Day of 2007 - 10

Okay, so days 8 and 9 are missing. No retroposting.

Thursday and Friday were stressful. Saturday was not stressful, and I was quite calm, but I think I was still exhausted on the inside. So no blogging on those days; no evening zazen. Both days I drifted to sleep with the lights on while watching internet t.v. I still feel a little off. There is something slightly amiss inside of me, something still restless.

Certainly the events of those two days would have that effect. Particularly Friday. A man was murdered in my vicinity. That's very heavy, and it is going to have effects on me. No doubt about that. I am dealing with it a little bit, but I think I need to deal with it more directly. Hopefully something formal will happen at work, but I need to do my own thing also.

All the issues I wrote about on Thursday are continuing, the feeling toxic, the feeling threatening to people, the feeling undesirable - leaking into feeling unattractive, unwanted, unlovable. That whole complex is still there. I find myself encountering it at every step. This hopeless feeling that there will never be that real joy between me and another person. I think I need to focus my efforts on balancing that out. Intellectually, I find it very hard to convince myself otherwise. Actually, I think the issue is that, intellectually, I actively convince myself that I am unlovable. It is the physical things, hiking, running, soaking, playing music, walking, anything - that gets me to forget that I am unlovable, gets me to enjoy being alive.

Not that I go around lamenting everything. I'm mostly pretty neutral; mostly ok. There are just these moments where I'm more aware of my limits - where I notice more than at other times the fragility in my sense of self, and I wish things were different.

It's hard. It's hard to do this stuff; and it's hard to garner the focus required to do this stuff; and it's hard to garner the focus required to garner the focus required to do this stuff.

If I take the time to be positive, I can recognize, yes, I am learning about who I am bit by bit. Right now, since the break up with Alexa, I am doing so at a much faster rate than when I was in the relationship. I can make better decisions about what I want and what I'm capable of. It feels like 2007 until now has been a long process of being disillusioned - in a positive sense. Realizing that a lot of the things I thought about myself were not realistic, and that this lack of familiarity was causing, is causing, the vast majority of problems in my life.

Ok, time to be more concrete. One major issue is what I am interested in - I'm not entirely settled with this issue, but I am at least finally aware that this is an issue, which is step one. What is it? I want to learn all kinds of things, read everything, travel everywhere. It was an overwhelming realization to understand that I can't do everything. Of course, I knew I couldn't do everything, but at some point in 2007 was born a very full awareness of this fact. That's devastating. When this hit me, which was really more full in 2008 than in 2007, I felt 10 years older all of a sudden. Bad decisions caught up with me. And the most frustrating part is that since I have realized this, I am doing worse and worse. My ability to focus on anything has diminished, rather than increased.

I cannot allow this to fully distress me, however. Maybe things are worse, but I can say that my awareness of this problem is getting larger and larger and more firm. I am confident that if I continue to observe, I will find a balanced way to approach it.

What can I focus on now? I am busy. I will be studying Icelandic and working on dinner for the next couple of hours (what a delicious dinner it will be). When I can think of nothing else, when I am struggling to feel that flowing, comfortable feeling in my stomach and just not getting there, when I feel detached, I can focus on now. I can be fully now. Psychological stratagems are good sometimes, but they are not necessary. If I love myself, I love myself now. Loving myself in the future or the past is not loving myself. Really, this is fundamental - this is almost obvious. But how often do I not do it? How often do I not want to take responsibility for the consequences of not loving right now?

I need to go. I feel the need to write more later - more specific things as they come to me. I won't adhere to the "Days of 2007" topic if I do that. I'll just label it however I feel.

Góða kvöldið.