It’s a Humpty Dumpty Sort of Life

It seems to be a rule in life that if you get knocked down you have to get up again. If you’re, for example, a gazelle being chased by a lion or a fly trapped in a spider’s web. If you just stay down and don’t move you’ll never move again. So why do we humans stay down? Do we want to get eaten by the spider? (Just in case anyone was wondering that’s actually my ultimate nightmare.) I dunno.

Today I was blah. Emotionally I was in the dumps where I throw all of my emotional banana peels and snotty tissues. But I never think in those moments, “I better stop being blah if I want to survive.” I think, “Man, I wish things were different and that spiders didn’t exist and that I could make myself happy.” But you can’t just snap out of a depressed mindset. You have to crawl. And then you have to try and not be discouraged that all you can do is crawl.

So I crawled. And didn’t get eaten.

Crawl guys. Crawl.

I feel like I’m on the verge of greatness, the precipice. But I can’t push myself over the edge. I refuse to jump. I feel like I always have so much to say and absolutely no clue how to say it. I have all these feelings that I want to put into words but when I try they don’t come out right. If I can’t describe what I’m feeling perfectly, I get frustrated and say that I’ll come back to it, hence why I haven’t blogged in a while. My brain feels hazy and confused 47% of the time. I’ve used this metaphor a couple of times, but I feel like there’s a knife stuck in my heart. And I’m afraid that if I pull it out, I’ll bleed out. So I just keep it there. That’s as accurate a description as I can muster. There’s not a clear line between right and wrong anymore. It’s blurred. I used to think that there was an old me and a new me. But now I’m caught in the middle, somewhere between destruction and metamorphosis. A lot of times when I try to build something new, before it can fully form, it burns down. Some days I feel like I have to try too hard to be me. When I try to be genuine, it has artificial undertones. It’s because right now I feel like I’m broken into parts and the parts are all vastly different from one another. So then when I try and love or care or have faith, I feel like I’m contradicting another part of myself.

I think full blown metamorphosis will happen when all the parts of me finally merge into one lucid thought, when I can finally confidently use adjectives to describe myself.

I am sensitive

I am kind

I am thoughtful

I am intelligent

I am giving

When you’re internally struggling it affects everything that you externally try to do. Trying to be a good friend, trying to be supportive, trying to learn, trying to stay relevant, trying to handle anxiety and stress. It all becomes a lot harder when you feel so unsure about a lot of things.  I have no clue what I’m doing with my life. No clue at all really. That’s something I’m very unsure about. I know that I’ll figure it out.

But even though I know that I’ll figure it out, it doesn’t make it any less awkward when people ask, “So what are you doing these days?”

Well. Breathing. Walking. Eating quite a bit. I dabble in sleeping. And I’m majoring in drinking coffee way too late at night. I never know what to say, because if you say, “Oh nothing much, I’m not in college and I’m unemployed,” people tend to look down on that. But why? Why should we have our lives figured out? Figuring out what you want to do with your life is kinda a big decision. Why not just spend some time finding out what you like to do and don’t like and what your strengths and weaknesses are.

I’m not talking about bumming it. College is good. I would like to be in college. And jobs are good. I want one. You should probably have a job while you figure things out. But there’s nothing wrong with taking some time figuring out what you want to do. However, figuring out what you want to do becomes a whole lot harder when you can’t even figure yourself out (I thought I’d throw in a “However” because I’ve been using “but” too much.)

I’ll jump down from my soapbox now.

So how does feeling like a whole person again happen? That’s what I’m still trying to figure out. But I’ll get there.

People are people so we tend to give things a bad name. Christianity, America, love, fried food, ourselves. People look at other people and see the things they represent and decide that they don’t like who those things have made that person into, and they don’t want to be like them. And a negative opinion of the things they stand for forms in that persons mind. I think I’m afraid of this happening and that’s why I don’t openly stand for many things. On some things I’m still figuring out what I stand for. And other things I’m afraid of being judged, what the people around me would think. There’s this quote by Jonathan Lethem that says, “I want what we all want, to move certain parts of the interior of myself into the exterior world to see if they can be embraced.” That’s accurate.

Up there I said that people are people. Sometimes I think we forget that. Everyone is flawed. Everyone. We all have issues. Different issues, but issues. If we spent as much time dealing with our own issues as we did trying to fix other peoples, imagine what we could accomplish.

And if we loved people. Not selfishly but honest to god loved people. Emily Giffin says, “Maybe that’s what it all comes down to. Love, not as a surge of passion, but as a choice to commit to something, someone, no matter what obstacles or temptations stand in the way. And maybe making that choice, and again, day in and day out, year after year, says more about love than never having a choice to make at all.” Love is an attitude. An attitude where we choose every day to love people when they’re being people.

I’m a people. And I’m flawed and I have issues. And like everyone else I’m still working through them, every day. So maybe that’s how I become a whole person. By daily taking small steps to becoming the person that I know I can be. Not setting up camp in the spider web of self-doubt and insecurity, or eating rotten apples in my emotional dump. Not staying down. Crawling. And continuing to crawl and move forward and not letting your soul become cluttered with sorrow.  As John Steinbeck said, “But I have a new love for that glittering instrument, the human soul. It is a lovely and unique thing in the universe. It is always attacked and never destroyed.”

I feel like this is a recurring epiphany. Every so often it pops in my mind and then, for the billionth time, I think “Oh, of course, I should have thought of that before.” And of course I already have and here we are.

One day I hope to be able to express my thoughts as well as these writers express my thoughts. But until then, I think I’m going to eat another piece of pizza and go to bed.

So goodnight all. May your dreams be filled with endless buffets and hot air balloons.