A Thursday Stream of Consciousness

Getting started again I feel so behind everything. Behind on my day behind in my work behind in my life. Some days I feel like I am 10 years younger than I am. Not because my body works like that of a spry youth running on purely liquor and some belief of invincibility, but because I feel like my life didn’t start until I was nearly 28. Didn’t feel like a capital A adult until i was nearing 30 while, for a long time, i made it into a joke about “if 30 is the new 20 then i’m barely 18” I now realize how revealing that is about myself and my weird insecurities. Recently I recorded an episode of our podcast, Between the Profound & the Profane, in which I lightly touch on this subject of growing into my 30s, and how it feels like I'm battling entropy, and I’m 10 years late to that fight. Am I chasing some dream a child conjured up so many years ago? Am I a fool trying at nothing so that I can excuse my laziness and ineptitude? I don’t know and I probably never really will. It’s probably not important, for in the end whether I had normal work or was successful at whatever it is we are trying to do here on the Bonus Hours I’d still find something to feel anxious about or another thing to feel depressive over. The important part is that my brain feels like it functions better when I am doing this. I don’t feel as tightly wound around my own chest, or the constricting pressure of the snake called living. Maybe soon I can get over this notion that I have to have been something spectacular by now, but I am not really sure if that is gonna happen. Why worry over it? Why worry? For whatever reason I long to be seen. Maybe some sort of need for validation that wasn’t fulfilled by myself, my parents, or my what few interpersonal relationships I’ve had. what the hell does that say about me? That no matter what anyone gives I still find myself lacking. It isn’t on the people this is a me problem that I can’t seem to get around. I’ve finally began to come to the light that whatever it is that I think any relationship might be for other people is nothing more than how i learned about people and social situations. My ideas of how people connect and how they feel about those connections or how those connections make them feel are fully developed from watching Nick @ Nite as a kid and other assorted movies and television. This leads me to feeling like I am lacking in the way I give and receive validation and love from the people around me, then that feeling leads me to wanting to seek validation from elsewhere. Ever seeking out some form of an audience for whatever it is I do. An audience. My audience. The worst thing is people treat this feeling like it makes you a bad person. Like it means that you are stupid or vapid or selfish. Maybe I am any of those things, but wanting to make some form of art or writing or what have you and have that work be received my a crowd is what the culture I live in was built on. The United States of America exports popular culture, we are or were at one point maybe, a society of art. I absolutely believe that , and believe that we should embrace that. My attempts to live that have mostly gone unnoticed for my whole. Unnoticed or unfulfilled. As I said on the Midnight Hour this week, I lost my way late into High school, and avoided college or failed out of community college multiple times depending on how you look out. Failed Or dropped out. Yeah, Community College Drop-Out, that’s me. Unemployed Podcasting White Guy. Feel like a walking stereotype. Feel like a failure at life. Feel like that can’t stop me from trying any longer.

And it probably never should have.

So, I keep going.

Cause what the hell else am I gonna do?