I've had a few posts drafted in the past few months since the last one, but with time and other distractions and ongoing life events (work in and out of work; doctor's appointments and physical therapy- no I'm not dying, I just have knee and skin issues; family visiting for a week and commandeering my car; Pillars of Eternity and that One Piece mobile game my Cisco friends have gotten me addicted on; and so on) and an increasing dissatisfaction with anything I write nowadays, none of them have come to pass.
So I'm going to settle for this one instead concerning moments past unreflected.
This may be a bit messier than usual.
"So, why aren't you happy?"
To be honest, I have trouble answering questions like this on the spot because a truthful answer requires powers of reflection and self-awareness that I am poorly skilled at drawing upon within a span of a dinner conversation. With the help of time passing since, I can probably think of a few things now compounded on each other:
1. I experience this recurring feeling of dissatisfaction whenever I hang out with people I don't often see nowadays. I could probably reduce this to some abstract statement like "time doesn't suffice," which is annoying because I don't even know what it is I expect from these one-on-one's or one-on-two's (for certain couples lol) nowadays. A deep conversation about life, the universe, and everything, which sounds vapid the way I'm writing it right now?
I used to have these kinds of conversations a lot back during college, but they often contributed to sleep loss because one night wouldn't be enough to encapsulate the kinds of things I liked to talk about, and we'd end up talking till 7 am... (Perhaps I'm just not efficient about getting to the point, but just thinking about that makes me feel rushed and anxious and could trigger a whole other discussion about busy-ness and the need to slow down.) It's even worse now because with people you don't see regularly, you have to play the catch-up game, and the span of an hour or two or three (because I can't do all-nighters anymore and Ryan's always sleep-deprived whenever I talk to him) sometimes isn't enough to encapsulate everything you might want to talk about that's happened to you in the past month or few months or six months or year or several-years for some people, possibly.
And with other people, sometimes you realize that there isn't that much to catch up over because you inhabit different social worlds, and your lives have become less relevant because you don't share a lot of things in common anymore (cue discussion on fear of becoming irrelevant). Case example: feeling removed from the context of friends who live in SF even though I end up going to SF every few weekends anyway. Then again, I don't think it'd be much different if I lived in SF as most of the people I know there are into things I have no apparent interest in anyway*, and I'm happy with where I live now. (*I say apparent because I occasionally lapse into brief obsessions with things I had no past interest in before. Last week it was shoes and now I find myself sneaking peeks at the shoes worn by every person I pass by. I think Wes might've finally rubbed off on me a little haha.)
And then there's the part where you say goodbye, and the other person says something that makes you realize they don't expect to talk or see you around for a while either... because you haven't been regularly talking to them begin with, so why would anything change now? And I could elaborate more on this and how I don't really initiate conversations with most people even when I do want to talk to them, but every attempt I've made so far has regressed into a rant about personal insecurities and how much I hate instant messaging and Hangouts even though I still use it (because if I quit, I'd just lose touch with the people I still am in touch with), and how lack of response when I've initiated with certain people has sometimes made me depressed enough to the point where I physically couldn't work- well okay, that's a whole other story.
What it comes down to, I guess, is that sometimes I find myself wondering if it's worth keeping up with people anymore, if I keep feeling this dissatisfied all the time. I mean, I still treasure the time we do spend together... but is this what it's going to be like for the rest of my life? A series of increasingly infrequent interactions until we disappear from each other's lives altogether due to irrelevance (or one of us dies), like the relationships I've already lost to time? Is it really worth the silent heartbreak?
2. "My priorities are not in sync with my actions." - from another conversation. Speaks for itself.
3. That one time I was told someone didn't like me at all because we had nothing in common. The fact is that a lot of the people I've wanted to befriend in the past actually had nothing or little in common with me to begin with (maybe part of the reason why I found them interesting in the first place?). Since the above happened, I don't really bother to initiate such things anymore, but this still bothers me sometimes.
4. Other things I still don't care to post on here right now because I don't feel like blogging is the best outlet for them at the moment and I experience a mental block even trying to discuss them in person with people I'm close to.
So... how do you explain this succinctly to the person you just spent the last hour catching up with?
Well okay, considering it took me 7 hours to write this post, I don't think it's possible (and I'm not even satisfied with what I wrote). And apologies for the cynicism, but this is how my mind operates when I don't have it on auto-filter. I've been finding lately that hiding such thoughts just leads to increased apathy and a deadening inside more than anything. My intention in writing this is the opposite.
If you discounted people and relationships I'd say I'm actually pretty content with the way life is right now, as I don't have much else to complain about even with a sucky knee problem... but those are major things to discount from a life. And as tempting as breaking off contact with all people sounds, I don't really intend to do so.
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