It's Tuesday

It's funny to think that the way I write on this site now will be considered part of an era by me later, and probably viewed with a similar level of distaste as I currently feel about my scribblings as an 18 year old. I was just going back and deleting old entries that are (or were, as extensive editing goes) directly taken from my Assassins story. The more invested I become in my writing, the more vulnerable it feels, the more obligated I feel to protect my characters and their story. Anyhow, some of the posts that incidentally mentioned Assassins were absolutely cringe inducing. It's been said a thousand times by many including me, but it really is amazing how your perspective ages nothing like wine. Perhaps the most simultaneously amusing and sobering aspect is just how unaware you are of how embarrassing you are. Almost everything I wrote as an 18 year old was legitimately how I felt, or if it wasn't, it was how I wanted to be seen, which is in the same vein. The most embarrassing things I've ever written and expressed were pushed out of my heart at the speed of honesty. My perspective of it was totally different. I'll give you an example:


The Seams
April 17, 2005

There are times when I need to speak my mind but I won't. Those times are few and far between, granted, but when they happen they bug me that much more. Then there are times when I do speak my mind, and people invariably get hurt. And I'm not sorry. I'm never sorry. I'm so remorseless you have no idea. I am the embodiment of a complete lack of attachment. And yet I scratch desparately for love. Do I even want that? Or do I just want to not be alone? I ask myself that sometimes, and the answer is both. And one is overriding the other. It's hard to play the altruistic loner. Damn hard. To not settle. To not change to be more appealing to people. To wait for someone who actually meshes with you. It's so easy to just lie and be something you aren't. So easy, you have no idea. I do it every day. EVERY DAY. It's a weakness. The problem is that it drives me insane. I cannot stand the person I am, because no one else can. No, I don't mean that in the way it comes out. This is not a large tragic wail from someone with no friends and no one to lean on. This is one of those little pains that you let bleed out from within. I have friends. I won't lie about that. I won't try to factor them out of the equation to make how I feel seem more dire and apocolyptic. What I'm saying purely concerns that small crack in my life. The one that has fissured into a crevasse. My grades are ass and I don't care. I alienate a friend or two on a regular basis, and I'm upping the ante.


That was me being 100% real, totally genuine. I read it now and want to tag it #whitepeopleproblems. I think immediately, "this is something my sister would write." (She's 16 currently, for the record.) My perspective is blissfully closed. This at the time for me was like an intimate confession. I was sharing something that I just didn't trust people to get, MAAAAAAAN. I wasn't playing the dramatic asshole. I was the dramatic asshole. And there are volumes of this. It's far from an isolated case.

What fascinates me most about it is my complete inability to self-analyze my behavior, my complete obliviousness to just how masturbatory this thinking is. It's a lot scarier to me, the difference between acting this way and thinking this way. Anyone can have a dramatic moment, a moment where you feel boxed in, where no one gets you and you feel like you don't have someone on your side. Thinking this way consistently implies something different entirely. I really was the persecuted artist in my own head. Even though I didn't state it, I really did feel like there was only one Bryan mold, that I exploded out of, and the world wasn't adapting to me. I didn't have to state it, it's laced in every paragraph.

It's pretty funny up until the point where you realize that you could be a more advanced version of the same guy. Is it as noticeable? For me personally and for most people, it isn't. In early adulthood we learn a little grace, a little concealment. Everyone can of course name at least a couple examples from their life of people who lack this, but I think it's fair to say for the most part that as we grow up, our threshold for this overt level of self-indulgence shrinks. Or it mutates into an entity we no longer recognize as self-indulgence. That's a scary thought too. Because honestly for me personally, that selfishness does want to be felt still, sometimes. Just because I recognize it doesn't mean it vanishes. It's important to remember that your mind is the most powerful propaganda machine for your desires that ever will exist. If you want to hate yourself, you'll see irreparable shortcomings in every moment of your day. If you want to feel superior, you'll see those same irreparable shortcomings in others. Your mind will always, at the end of the day, try to achieve the most amount of sentiment, opinion and feeling that is most pleasing to it. Aiming it in the right direction is the everyday subtext struggle.

These are the symptoms of a greater issue. I hesitate to say disease, because who is to say that being a young adult is any different than being a teenager? We're all victims of our eras, subject to the cruel lack of growth that our short time has afforded us. I think it's a mistake to point at a mile marker and tell yourself you've reached minimum safe distance from teenage foolishness. I can, as a 24 year old man, look back on my mentality as an 18 year old and point out how childish it was. I can say, look at how I've grown, and how time has allowed me a perspective that is wider, more understanding and (hopefully) much less susceptible to that young manner of thinking. But I'm sure a 34 year old version of me will say the same thing about the times I'm living now. You're never there, at the end of the road. Because the road and the perceived distance are fluid, and they just change the more you look at them. And that scares me a little bit. How do you to avoid always having that feeling, that you're the same sort of closed perspective thinker that you were as an 18 year old boy or girl?

I think the main struggle of your teenage years is establishing your own identity. We all do it to different levels of aggression, and I think those levels reflect just how embarrassing that era will be later. I know now that I wanted desperately to have and to know my own identity. It's why I started this blog. I had very legitimate moments of despair in social interactions, when I felt like I was being someone that I didn't want to be. I resented others for putting me in that space, even though that's a commonality of life. I forced myself into behaviors that reflected who I thought I wanted to be, even if I wasn't, and tried to take pride in them. I was obsessed with the concept of truthfulness while being an unapologetic liar. And much of that embarrassment is fully documented here. I can and have read it as I've gotten older. As my identity has become more and more established, as some of the concrete has been poured and dried.

How much of that has to do with time? This blog is 8 years old. Have I grown because of all that time? I think it's fair to say that people can squander their time as far as growth is concerned. I have known and do know people that, if they have grown at all, it's been largely imperceptible. Is time a requisite for growth? It seems like the answer is yes. Which is one of the joys of life, no matter how I may fret about it in the above paragraphs. It is undoubtedly rewarding to feel like I've come a distance as a human being. I didn't go to college, I don't have a career, I don't have the classic signposts that people point at to show how far they've come. But I can very clearly feel that I've grown emotionally, I can feel myself constantly taking form. I can put my back to the wall, drawn a pencil line on the wall where the top of my head meets it, and say "See how the years have always taken me higher." I've always worried though, about how much of me is from me, and how much of it is just "this happened to you, so now you're like this."

I guess that's really the kind of thing that really vexes me, and always has in one form or another. How much of me did I choose, and how much of me is unwittingly chosen for me? I'll give you a good example. I was talking to my mother last week about teenagers giving birth to kids. I couldn't understand why a teenager would go through with it. My mom got pregnant with me when she was 18, so she was one of these teenagers. She thinks one of the big problems of why this happens and why the kids turn out crappy is because of how the parents of the teenager act. When she had me, she largely had to rely on herself to take care of me. She was living at home, but she had a job and the most my grandparents ever looked after me was once in a while. The majority of the time she had to find someone else. This really tempered her perspective on this issue. I asked, "You can understand though why a parent would want to help their own child, right?" I probably asked that question three or four times before I got an answer that wasn't a defense of her ideology. She kept saying, "but if they'd do _____ it would be much better." I tried to re-frame the question to be more clear, "Do you see how your own experience has tempered your ideology?" I only really got half of an acknowledgment. She can't change that the experience happened to her. She can't change how deeply it informs her opinion. But how much power does she have to change how anchored to that perspective she is?

This is what scares me: that as I grow older, and I have experiences that inform my opinion, I will lose sight of the validity of other opinions, or be unable to acknowledge the possible weaknesses in my own. It's terribly easy to label things as right and wrong in your head, and while that's something we need socially, I worry about how we abuse that without even realizing it. I couldn't really make my own mother see what I was getting at. She had gone through two decades of experience, and to her that was THE answer. Obviously I'm not saying she's right or wrong. But I think that life is quite often too complicated for those sorts of labels. Will I be able to maintain that distinction when I'm 34, or 48, or 62? Is it more advantageous, or just easier, to be limited in that way when you have children? I know explaining an abstract thought is like pulling teeth with wet hands, but does that also change how you think? This I believe is the struggle of early adulthood, at least it seems to be mine thus far. To be able to observe my behavior of the past, understand it, and resist lapsing into it again in one form or another. Because no one is better at tricking you than yourself, and no one has more to gain from it.