The more things change, the more they stay the same. The pendulum has swung back violently in the other direction. As I spent much of last month panicking about my future, growing to accept a new set of circumstances and steeling myself for the tribulations ahead, unseen forces were indeed working in my favor—at least, the version of myself that was afraid of change, the one intent on clinging to this present station of life.
The apartment building was sold to a realty group based out of a nearby town. By divine providence, or some equivalent otherworldly force, it doesn't appear that much will be different about the living situation going forward. The rent isn't going up in the near-term, repairs are still on schedule and the adversarial brinksmanship between landowner and land-occupier is not poised to continue.
I am naturally relieved about this; my partner and I are tired of being jerked around with this building and we're beyond ready to get back to something resembling a normal life. At the same time, there was a part of me that imagined what a new chapter could have looked like. I wrote recently about my ongoing struggle to exist in a rural area, and it started to feel like this may have been the golden opportunity I needed to start fresh.
We found a three bedroom house in the downtown area of a nearby city that fit our needs, nestled in an almost picture-perfect area. It would have been within walking distance of many opportunities, but not too out of the way from our current jobs. We were a few days away from going to check out the place when the news dropped. Just like that, the dream was over—or at least put on hold until further notice.
I'm growing concerned about the way conflicts in my life get diffused or brushed off to the periphery with very little effort on my part, time and time again. I don't think I can keep getting away with this forever. It's lulling me into a sense of complacency, a dangerous state to be in if I want to keep growing as a person. One of these days, the other shoe is going to drop; I don't know if I'll be equipped to deal with it.
Deep down, I know it's a good thing that I'll keep being stuck here. There's still so much work to do on fixing myself. Looking back on the year that has almost been, I've made solid progress on this personal growth I keep harping on about. I'm working more hours per week, I'm picking up healthy habits and my free time is not entirely composed of passive consumption. That's an improvement, but I'm still not there yet.
There are aspects of my personality and the way I carry myself through life that are too rigid to loosen up. I can't help but feel that I'm not like other people in so many ways; I don't even know where to begin with tackling this or even describing it. Being around people from my old life reminds me of how far I've fallen, how much ground I have yet to make up. It might be seen as a good thing to be different from others, but not if those differences cause me to be a non-functional being in a world that demands functionality on a daily basis.
I struggle almost every day with insomnia, an invisible force that controls my life. The weird thing about insomnia is how it steals an exponential amount of time from right under my nose; an hour spent awake at night thinking it's too late to get anything done turns into multiple hours of non-functionality the next day. Most people have lived so much life by the time I roll out of bed; staring at a backlit screen to pass the time as the moon arcs overhead hardly makes up for it.
My brain has this weird quirk where my most poignant thoughts and ideas come flowing out at around 2:00am lying in bed, looking up at the ceiling when my eyes should instead be covered by their lids, rapidly moving. I've tried to recreate this experience with meditation, freewriting and introspection while listening to music during exercise, but it's never the same. Even now, I am sketching out thoughts into my phone long past what would be considered a reasonable bedtime on a weeknight.
Working an evening job three nights a week is going to leave me energized for at least a couple of hours after coming home, but truthfully, I've had this problem long before I picked up a second job. I'm not sure if talking about it here is going to make any difference, really. I put these thoughts down here once a month and then go on with my life, all but forgetting them the next day.
It's been a year since I started this personal journal. A consistent schedule of writing has helped me understand myself better during this time, no doubt. I just can't shake the feeling that I'm always going to be me. This is it. I will always have these shortcomings, these tendencies, these impulses in the back of my head, even if I learn to grow out of them, or curtail them, or at least acknowledge they are controlling me in the moment.
Undertakings I was once inspired to roll up my sleeves and dig into become obligations, burdens, time-sucks, traps. Knowledge, skills and routines fall away faster than I can build them up. I don't know how to get out of this middle zone of life. The cycle continues on to the point that it becomes difficult to convince myself the distant horizon I'm supposed to be working toward even exists in the first place.
I guess that has to be fine, right? I can commit myself to these goals of self-improvement, but there will always be vast swaths of the human experience that I will never be an active participant in. I could have done more in the past, I could be doing more right now. That's always going to haunt me. I cannot escape. How I cope with this reality will determine the path forward.
On the plus side, I got a new laptop. My body weight is beginning to trend downward and I can ride a bike five miles straight for the first time in ages. I'm adding some new healthy food options to my diet and counting my caloric intake every day. I've got more opportunities for creative work opening up. So uh, there's that.