ache in my heart and I'm profoundly exhausted by the thought of school. These last couple of weeks I have been working just insanely hard and then suddenly there were no immediate deadlines, nothing was due the next day and I just crashed. It's like I had some sort of animating force propelling and suddenly it vanished and I am a lifeless golem again.

It's like you work so hard for something and then you get there or get it and you realize it was always kind of false to begin with and it just shatters your will to continue.

I'm also annoyed because I only just now feel like i understand how to "do" university, and it so close to being over. Like I wasted so much time and while obviously all that time is a factor in who I am today and the decisions I make now, just thinking abck on the poor choices and just the miserable state I was during what are ostensibly supposed to be the best years of my life? fffuck. I'm making up for lost time in a lot of ways - I have friends at school and talk to professors and even know a few people on a low level first name basis which is brilliant and is exactly the sort of thing I avoided doing during any of the last four years. But there are two weeks left and then its summer school and that is unlikely to be any fun at all via not being courses I'm interested plus also full of people I don't know, won't have shared classes with before and its like arrrgh this shit is not fair. I want a do over.

Like I said, yesterday i felt great about all of this. I had a crush on a girl, friends, acquaintances, a few solid weeks of non-stop studying and work behind me and everything made a certain amount of sense. I want that back damn it, not this stupid angst. I feel like fucking teenager and it's not pleasant.

slow descent into alcoholism

i don't understand alcoholism. i don't know what it is but the idea of using alcohol as some sort of crutch is just so far out of my frame of reference. i've self-diagnosed myself with an addictive personality but i can't picture myself abusing alcohol. maybe its because i only currently drink socially and maybe its because alcohol usually just makes me sleepy but i can't see any way for me to do it. i think i have to many hang-ups around booze. like the idea of drinking alone seems like the saddest thing. like if i'm drinking alone to get drunk i've already lost so many battles to get there that the alcoholism is probably just one of any number of concurrent problems

doing unpleasant stuff

so i've put off doing something unpleasant for the last few weeks like i do and now i have officially run out of time. i wish i wasn't like this but its hard to change. i'm trying to be a better person who owns his mistakes and hopefully learns from them and finds ways to improve but this is difficult (like duh).

i feel scared and intimidated and in over my head. scared that i am going let myself, and maybe more importantly, others, down. i think that's what's the source of my procrastination. i would rather not play the game than try and be found wanting, which is a big fear of mine, that I am a fraud, an unambitious slacker jerk who wont amount to much and everybody will find out.

this project is so big and has so many future potential ramifications for job opportunities that i am terrified of failing. i'm working with a partner and she is so amazing and intelligent and just so profoundly curious about everything and engaging and successful that it is intimidating. i know we are nominally equal partners but its like there is such a gap between our levels of experience that i don't know what i have to contribute which makes me feel like a fraud pretending at intelligence and its only a matter of time before she finds out how useless i can be. do you know how much xbox i have played over the last three weeks? how many episodes of breaking bad and cougar town i have watched? its gross. i know comparing myself to others is unproductive but i can't help but feel that i come up wanting.

i know i have some baseline intelligence. i go to a good school, i can get good grades on my papers, i am the "smart one" in my group of friends but my lack of ambition is worries me. not that i have any burning need to go to law school or enter the corporate world or whatever but i know there are careers that i would like to enter but i don't have any concrete way to achieve these murky long term goals. i don't work well with the long term, everything i do is in the short term. trying ti plan more than three weeks out terrifies me, like acknowledging that i have some say in the way the universe unfolds around me.

so this project: its huge, bigger than anything i have ever done before, the kind of project that will result in real world tangible results (or as tangible as anything on the internet can be) and lead to job opportunities or at the very least a nice line on my cv or w/e and my approach this whole time has been to retreat and pretend like nothing is going on. i don't know how to deal. i want to be successful, a lot of my self-image is invested in this succeeding but i don't know how to make it happen and my first instinct is to lean heavily on my partner but what kind of image does that project? So i've been ignoring the issue for the last four weeks, all of the winter holiday basically and now i have this class tomorrow and its not like i can avoid this any longer and i will somehow have to justify my awol period. and you know me i am no good at lying or making excuses so what am i going to do? sorry, felt like taking it easy for a few weeks now lets get crackin!

i am trying to imagine the worst case scenario so as to prepare myself and i think my worst fear is that this episode has revealed me to my partner as the flaky, unreliable, commitment-phobic person that i am and that our working relationship will be strained from here on out. but then i spend most of my time in my head which can be a horrible echo chamber of horrors sometimes where slight transgressions get amplified (i wrote amplified not magnified to keep with the echo chamber metaphor - will you have noticed this in the future???) into gigantic mistakes. the first thing to remember is that things are almost never as bad as you imagine them to be: what for you is reasonable grounds for a ritualized japanese style suicide, barely registered with anyone else. people are self absorbed right? am i rationalizing? because of course sometimes things are a actually a hundred times worse than you imagined and then you are a real knob because you've spent all this time prepping your doomsday plan only to discover you weren't even in the right ballpark in terms of apocalypse scenarios.

so so so i guess what i'm mostly worried about at this very moment is less the damage (if any) that i have done to my future hypothetical career and more to the damage i've done to how my partner perceives me. has this whole thing been a weird passive aggressive thing? i wish my primary response to external pressure was not to shut down. given the choice between fight and flight i grow wings every time which makes it hard to deal with problems. small problems become big problems when mixed with inaction.

so maybe thats what my new years resolution should be: act more, react less.

ugh i've just been feeling so inadequate to everything lately. taking care of business, myself, others, whatever i just don't feel up to it, which is dumb, though still true probably. i was hoping this piece would act as some catharsis and i guess i feel a little bit better.

it's such a simple thing: check your school email dummy what is the worst thing that could possibly have happened? if something was really major she had other ways to contact you so what could you have missed? i wish ignoring my email inbox was not so fucking easy. fuuuck.