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 �what is Man? a miserable little pile of secrets.� - andr� malraux "i desire to live in peace and to continue the life i have begun under the motto, to live well you must live unseen." - rene descartes note random entry image credit design by : ilazarn ikmal powered by : diaryland |
here's to living life.
2019-01-02 @ 8:39 p.m.
i spent time with my brother and his wife and it was really fun and everything but my brother drinks too much later that day, his wife and i were talking about something separate but tangentially related and it just organically came back to what my brother and i had been talking about when we were together. i thought, huh, that's weird that this came up again out of nowhere, but then i started really thinking about it, and got into my head about it. when i was thinking about it to myself, i thought i would come here and write about it, and i had all of these thoughts and in my mind, it was going to be this huge introspective entry. but now that i've sat down to do it, i realize that i just don't have the emotional energy for it. and you know, that's basically what the thesis of my "arguments" (like, not like angry arguments or anything, we just had strong differing opinions on our family members' behavior) turned out to be. we were generally discussing our parents, and my brother was trying to analyze and explain my dad, and i said to him and later his wife that i gave up on having expectations just because he's my dad. i can't keep devoting so much emotional energy to someone, or to a situation (or anything, really) that exhausts me and is not going to change. it was the same thing with my mom, and the same reason that i feel so free now that i am not with boy. stop expending so much of your time and energy and putting yourself out and going out of your way for anyone who will not demonstrate basic consideration for you in return! especially if this person has an established pattern of behaving this way! of the two of us, my brother and i, i've always been more vocal about how shitty our parents were (and still are). he was (and still is) the golden child so when the two of us talked about this kind of stuff (which was rare because "we don't talk about things" should be our house motto), he always kind of skewed neutral. but in these little vignettes of conversation over the weekend, he sort of let slip that he has always felt that way too, but always sort of just brushed it away and made excuses for them because he didn't want to acknowledge what he knew was true. lately, he's said a few pretty aggro things to my dad, and i think it's because after all of these years, he's starting to feel that resentment. how long can you hold out a certain hope, and it is almost always dashed? if 9 out of 10 times you gamble you lose in situations where there are stakes for you but none at all for the other person, why bother? it's so hard but i said, you know, you really have to just let it go sometimes, and go on living your life, and be thankful when you stumble upon a penny on the ground. for me, that was when my dad came up here a couple of weeks ago. SIL just started therapy recently and i've been pretty open about it with people because i really do feel amazing. and i said to her i don't know if your therapist has been talking about it, but until recently i didn't really get mindfulness. and she said yes, she was just getting into it. and i said you know, i now understand that there is also a sort of mindfulness of spirit. it's not just savoring the moment of your food or feeling the warmth of the sun on a perfect day. it's also about being present in a situation, just kind of being attentive and satisfied and expecting nothing, just accepting it as it is for what it is, good or bad. my brother is still an addict and i hope that he can get to this level and live without his vice. he sounded like he is almost there, and i get it, but ... i hope he knows he can't drown the resentment. he has to do something else. sigh. anyway. it was interesting to hear his philosophy on life, though. completely different from mine. completely different person. it's so weird to know this person is part of you, you were raised in the same house, but in those short years between your births something happened that lead you to becoming completely different people. we have similar moral frameworks, but we're so different. he said he realized early on that he could be as bad as he wanted to be because it was obviously illegal for his parent to kill him as punishment, so he was like, alright, nothing is REALLY going to happen to me, i'm going for it! and he was the favorite, so he was so cute and charming that everyone got over it quickly, too. me? my mother would wither me with just a look, exactly as boy would do. my brother never cared what people thought of him so that kind of thing didn't work on him. he never cared about anyone's opinion, but that's all i cared about. that right there is why our lives diverged the way they did. that was kind of vague and all over the place but this was the "condensed" version. hah. i'm fucking exhausted from multiple stints of doing nothing but eating, smoking weed, and drinking for several days and not sleeping enough. i love the holidays. but now it's all over, and here we are in 2019. i'm excited. i have a lot of things that i want to accomplish this year, but i won't be too hard on myself if i don't. they're kind of not 100% feasible right now without some major alignment of stars or infusion of cash, but i will begin to outline and plan for them nonetheless. for a really long time i had to live without and put aside my wants and needs so i am comfortable with one more year of mostly directionless existence. there are a lot of experiences i still want to have, so working toward saving my money for these largely hedonistic pursuits doesn't make me feel guilty, yet. and i'm not 100% directionless. that's a bit of an exaggeration. i am saving toward these experiences. i'm rebuilding my credit. i am developing my person and discovering what i want to do. it's all very exciting. i feel like the complete opposite of how i felt when i was graduating high school. i remember this kid i was only kinda friends with (but i'd known him my whole life since we'd gone to school together in a very small town) wrote in my yearbook, "the world is your oyster." and when i read it, i was like, really? this is such an old man thing to write. and at the time, it was so unrealistic a concept to me. i had no choices. there was nothing out there for me to discover. my path had already been decided for me, and if i didn't stick to it, i would be shunned and abandoned. shut up, put your head down, and do what you're told. but now, i get it. 18 years later, i get it. so here's to having nowhere to go but up, here's to me and here's to you. truly. here's to 2019, here's to living life. |