Wednesday, January 23, 2013

Some things...

There's a lot about life that I don't understand.  I don't mean to say this as some profound thing or to try to separate myself from the pack.  I'm sure that there are things about life that 100% of people don't understand.  What I mean to say is that there are things about my life that I don't understand.  Certain situations arise, and I don't understand why I handle them the way I do.

I don't handle personal setbacks very well. I feel like I'm a pretty rational person, but whatever chemicals are firing off in my brain would disagree.  Feeling like this makes me tired.  It makes me want to just give up.  "What am I going to have to deal with today," is usually the first thought I have when I wake up.  It's not anything happy or optimistic.  It's how can I endure another day.  And I'm not saying that my life is all bad.  I have good friends.  I have a good family.  It's just that with every good thing, I cringe waiting for the other shoe to drop.  I wait for the bad that will balance out the good.

I always seem to latch onto a situation that, to someone on the outside, is obviously bad for me.  For whatever reason, I always think I can turn it around to work in my favor despite that fact that I have LITERALLY no history of doing so.  This is especially true with women.  My brain will decide whatever it is that attracts a person to another, and then it's over for me.  When it doesn't work out, I get really down.  Really, really down.  I know people deal with rejection.  It happens, but for me, it's intensified for reasons I discussed in the second paragraph.  I end up questioning myself.  I regret all the things I didn't do and feel like an idiot for the things I did do.  I think I'm a good guy.  Funny, fun to be around, witty, all that stuff.  I don't understand why it happens, but it definitely does.

I appreciate friends trying to make me feel better.  "Oh, you'll find somebody.  Everybody does!"  Years of being a ridiculous pessimist immediately make me think that not everybody does; nothing is guaranteed.  It's luck.  It's circumstance.  It's a whole number of things that need to go right, and for me, for whatever reason, they aren't.

Somebody said to me the other day that by the time you turn 30 you've either got it or you don't.  I totally believe this and it scares me.  It scares me that I don't have my shit together yet and don't really know if I ever will.  It scares me that I'm starting to not care about things.  I have no passion for anything.  I feel like the person I used to be is almost completely gone.  I wanted to be in a much different place at this point in my life.  I'm starting to develop a really negative view of myself because I've done basically nothing with myself.

I know the natural reaction to this will be "go see a doctor!"  I get that.  I've been three times.  I've been on "happy pills" three times, each time long enough for them to do whatever it is they are supposed to do, and each time the benefits were only temporary.  I know I should keep trying, but it's frustrating to be temporarily fixed and then go back to the lows.  Today it became very apparent to me that I need to do something, though.  I don't want to be one of those people who wake up one day and just decide that they're done living.  Don't get me wrong, I don't plan on doing that, but does anybody plan on doing that?  That's not what anybody wants to do.  I just feel like a normal person wouldn't react to things the way I have been lately.

So I'm going to try to do something to get myself back on track soon.  I don't know what yet, but I'm looking into some things.  I know this was very whiny and self-indulgent, but it was written at the end of a long, sad and frustrating day.  I needed to get it out and didn't want to burden friends with it.  Also, it offers some explanation to people who have to deal with me on a daily basis and probably aren't sure what Dale they're getting that day.  So I apologize for that.  I'm definitely going to try to change that.

(I haven't written anything of any length in over a year, and I'm too tired to proofread this, so...there's that.  Not even sure it makes sense.)