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.