when you're young, you build up these ideologies of the world. who you want to be, who you want to be like, or what you want to hold on to. at least i did. i have held onto these ideologies for so long, read the books of my heroes, and wished that i could have their lives, to live their experiences, and to know that i could be strong like them in times of peril. through times of war, lost love, depression, and all the inhumanities of life.

and here i am, at 27, lonely, not yet made shit of myself, not experienced any sort of hardship of the past two generations and feeling like a general nothing of nothingness.

i remember back in college i went to see a psychiatrist after a bad breakup. he gave me a prescription for some pills and told me to come back. i shook his hand and thanked him and never went back and never filled the scripts. i don't even remember what his name was and sometimes now i wish i had.

i always wanted a life where i listened to no one. where i was a young prince, doing what i pleased at all moments and times, because i could. where finance, time, feelings, and presence were all under my control. where i was untouchable.

since i've been a young boy, i've always wanted to just have a tremendously raucous, wild, complete young life. to live without regret or second thought. to live without fore or hindsight. and just be without responsibility. but things are quite different now.

i've got to change. that much i know. because i can't think or act or do things like the way i've always done. and it's hard. it's so very hard. i've been waking up everyday for the past month, filling my day with work, exercise, work, errands, painting, and on and on and on. my friends tell me come out, let's have fun, let's go out and cause some ruckus. when i do, i honestly feel more like shit than ever. and all i want to do is crawl into a ball and cry like a little baby girl, born new into the world. although we would be crying about totally different things.

i don't know what to do, but i suppose i'll look back on all this and laugh one day, thinking how silly and trivial this all was and is. how easy i have things. how much harder i need to push things and myself. and to quit all this crybaby bull shit.

when i was in high school and young and naive, i was extremely in love with a girl, we'll call her laura. not the kind where you just want to get your fuck on with them, but the type where you could hang out with her and talk and just have peace and quiet. she was tall for our age, and it was one of her insecurities, even to this day.

she had a boyfriend and i had a girlfriend but we hung out and i liked her company very much.

growing up, i was hammered with the fact that i would probably have to marry an asian girl, preferably chinese. so dating laura would have been out of the question. she came over the house a few times and my mom was machine gunned me with questions afterwards.

soon enough, high school was done and we moved on to our perspective colleges. i haven't really kept in contact with many people over the years, but we kept in touch with her. i would visit and she would visit me. we talked about life and love and things in between. she knew my family and i had met hers on several vacations and we would flirt sometimes, but i never took it to the next level.

people often say that if you're stuck in the friend zone with a girl you can never climb out. i've always thought that was bullshit. i've always believed that in a fight, anyone's got a chance to win.

maybe it's time that i let down my own past walls. and just do what i want.

struggle

for the first time, i feel like my art is finally going somewhere. it's not like i was never confident about it before, but it's more so balanced now. not like a boat tipping up and down in rough seas. one of my favorite professors, kevin moore, once said "you can't just keep riding this roller coaster, the trick is to find that perfect balance between loss and defeat."

i feel like i'm at a very strange time in my life. i've just spent the last four years honing my craft, everyday, day in and day out. thinking about it, dreading it, loving it, devoured in it, sick of it. i've watched all my peers outside of art climb the social ladder, getting promotions, going to grad school, working day in and day out with the benefit of a paycheck. of security.

maybe i should have just gone to law school. maybe i should have just stayed at a regular job. sometimes i wonder if i made the right choice because really, sometimes it's hard to justify what i've chosen. i suppose i just don't yet know what success is. or how to achieve it.

but in my heart i know i have to keep doing this. to just keep pushing and pushing. day by day. hour by hour. because there's no rationale or reasoning, i just know i have to do this because there's nothing else that i would do with this sort of love and dedication.

sometimes i feel like i purposely chose this life because it was probably the hardest thing to do, that i just want to struggle. other times i feel like it gets to be too much and the payoff too small.

i've been thinking about moving away lately with the dog. maybe to oregon, maybe to arizona. just for a change. for a few months, maybe years, maybe i'll never go.

even so with just the daily routine hum of life going on i know i must keep going. because there's no direction but forward.

breakup

breaking up always sux dik, obviously there's good one's and bad one's but it still always sux. especially if it's been a substantially long relationship, in this case, it was about 1 year and 7 months. obviously it takes two to tango and both parties are accountable for a breakup. but i would say in this case, i was probably the idiot that drove her away.

i suppose it was bound to be. in the last six months i have been so caught up in my own life, needs, wants, and desires, that i completely shut out this person in my life. i thought that just as long as i was working hard and striving for success, she would understand. she would be able to forget the little things that i would forget. she would forget the the mean words i would sometimes snap to her. she would forget how horribly callous i had become.

it is my own fault. i must accept blame for this fall, because there is no one else that was wrong. it is a tough pill to swallow. and right now really i'm just wallowing in my own misery. i try to take up work to fill the day, but every waking moment is haunted with her image and how i lost her.

if i were a little more dramatic i would probably have shot myself or at least started cutting by now. but sometimes i feel like the pain is good. like a crazy violent thunderstorm that cleanses the earth.

i want to scream, shout, cry, and bang my fists on the wall until my knuckles are broken and bleeding. but it won't help at all. i'll be stuck at the same goddamn place with no one to blame but myself.

maybe i am just meant to be alone for the rest of my life. i cannot seem to let anyone close and if anyone does, i immediately shut them out. before she left she told me she loved me and that she didn't want to go, but that she had to. to save herself and what little left she had of happiness.

i've been really out of sorts for the last few days and i wish that she would just come back, but i suppose that's just the boy in me pouting and throwing temper tantrums.

alas, it's just life. sometimes things fucking suck and i just want to destroy everything. fuck me.