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I am detached from who I once was, and I would much rather be more like I was than what I am.

I neglect the fuck out of this space I set aside to try to reconnect with those parts of myself which I never engage. I want to get back to being a music playing, distance running, delusional little wannabe writer. I'd even like to be a student again. The last time my life made sense to me was when I was still an undergrad. School makes sense to me, but I never figured out what to do next and it's been a damn decade.

It's so odd that the only time I bother to come back here and spend any time typing out the thoughts I'm trying to unravel it ends up a repeat of themes touched on years ago. I'm not so blind as to miss the fact that I've been contending with the same issues for an absurd amount of time with no resolution. I'm no closer to knowing what the hell to do to pay my bills without being miserable, I'm not consistently engaged in any creative or mentally stimulating activities, I'm not close to any goal I have ever envisioned for myself.

I'm not happy, but I'm not so unhappy that I have been compelled to change any of the things I know I have to. Easier to go with the flow, embrace the comforting simplicity of routine, rather than accepting the challenge of making the efforts needed for something better.

Maybe if I were to compose my thoughts more regularly, or find someone with whom to share them earnestly, these entries wouldn't be so repetitive and "I" centric.

I'd love to blame all this shit on having dealt with some serious emotional damage in my mid-twenties, or some difficulty in my formative years, the reality is I've always been eager to accept things as they are and eschew the unknown in favor of familiarity. Far be it from me to give up a reasonably comfortable if deeply unfulfilling life for the pursuit of something potentially more satisfying.

In short I'm unmotivated and aimless, probably a bit lazy, and in no small part scared of doing any of the things I know need be done to get out of this life I don't want to be living.

This went off the rails a little...

I often consider writing as an attempt to formally organize disparate thoughts, and the feelings that often accompany them. I don't think I've ever been particularly good at sorting my thoughts in real time, and certainly much worse at processing emotions. There has always been a slightly frustrating contradiction in that I think I can write reasonably well, but it takes a hell of a lot of editing. I backspace over so many sentences, restructure  and rearrange paragraphs, re-read and subsequently napalm entire entries. In college I considered writing papers trivial for the most part, sometimes even enjoyable, but essay exams were often frustrating because I always thought of half a dozen changes I wanted to make 3 sentences into the first paragraph.

One of the most frequent topics I feel compelled to put some actual thought into is a sense of a loss of identity. I've had the thought almost every day for a few weeks now that I have been stagnating, and have lost touch with the things which I used to define myself. I was for so long a student, then a runner, then a musician. Sometimes all three, sometimes just one, but those things all mattered a great deal to me for a long time. They gave me purpose, and a sense of identity, the lack of which is distressing.

A lot of the issues I find myself (not) dealing with stem from a combination of being terrible at making decisions; and a willfulness to delude myself into thinking things will sort themselves out eventually with little or, hopefully, no intervention on my part. I have regularly found myself unable to make incredibly simple choices for unreasonable periods of time, and am presently 7 years into a temporary job just until I figure out what I want to do when I grow up (I am no closer to knowing what that is, and feel less likely than any other time that I ever will).

I've kept my head down too long, closed myself off in a lot of ways as a fucked up and ineffective coping mechanism, and wasted so many years not doing anything. That's the most distressing thing, that instead of improving, I consider myself demonstrably worse in so many ways. I'm wasting my life, losing myself, losing contact with people I care about.

I think about skipping town and driving across the country a lot these days. If I could afford it financially I might. Someone who I love referred to it as a "quarter-life crisis," which would be nice if only for the fact that it would put my lifespan at about 120 years or so. Time on the back-end to make up for the youth I've so mundanely squandered.

Quatro

I find I only ever write when I stay up too late.

Sitting alone in a darkened room does wonders for my ability to think too much to sleep easy.

I also find that after a couple hours to myself I am increasingly prone to bouts of emotional daydreaming. I am, when not sufficiently distracted by nonsense or fatigue, incredibly susceptible to nearly crippling nostalgia. When I allow myself to stray too long on a certain thought, image, song, anything that puts me in a particular state of mind, I can tumble down the rabbit hole - chasing the wistful memory of a feeling long since gone, without hope of truly recapturing it.

It's nice to be able to find all the songs that soundtracked a particular time in my life when the mood strikes though, it creates a more immersive melancholy. I ache for a youthful, reckless, incomparably exquisite love that escaped me; a youth that slips away more completely each day; simpler times surrounded by friends; a family not broken and scattered.

Were I happier in my life as it is, I imagine such exercises would be less consuming. The thought just wormed its way into my mind that my life is demonstrably worse in most every way than it was ten years ago, which only serves to deepen the unsatisfied longing brought on by my retrospective ruminations.

I leave off determined to improve things somehow tomorrow, full of the knowledge that sleep has a way of sapping resolve.

Entry the third

My family nearly disintegrated completely between when I graduated high school and college, though it is better now than it has been in  a long time.

My mom left my dad just before I finished my senior year of high school, though it was no surprise to my two brothers and I. He's never forgiven her. I watched both my grandmothers taken by wasting diseases, and my grandfather lose his cognitive functions incrementally due to micro-strokes. My own father has been hospitalized repeatedly in recent years owing largely to his disinterest in taking care of himself.

My youngest brother did the most damage though.

He developed some serious mental health problems just before he finished high school (he was diagnosed with bi-polar disorder a few years later). He went from binge drinking, to hallucinogenics, eventually to heroin. He would go on to take damn near everything of value I owned and pawn it while I was at school. He stole from everyone in the family when he could, regularly threatened our parents, once tried to stab me when I grabbed him by the throat while trying to throw him out of my mom's house.

Despite it all, he always tried to hide his addiction from me. He would get upset with my mom if she mentioned it while I was around. He always told me he was clean, or trying to get clean. We had been about the best of friends growing up. He looked up to me, always sought my approval.

My dad and I had gone to see a movie with my other brother. I was about 3 minutes away on my route home when my dad called me hysterically saying the Dave was dead, and that I needed to come back. He was sitting on the front steps wailing. My other brother got back a few minutes after I did, just after the police and EMT's. We stayed there until around 3:30 in the morning. I drove home and didn't sleep, my parents hadn't been on speaking terms for a long time so it fell to me to tell my mom her son had died. I was 26 and had to tell my mom that my little brother was dead. I'm almost certain it's the worst thing I'll ever have to do (I sincerely hope it is).

That will have been 5 years ago this July. My parents are still largely broken. I haven't actually talked about any of this since it happened. I've internalized, kept my head down, and tried to carry on. I threw myself into the job I have, that I hate.

I didn't ever cry. I almost did, once, the morning after, but it's never really happened.

I still have bad dreams pretty regularly. Not as often as I did, but it's not unusual to be nearly asleep, between conscious and unconscious, and be rattled awake by the thoughts.

This attenuated account is by far the most I've said about any of this. It seems strange that the most devastating event I've endured would go unmentioned, but it's also a function of having hardly anyone in my life who has known me long enough to have even met my brother. I feel detached from my earlier life, and in many ways detached from myself (which was what I was originally intending to write about, next time I guess).

Two.

I've managed to go a month without so much as visiting this page, much less putting any words down...

To expand on a thought from the last time; motivation and inspiration come all too easy (and almost exclusively) precisely when any chance of accomplishing anything is nonexistent. I spend an inordinate amount of time in my car formulating bits and pieces of entries I want to write, the cogs in my brain spinning more freely when not under threat of committing any of their movements to the keyboard.

Backspace is my favorite button now. Erasing line after line. Reverting half-formed notions to pristine emptiness. Disposing the evidence of intent absent substance or direction.

I still find myself deeply self-conscious of what I put in this unread space.

Let's try this again...

I can no longer count the number of times I've set out to start a new blog. It seems the last effort was just about two years ago.

The pattern is typically the same; always during some new fit of insomnia, during hours I should rightfully be unconscious, a sudden urge to return to writing, followed by far too long spent staring at a blank screen. I always find I am most ambitious while laying in bed endeavoring to do the absolute least I am mentally and physically capable of. All my goals seem so much simpler, so clearly laid out, from the comfort of a darkened bedroom. It may just be that from under the covers, with "today" resigned to history, and "tomorrow" only an idea interceded by glorious unwaking hours, the urge to procrastinate and avoid serious issues is subdued.

It's really simple to tell myself I'm going to start running every day, and write some short stories, and keep in better touch with my friends, and look for a better job, and do my taxes, and visit my parents more, and tell someone I still love them, and a million other things when it's 2 A.M. and there is absolutely no chance I need to do any of it just then.

From my pillow, tomorrow seems excitingly close, and comfortably far away.

I do sincerely hope to stick with this. I used to quite enjoy trying to articulate things that, for the last decade or so, I've been content to internalize or ignore. Hopefully this is not a one-off, late night brainstorm that withers immediately upon waking.