Trying again.

"Despair is only for those who see the end beyond all doubt." -J.R.R. Tolkien

It's amazing how thoroughly clouded my view of the world around me can be when I am upset. The world can seem like such a dark place when you've gone a long time without hope of good things to come. You start to forget about the love and kindness that you are being shown by others right now. I can only say how sorry I am that I do not recognize it like I should.

Furthermore, the rather dark nature of this blog over the past year has more than once got me into trouble. Hard words can be interpreted in even harder ways. I no longer know how to reconcile my desire to share my feelings while being obscure enough to conceal my identity and the true circumstances of my life from the internet, and also being understood perfectly. It has gotten me scolded once, and now I've lost a friend for it - or rather, accelerated a disintegration of one.

I do not know how to reverse this process I am going through. It is true that I have a poor attitude. A very poor attitude, indeed. I am attempting to improve this. Already I have made progress. I have enjoyed a wedding without being focused on self-pity very much for the first time in a few years. Furthermore, I feel I have gained some measure of resolved toward rectifying my spiritual life. This is progress.

I think what is most needed in my life right now is to maintain an attitude of gratitude for whatever it is I have right now. It is useless to continue to count my losses, whatever they may be. I have a small group of people in my life that really seem to care about me. I really don't know why. I think most people I interact with I make uncomfortable or am just rather grumpy and rude. But that shouldn't matter. They are there, so they are there. In addition, I also need to be more generous and less self-focused. Of course if I focus on myself, I will  get lost in all the sad things that have happened to me. I will get lost in my worry about the future and my anger over having to let go of my passion for my vocation and focus only on my career. If I give myself to others in whatever way I can, maybe I will forget about myself altogether. Nothing that happens to me has to bother me. That is my burden, my responsibility. I can feel good about life, even if I don't know how yet.

It's just time to try again.

There was a dream that I dreamed, a dream to start over.

Things that are OK.

I am OK.

Just OK, though. Not especially good. But not especially bad, either.

I went to a job interview today. I was worried about it, but it wound up being pretty easy. Too easy. In fact, that was the only good thing about today. I did OK at an interview.

Everything else was pretty bad. I ended up not visiting anyone I wanted to visit in Cincinnati. I'm pretty sure the place I interviewed at is a terrible job where they treat you like cattle and work you to death until you quit or get fired. Is that what I worked all this time for? To get in a job like that?

My little brother has a girlfriend now. She's nice, I like her. They are both great together. They seem happy. I hope they are together for a long time. I thought I would be jealous of his happiness but I'm not. I'm just OK. I'm OK with the fact that nothing seems to really work out for me and that I've given up on dating relationships for...I don't know. As long as it takes for it to be OK to date again...or try to.

Why am I OK with these things? I don't know that I am. I just feel OK. I can think about all the people I can't call but I wish would call me and then just...not think about it for a while. I'm not numb. I'm just acclimated to this stuff.

Before long I'll have to decide where to go from here. What do I do with my life? I suck air and eat food and drink water and go on. I do the best I can do with what I have. I feel nihilistic but I try to think Catholic. I hold on to hope. Sometimes.

What else can I do?

There was a dream that I dreamed, an OK dream.

Breaking my idols.

I'm the kind of person who tends to glorify the people I really love.

When it comes right down to it, though, people are actually quite predictable. I build other people up who I love and make me feel good as heroic, idyllic paragons of love, mercy, and justice. But in the end, when it comes down to painful human experience, they really are just like everyone else. Even when I say otherwise. I'm wrong.

It's easy to run away. Sticking things out and doing the hard work of picking up the pieces and figuring out what went wrong is the hard thing to do. I'm not sure why I'm the only one who ever wants to do it. Perhaps no one considers me worth the effort. Still, I'm starting to get used to this. The last time I went through something close to this, it took me over 3 months to recover. I'm already starting to feel better after a few days. At least a little bit. How can someone get used to something like this? But here I am.

I really feel like I saw this coming. I started to make odd predictions out loud that I had no reason to believe. I thought I was being insecure and paranoid, but everything I said came true. I have decided that next time I get these intuitions, I'm going to act on them. I was afraid of self-fulfilling prophecies, but now I'm not sure about it.

Here's the first prediction I'm going to act on. If I can avoid my habit of idolizing people and putting all my happiness and hope into them until well after I move out of my current town, I will be OK and make a long-term recovery...I will change and become happy by myself. If I don't...I'm not sure. My prediction doesn't go that far.

I hope I'm not just going crazy. If I read this on someone else's blog, I would think they were trying to get attention. But this just keeps happening. I'll get a feeling about something and it will end up true.

Right now, I feel like breaking my idols.

There was a dream that I dreamed, a dream of apostasy from my false religion.

On being foolish.

There's nothing like making the same mistake twice to humble you. And making the same mistake multiple times...

I am grateful this morning for the lack of nightmares. That much, at least, is different from the last time something very similar to this happened. I had nightmares for a long time. Since then, I have more or less made mistakes of a lesser extent, but similar manner, and now I have once again committed a huge blunder of the magnitude of...well, before I started writing this blog.

I have told myself in the past that I have learned a lot since I began this blog, but it seems I have not learned nearly as much as I supposed.

Like, for instance, that the more you tighten your grip on something hoped for the more quickly and easily it slips through your fingers. Like how to take people at their word rather than fantasizing about what they really mean. That last one is a surprise. That was something I was proud of knowing...or "knowing." It seems I don't really know it at all.

There is this much, at least: I know now that my problems really have been all my fault for a very long time. I hope I do not soon forget how foolish I have really been all this time. No, my ignorance is bared forth so powerfully today that I can no longer deny it. I am powerless against my own desire for love and affection, and it is destroying my ability to have it. No one...no one wants to love a person who needs it. I do not speak here of the friendship love, or the love of affection, or the love of a Christian to his neighbor. I speak of the love of self-gift. It is precisely because someone does not need us, in this kind of love, that we wish to give ourselves completely to them.

The problem is I don't know what to do. I have done many different things now, and I have had a great share of hope in things to come, and now again while I was trying to rectify my mistakes I incidentally made them again.

My foolishness will not be coming to an end anytime soon. I can only stumble around in the dark, hoping that somehow I finally find the light switch and turn it on so I can finally get out.

There was a dream that I dreamed, a dream for an end to my foolishness.