Dear Diary
I have to be honest about something. The personality that I present, the voice that I write with comes from me but it isn't actually who I am. It is a romanticized and perfectable version of myself, the guy I wish I was. I would like to pass myself off as a clearheaded observer of the ridiculous, pundit, scourge of the despot, and sometimes even as a Don Juan de Marco. But in reality I'm a lot more like Don Quixiote, chasing windmills and fighting imaginary dragons. I'm a lunatic who chases fantasies and is totally unwilling to slay the dragon in my own head.
The dragon isn't getting stronger, in fact I think he's getting weaker. But every time I distort reality to make it look like something I find more palatable I give up ground to the fucker. I embalm my guts and blot out the sun with my drapes while I crawl on my hands and knees through the cave I hollowed out of dust bunnies, laundry and watches with dead batteries. I sip poison and keep my eye trained on the dragon, I sip poison because it kills us both. The dragon sits there too, with his eyes on me, and it is as dense and massive as a composite of all my stupid fears gets. I keep my eye on it, making sure it isn't getting closer, when what I should be doing is fighting it.
But I know the truth as much as it can suck, I feel imprisoned because I am chicken shit. Its so fucking simple but so incredibly difficult. To live fearless is to be free. I want to live unencumbered by fear of loss, rejection, humiliation and most of all loneliness. I used to think that securing things so tight and close to you that you could never lose them was the only way to be free of fear, but that just makes it worse. And I see people do it all the time. They find something or someone that quells their fears and they cling to it like a drowning rat, then they do crazy and idiotic things to keep it from slipping away. Just like I do. They create illusions about its indestructable permanence in its ability to shield them from the things they fear. The only things indestructable in this universe are cheese and haiku poetry.
I know that its my life that I am spilling out, pouring into wells that will never be full. All that wasted energy provides nothing other than the fun of the drama and the thrill of a disastrous catharsis whose substance would provide me with clarity if I took the time to look for it rather than chase a shadow of it. But I'm afraid of the clarity. In the fuzzy focus I can pretend that certain things aren't as they seem. But things are usually what they seem, and in the end everything that seems to be falling apart falls apart.
But it doesn't matter how things turn out anyway because there's always a new story, always new people to please. I've spent my life dancing on this stage. Tappity tapping my hoofs and wiggling my curly tail.
As much of a genius as I claim to be I make dumber decisions than a lot of people. I am afraid of being alone. Its a fear that compels me to please people. I struggle for approval, and like I said before I cling to people who quell my fears. Both behaviors are totally pointless. Its obvious that trying to impress people is a waste of time, they're too busy with their own windmills and the dragons in their heads. If I figured out this much it should be clear to me that a lot of my time is spent on this long process of trial and error. An experiment trying to make people like me with the hope that some of them are worth it. That is fucking exhausting.
Being afraid of being alone is ridiculous. More than that, it is self destructive. If you can't live with yourself, fix it, don't cower from yourself in other people. All that frantic energy and hyperactivity you do is only to distract you and fill your day with anything but living with yourself. Now that I know what it looks like I see it in everybody. Packing every waking moment with activity just to shut out the fear. I know it because I'm the same. But you have to learn to be alone, learn to tolerate yourself even if you think you can't stand to be alone. Trust me on this one, if you spend your life avoiding yourself in the end you will become this drifting amorphous squid who assumes the identity in fashion at the moment. It happened to me.
My rhetoric is always the same, quit being afraid, use your brain, don't be selfish. It is my mantra, which I do almost nothing to actually follow through on, but it would be a lie to say I do nothing. And through it all I feel like I keep getting smarter, go figure.