"I can't believe we said no to free beer!"

The reality we live in is shaped by the narrative we tell ourselves. We have the power to influence our actions and behavior in the external world through focusing on our internal monologue. For those of us plagued by persistent low spirits and outlooks tending towards doom and gloom, an objective glance at the content of our thoughts can be helpful. Although it’s not an easy feat.

 Cultivating metacognition is a task that takes time. Through the discipline of meditation, analyzation, and introspection, one can perceive their own thoughts as both ethereal and ephemeral.  You can take away the clout and emotional impact your thoughts have on you if you understand that they don’t control you, they just exist, like clouds in the sky. Maybe that’s a lazy or generic metaphor, but it’s true. You can fight the sky if you don’t like the shade of blue it is, but you’ll change nothing and you’ll experience less consternation if you simply acknowledge the color and go about your day.

You can consciously reject the negative and interject your own positivity. Create a new narrative for yourself. Tell yourself a new story about who you are and who you want to be. Tell yourself this new story every day, and with time it will work itself into your subconscious. It will become your new reality. You will become the person you are creating in your mind. A person you love. A person without the negative perceptions and self-imposed limitations. Perhaps a person you always were, but didn't realize.

This isn’t to eschew the reality of depression. I don’t mean to be pedantic or falsely oversimplify things. Depression is real, and not just something you can simply will away with a few minutes of positive thinking. It a process. It's changing yourself by changing not just your thoughts, but the very way you think, or how you perceive those thoughts.  It’s a commitment. And I'm making that commitment.

Every day.

I will imagine and design the person I want to be, and I will put forth the effort, discipline, and hard work it takes to be that person. I want life to be something exciting and rewarding. Not the burden of doubt, insecurity, and self-hatred it once was. I want to look out and see possibilities, not daunting tasks I must grit my way through. I want to simply live life.

And live it well. 

"It's not the years, honey. It's the mileage."

My mind’s creative well seems to have dried out lately. I think it’s running low due to massive amounts of energy being spent on catastrophe-based introspection and a general sense of aimlessness. I’ll try not to make this a half-cocked, self-indulgent public therapy session, but I promise nothing.

My wheels have been spinning all day, everyday. But I never lower them to hit the ground, so I’m just wasting gas. My mind won’t shut off. Every day is a rumination on “what do I want out of life and how do I get it?” I spend more of my time reading blogs with titles like How To Increase Your Productivity and watching (ostensibly) inspirational Youtube videos about how to live your dream life and achieve success than I do applying myself and moving forward towards any designated goal.

I’m chock full of ideas on how to get going but I got no fucking clue on where it is I want to go. I have no endgame to try and materialize, so I’m reaching for a goal that doesn’t yet exist. And even though it doesn’t exist, I keep reaching out. And sooner or later, I’ll overextend and fall.

Maybe this has something to do with the fact that I’m turning 30 in a few weeks.

I’ll admit something I haven’t admitted out loud for a long time.

I view myself as stupid.

I have no interest in a pity party, nor do I need anyone to denounce that idea. I’m not fishing for any positive reinforcement. It’s just something I’ve always felt. From needing tutors throughout my academic life and being prescribed to mood altering chemicals, to still not being able to navigate simple arithmetic and heavily relying on spell check, I’ve always felt incompetent.

I’ve gained enough objectivity in my life so far as to be able to analyze those feelings and where they come from. I think they were externally instilled at a young age as opposed to intrinsically manufactured and I fight the thoughts when I can. But some days, when the chips are down and I’m dwelling on how much of my life I feel as though I’ve wasted, I just can’t keep them at bay.

“Maybe you really are just stupid. Maybe your brain never fully developed. Most other people don’t struggle and falter in every conceivable way like you do.”

Plus, there’s my life long struggle with mental illness. But I think that’s for a different blog at a different time.

So I’m sitting around feeling aimless, stupid, and entirely too self-absorbed. I’m becoming increasingly isolated and all the research and reading I’m doing seems to be more of a detriment that any sort of remedy. I feel old and uneducated and the world and everyone in it seems to pass me by. I recognize these feelings as symptoms of depression. But as any entry level med student could tell you, the identification of symptoms doesn’t relieve the effects.

But I’m getting too down and off point. Is there a point to this entry? I don’t know, I just felt I needed to write one. Ah yes, productivity as related to purpose.

You know, Ayn Rand (dropping literary references to overcompensate for my feelings of stupidity and under-education….shut up mind!) said in her seminal book Atlas Shrugged that the most depraved type of human being was a man without purpose. And as much as Ayn Rand was a gigantic lady-douche, I think she had a point there. (Also, her prose was astonishing.)

I feel as though I have no purpose right now.

I feel like some goddamn passion would cure these days of idle living.

I mean, I’ve always wanted to write for a living, but where’s the pragmatism in that? I’ve been financially unstable since I entered adulthood, do I really want to extend that in such a untenable industry as creative writing? Maybe I should just find a job that pays alright and live my life like a normal person.

But maybe that’s a cop-out.

Or maybe it’s practical.

It sure feels like a fucking cop-out.

In The Tao of Wu, Rza tells of how, Ol’ Dirty Bastard (shortly before he died)  came to him in a state of perturbation and simply stated, “I don’t get it.”

Well I don’t get it either, ODB.

I don’t get it either.

"What is that, Nietzsche? Shut the fuck up."

I’ve been thinking about a quote from Plato a lot recently.  Well, Plato by way of Socrates, but we’ll just say Plato of the sake of being succinct. 

Perhaps quoting Plato can be seen as pretentious. Perhaps, given my level of education, you think I have no business quoting Plato. 

But it’s my blog and you don’t have to read the damned thing. 

Plato supposed that “An unexamined life is not worth living” and I believe there is a lot of merit in that. He’s shown to be an immutable force in the world of philosophy and an oft studied and idealized historical figure. So there’s our jumping off point. 

Examine your life.    

Good.

Got it.  

When do I stop? 

Is constant examination a good thing? Could too much examination be unhealthy? 

It’s a scientific law that the very act of observation changes that which is being observed. 

What if those changes are to your detriment?

Let’s say you can’t laugh at a joke without wondering if those around you are questioning whether you actually find it funny or if you’re just laughing to prove to the group that you’re intelligent enough to understand the base level of humor being displayed. Then, in an compulsory extrapolation of that train of thought, you extend that curiosity outward and second guess the laughter of the group. 

Who here is not on the level?

You can’t fully immerse yourself in a romantic relationship without wondering what psychic scar tissue you’re currently wading through and how it came to be. 

You stare at the other person and wonder what you represent to there unconscious psyche. And when they get mad, you’re curious what dormant childhood trauma you've evoked. 

Beyond that you find yourself falling into halfcocked and quasi-educated dissections of people as base animals. Walking piles of meat who have unanalyzed emotional reactions to just about everything and cling to bizarre and antiquated superstitions and desperately try to make sense of the imminent nothingness of death as we continue in those constant steps towards it.

You play host to myriad demanding thoughts that are as relentless as the passing of time and you can’t see the irony of your own inability to stop the reactionary thinking because you have allowed yourself to accept the delusional assertion that you (and only you) somehow recognize the worlds maladaptive thought process and have risen above it, and that, that is the reason you’re depressed. 

It’s not you. It’s the world. 

You heard that Plato quote remember? 

Although you didn’t read the book, the know the quote and it’s given you the intellectual upper hand. 

You got it all figured out. That’s why you’re almost 30 and still baffled by yourself and you spend your free time sitting in your boxers, drinking too much coffee, and writing in vain attempts to make sense out of a few thoughts in that overrunning river of questions that makes up your mind. 

And by putting ink to paper (so to speak) you find you can quell a few internal storms and you have the faint glimmer of hope that maybe, just maybe some day you could make a living out of writing things down. And maybe that’s more delusional than that aforementioned thought of inferred clarity.  

If an unexamined life in not worth living, perhaps an over examined life is an exercise in neurosis.  

"Behold your Bounderby!"

It’s 10:30 on a Tuesday night and I’m sitting on the roof of my building (right next to my apartment/hut) and I keep letting lose inextricable sighs.

I have, within the confines of my recently and greatly augmented life, a fair amount of time to reflect, speculate, and hypothesize on and about my past, present and hopeful trajectory. I still feel a powerful urge towards an undefined direction that I thought moving abroad would sate. That, on top of the arrival of emotions I had previously sunk with alcohol, and the new feelings that come with living in a foreign land and by myself for the first time ever, has me feeling out of sorts. I feel the overwhelming urge to create.  But music is out of the picture and every time I sit to write, I come up with blank pages or an empty screen. What could I add to the world that would be worthwhile or of substance? What would I enjoy that I could share with others that wouldn’t be some masturbatory practice. I write this blog to share my thoughts and experiences, but I always feel it’s a bit attention starved and occasionally highlighting a false reality I want people to perceive. 

So what is there? What’s that missing puzzle piece? Is that the shared dread that haunts mankind? Is that why we cultivate egos and worship deities and hope and work and pray? Perhaps I’m trying to boil too much down to a single question that when answered, would encapsulate the world. Or at least the world pertaining to the combined thoughts of the confused, delusional, and weary. 

I have ideas about sitting and staring into nothing, in the hopes of obtaining some peace of mind through a chance glimpse of oblivion. But I never get that glimpse. I can’t even seem to conjure a steady notion of what it is that that infinite chimera might look like. If this sounds like depressive ranting, that’s not how it’s meant. I mean, I think the yoke of depression will always bear down on my shoulders in some fashion or another, I’ve always been forthright about that. But I’m not in a bad way right now. Most days are good, and I’m sleeping like people are meant to sleep and I’m meditating in increasing measure and my physical activity is back to where I like it. At insane amounts of industrious and laborious actions.  So day to day, I’m feeling like a new man. But I don’t know who the hell this new guy is, and I don’t take kindly to strangers around these parts. So I have to figure out what the hell he wants and quick. Because the quicker that happens, the quicker I can take steps in a direction I feel confident about. Everyone wants to know where it is they're going. Right?  I mean, they say it’s not the destination, it's the journey. But then they turn around and say you should never leap before you look. Well I’ll tell them that talking in platitudes is for assholes.

 I’ll just keep on searching. 

Build my gallows high, baby.

I began my relationship with alcohol at the tender age of 14 and it’s cogent force has held sway over me ever since. I romanticize it with thoughts corrupted by Kerouac and Hemingway and unquestioning allow it’s presence in my day to day lifestyle. I had the idea to give it up since before I left Michigan. It’s an idea that’s been revolving in my thoughts for awhile now, but oddly enough, I thought it was impractical. My social life is based on it. More personally, the anesthetizing qualities it has gave me the resource to quiet the storm of my mind and given me respite from the crashing waves of wonder, anxiety, introspection, confusion, bafflement and occasional hopelessness that proliferate endlessly in my thinking. But that respite is temporary and those thoughts are often worsened the days after I engage in a session on the drink. I want to get to the core of those thoughts and that's impossible if I continually push them aside with the blank slate of drunkenness. I feel weak and cowardly having to engage in such behavior and to tell the truth, I fucking hate feeling weak. So I’m giving it up. Maybe not forever, but for a prolonged period of time. I haven’t gone longer than a month without getting drunk in over a decade and that’s a trend I feel compelled to break. I want to learn Chinese and start practicing Jiu Jitsu and take up boxing again and become a proficient teacher and explore the unadulterated terrain of my consciousness. Drinking kills my productivity and leaves a dent in my self-confidence and after having spent last night consuming enough gin to kill most people, I’m ready. I’m finally ready to move on from my relationship with alcohol. 

Show me your labeouf.

A week deep into my occupation of the foreign land of Taiwan and I decided to take a walk. Jason has put up with me being his shadow graciously, but I thought I would give him a few hours respite from my company. (As pleasant as it is.)

I walked to the downtown district and caught a quick dinner from a street vendor peddling barbecue chicken and grilled veggies and washed it down with a Heineken from one of the inescapable 7/11s. 

After taking a post-dinner constitutional, I was really starting to feel like I was getting my bearings on the neighborhood I’d been haunting. People seem to either stare at me or completely ignore me. But I’ve been pretty self-conscious lately, so that might be tipping the scale with too heavy a weight. 

I approached the massive mall in which Jason, Forty (new friend) and I had caught a movie in the previous week and I decided to see what was playing. Feeling full of pep and wanting to work off the beer calories I had recently acquired, I decided to walk the 18 stories to the floor in which the movie theater sat. 

I walked up to the ticket counter, sweating profusely and quite out of breath, sinking that self-conscience scale further than I had anticipated. The new Lars Von Trier movie was playing so I decided what the hell, why not get uncomfortable for a couple of hours. 

The young girl at the counter was having trouble understanding me (my mandarin is still nonexistent) and failing to find anything to point at to indicate what I wanted, I fell into that annoying foreigner pattern of speaking louder and hoping that that will somehow get the point across. So around my fifth time trying to convey what movie I wanted to see, I was practically yelling “Nymphomaniac” at this poor girl and my self-consciousness scale had sunk to levels I hadn’t experienced since puberty. A coworker came around who spoke some English and figured out what it was I needed and asked me if there was anything else I wanted. On the counter between us stood a cardboard advertisement for gin and tonics and it hit my eyes like a mirage in a desert. Drinks at a movie theater? What kind of Austin/Chicago hipster twilight zone had I walked into? I ordered one, more like a question than a command, and was relieved when they smiled and indicated that what I had just done was acceptable. 

The theater is pretty small and the chairs are more like La-Z-Boys and love seats. I take my (assigned) seat next to an elderly couple and sit in waiting. A young kid came up to me and asked for my ticket, then told me he would bring me my drink, which I had walked away from the counter without because I was tired of sitting there waiting for it like a grinning idiot. He came back with two large cups full of gin and told me it was 2 for 1. So I’m double fisting G&T’s, about to watch a very provocative movie next to someone's grandparents and I’m grateful that at least the chair I’m sitting in is comfortable. One of us should be.

I summarily sink both drinks and settle in for the show. Halfway through the film those drinks demand to be released and I get up to head to the restroom. As I walk in front of the audience in the small room my silhouette shuffles behind me on the movie screen and I make my way to the door. The door. That damn door. It looked like it belonged in a bank instead of a theater. Its giant stainless steel columns could have held Mordor behind them. (possible hyperbole) 

 I read “PUSH” in English above the handle and complied posthaste. 

The door didn’t budge an inch.

I start rattling it and it groaned and clanged and refused to open and I got the impulse to admit defeat. 

“Just go sit back down, Jay. Clearly this inanimate object possesses a far superior intellect."

But my full bladder stood defiant. 

I sunk the plunger of the handle, but the catch mechanism refused to release. Every time I pressed it down I imagined the sound was akin to that of a brick being hurled through a plate glass window. 

I imagined every set of eyes on my back. I imagined the little old lady leaning over to the little old man. “Maybe it’s an American custom to go berserk when you reach a door?"

The crowd was getting restless. They were ready to burn me in effigy. 

Finally I felt it give and pushed my way through with relief. When I came back in, I made sure not to shut it all the way. Just in case. 

After another gratuitous hour the film ended with stark shots of genitalia and loud German industrial metal being blasted through the speakers. I made my way quickly down the aisle and out that damn door and was greeted by an employee of the theater. He looked me square in the eye and enthusiastically declared “GOOD MORNING!”

It was 10:30 PM.

I grabbed another beer from the 7/11 and drank it on the walk home.