Inside my madness; and other tales.

I am a firm believer in common insanity.

Everyone has their own little weirdness, their own quirks and little insanities. If you follow my blog, you know something of my insanity...I'm quite sure the last three posts or so have been the product of my own special insanity. If you're not sure what I mean, allow me to explain.

If I'm not careful, I can get into some pretty sick thinking.

Observe:



This is a "normal" view of time. The past is permanent, immutable, fixed. Existing only in memory. The future is full of two or more possible directions at any one time.

This is my view of time when I devolve into sick thinking. I count every time I've gone "off the mark" of what I perceived to be the "good path" of my life (marked with blue) into the "bad path" of my life (marked with red). Imagine thinking about every instance of your life where things were inevitably and irrevocably turned in a direction that impacted the rest of your life - and disliking the result. It's not a nice burden to place on oneself.

This is the kind of thinking that has influenced the past few months of blog posts. I'm sorry if it's been repetitive or depressing. I don't apologize for writing it. It was good for me.

Things are better now, because I have relearned (with some help, no doubt) a few gems of wisdom that I feel are important for me to try to keep in mind next time I start this thinking again (and believe me, it will happen). It's sad to think that I've learned all these things before and simply forgotten, only to learn again by making myself miserable. Do you hear me sigh? Here goes.

Knowing the result of everything I try to do is unimportant compared to knowing whether or not what I am doing is good. If I believe in the power of the good, I should trust in the good to take care of the rest. If I truly believe that God exists (which I do) and that he is a good God, the power of good is virtually unlimited. It "echoes in eternity." If my soul is to last for eternity, it must be tied up to the good. If I am striving for that, everything else is nothing.

Knowing who I am means knowing what I can and cannot do. I can invite someone to coffee after only barely knowing them, because I'm kinda curious about who they are, and I'm bold enough to violate any social norm to do what I want, dammit. I can't change the past because it's over and I'm not a time traveller. It means knowing my boundaries. Being assertive. No means no, no matter how many times I'm asked. It means saying what I mean and what I feel, regardless of how others may negatively perceive me.

Finally, I must accept whatever comes my way. There are two different ways to take on life: fighting to make things happen, and surrendering to whatever fate God brings me. What one needs to be happy is to do both...my problem is that I was only doing the former. A fruitless battle guaranteed to make me miserable...because if something is not meant to happen, it will not happen. There is no shame in saying "Very well then. What will be will be." I did not understand this - it felt like cowardice. No more.

This is what I've learned - take what you will.

There was a dream that I dreamed, a dream for sanity.

"You go on."

"Death, but not for you, gunslinger. Never for you. You darkle. You tinct. May I be brutally frank? You go on."

The frank, bitter, but thankfully (and finally) truthful comments of a friend(?) have led me to question my writing of this blog. What real purpose does it serve? I am quite sure I don't know, and don't really want to know. Yes, I do write of my feelings and share them on the Internet, of all places. The real question is, is it the right thing to do to write these posts? I am not positive I have any way of knowing that right now, and quite frankly I suspect it doesn't really matter whether I do or do not. The content matters.

So the content of this post is about going on. Really, I have settled into a sort of complacency with my place in life right now. Ultimately, it is a healthy, spiritual complacency. Deep down, though, I feel I miss some of the romanticism I used to espouse, however unhealthily I managed it. Life was more exciting when I let myself have expectations. Now that I have none, it seems that I just go on.

I'm not saying this is such a bad thing, considering that how things turned out when I let myself get excited about things that were ultimately not guaranteed and even improbable. There's nothing wrong with getting a little romantic about the future, so long as it doesn't get in the way of you doing the right thing in the present moment. I think that was my problem, all along. I've solved the problem by destroying the romanticism, not by just centering myself on the present.

As I write this, I suspect maybe I'm going too far. I feel as though I do have a reasonable amount of hope for happy endings in my future, but it's not quite the same flavor as the experiences I used to have in less sane times of my life. For now though, I'll leave my musing at that.

What is really pressing on my mind at the moment is friendship. I have spent so great a deal of time on this topic in the past four years or so that I am not sure what else I can say about it, but this: that I am now quite sure that friendships are not chosen, but born. They live and die, they can become sick or strong. I really wish I had come to this conclusion in another way, but recent experiences prove this fact to me, and I suppose I should be grateful.

Some friendships...well, they just go on too. So many of my own are going on in a way that makes me wonder whether I really have any at all. Why would I say such a thing, you might ask. Well, I feel as though there is really only one person in this world who knows who I really am. And I recently found out someone I trusted has secretly harbored an animosity of sorts to knowing who I really am. A repulsion, perhaps, is a more accurate term. No matter how I describe it, of course, this person would deny it. But I hear through double-speak, and it doesn't fool me.

I must say I know he was right on one account: I was a hypocrite...on one occasion. I complained that it sometimes bothers me that no one seems to really want to ask me about myself, and most of the time now when I spend time with people they dominate the conversation. I clarified that most of the time I don't mind - because I truly want to know people better. Well, I screwed up by doing that exact thing to him. However, that doesn't erase the fact I really would have liked to gotten to know him better...and really, that one time...that one time...I really needed someone to listen to me.

I don't want my friendships to stagnate. Now I have made both mistakes - I have been all the way the dominant person, and now I have been the submissive listener too. I want friendships where both people get to know each other better...not a friendship that stagnates. I want friendships that are honest - not like the friend mentioned who would have made me guess to the uttermost end that all along he was unhappy with me, instead of telling me.

I am certainly more grateful now for the friendships I have that I have clearly not chosen...because those are becoming my best friendships...to those friends reading, you know who you are.

There was a dream that I dreamed, a dream for full, exciting friendships.