releasing this one as is, unfinished and unedited, from the drafts prison to let these old thoughts be gone from my being. i feel better now than i did when i wrote this btw. just needed to air some things out at a time when i was feeling more vulnerable than usual. tw/cw for a suicide mention
i'm going thru some shit right now. the tl;dr is that i am unhappy. i am unhappy and have largely been unhappy for the last 5 years of my life, despite some genuinely great moments and strong strides that have been made along the way. and i think just voicing this assertion of unhappiness into the ether is a necessary step in moving through it and changing my life to be a happier one again. so here's some words if you care.
i think ever since i became a teenager and started hiding from/acting out to my parents that i've always had a persistent feeling of being "inbetween stages" of my life. i've spent much of my adulthood feeling "stuck" by various sets of circumstances, all of which have washed over me as time passed. but the feeling of being in a "transitional period" never went away. furthermore the feeling of a "past self" being wholly divorced from my current being is a concept i am only just recently attempting to unlearn.
this kind of feeling was something easy to ignore before covid happened, as i was still young enough to be figuring out who i was and powering through whatever was rough or stagnant with resilience to make it to the brighter moments, which back then came more frequently. for much of my time in college the balance between Great Times With Friends and Crippling Depression About My Identity was ping-ponging pretty aggressively. sometimes i was up late trying to finish homework for gen-eds i didn't understand why i had to take while i was getting a film degree, wondering if failing the class would make me want to kill myself. and other times i would travel to new york for a weekend just because a show was happening and i had friends i could visit there. that's the other thing, i had money back then lol. i had money and my health wasn't a concern to me and anything i did was something i felt i could muscle through and worry about the details of later.
well, it's later now. life has slowed down and i've been trying to "work on myself" for the fleeting remainder of my twenties. i started going to therapy in early 2021 and it's probably the best decision i've made in my entire life. it's also been the one with the most brutal consequences. because when you start going to therapy, and you actually commit to doing the work in there, oh man do you have to sort through those details. you start pulling apart every aspect of who you are and why you act the way you do and you reveal your realest, strongest, often ugliest emotions. and yeah it's best to learn to hold dialectics, to keep those emotions as only one piece of the greater understanding of a situation as you move through it. but i've been Moving Through A Lot of Situations in therapy and proud as i am of the work i've done there, i also really feel like my daily life outside of therapy is one of few pleasures.
i've become a complete shut-in since 2020, i also have been living in poverty for most of my time since then. i never go out to things unless i am dragged to them by another party anymore. i've only made one new friend on my own since coming to chicago four years ago and it's because she was a coworker i had a crush on. i would not have actively sought out that friendship had it not been tied to an activity i was already forced to take part in (you know, having a job). i am an avoidant person. i am resistant to change. i have bad separation anxiety. and i am fundamentally uncomfortable taking up space in any capacity. i also hold perhaps too much stock in reassurance from others to navigate my life.
these are all things i've come to learn about myself. but i also think one of the biggest contributing factors to my resistance to making beneficial changes in my life is that perception i hold onto about being stuck as if i was living my current moment in purgatory. even living in poverty, i still have the tools to make changes that would allow me to, say: see more of the city or meet new people or get close the people i already know or make a name for myself in some artistic endeavor or get medicated for the number of mental illnesses i am stricken with or just go outside and enjoy an activity for once. but i don't reach for the kinds of lifestyle changes that facilitate those things because (in addition to all that other stuff) there is an ever-present sense that i'm just treading water. that no matter what i do or how real my efforts are, they're all in service of just getting to the next 24 hours and nothing more. i'm not "living correctly" i'm not "enacting change" and whatever future i want is always going to be a carrot on a stick.
and that feeling means i can't just smell the roses while i'm here either. nothing feels satisfactory to me anymore. nothing feels like it has any weight to it unless it involves exhaustive emotional work. and that really sucks. i don't want to be having a difficult time just to be able to feel something. that shit is exhausting. i feel like blent girl man, i just wanna do nerd shit again. i wanna snowboard or whatever. i want to be cringe and be free. please god just let me have that. just a little independence for once as a treat. break me from the chains that hold me back from living my life. i'm not asking i'm begging.
i know thinking about all this in this way is tunnel vision. i'm acutely aware that i back myself into these corners when i don't need to. this is why i think voicing the feeling is a mandatory step in manifesting the future i actually want. it lets me feel and be valid in that feeling, that hurting, but then let's me release it and let it go. cuz i know that i am making moves. i know i'm already doing shit that is good for me. i just have to figure out how to shake the feeling that it's not all in service of something greater. that whatever i'm doing is not a Frivolous Now, paralyzed away from a life worth living, but my current moment that i am allowed to navigate however i want. one that has purpose and will create happiness in the now that i live in, not just some nebulous future down the line when the now is behind me.