A friend sent me a Facebook marketplace listing for the minions movie fart gun, And I really wanted to rebuild a taser and so I bought the guns for $22. I went to the lady right after the gym and she said I can clearly tell you work out, and I realized that it doesn’t shock me at all that someone says that. Like very clearly I work out I was in my tank top and I am very muscular, and it kind of nice even though it feels scary and like I’m being vain, but it feels really nice too have that positive self image about myself for once. I don’t know why it feels like it’s such an evil thing to have a positive self image.
I had a very long day today with a lot of socialization, and near the end I very much felt myself crashing and I wanted to be alone. What originally was a source of potential conflict instead turned out to be a very deep heart-to-heart with a close friend. I’ve known this friend for two months now, and we have hung out a lot since then but this was the first time I got to really know her in this intimate sense of both of us sharing some trauma. We talked for like two hours, and I realize that I actually feel good. Like I don’t feel misunderstood or hurt, but I actually feel like the opposite. Like I feel really valued, and I feel connected to people rather than isolated. I’m really grateful for this friend and also how my life has started to bare fruit that I have planted earlier
I had a rooftop barbecue and hot tub event with a friend, and L Brought her sister and her sister for some reason is just such a massive dick towards me specifically it feels like. There was only one other guy there, and that guy didn’t really interact with her but it felt like just disproportionately she was being very rude to me, like making comments about how people just must not have liked me for something completely unrelated, insulting the random playlist that was playing on my speaker saying that my music was elevator music, being excessively pedantic with rhetorical questions, when I jumped into the pool as I got up from the water I heard her calling me a fat ass, along with several other consistent just like negs it felt like. I don’t know what this girl’s problem is because her sister is nice, but she is just such a fucking dick it feels like and im pretty confident its not a signal towards me, like it is not a reflection on my behavior as much as it is on her. No one else not even her sister joined with her and other people kind of defended me at different points. But overall just fucking weird from her.
Hey me! This is a little bit different than what I've been doing for the last few weeks, but here is me journaling as I go on a walk outside of my work again. I’ve slept really well the last three nights in a row and I’ve been able to exercise pretty well, and I have had a pretty good amount of social interaction. I’ve also been eating relatively well, and so it kind of sucks that I don’t necessarily feel the greatest. I don’t think I would say that I’m depressed right now but it is a little bit adjacent to that. There’s a very small dull pain in my chest but it’s enough to make it where it feels like I am slightly less than neutral meaning I have a little bit of that anxiety of this feeling not going away.
Going on a walk specifically on this route reminds me a lot of when I first went through my break up and additionally I also saw a Mazda which was something that reminded me of her. Thankfully time does heal a lot, as I don’t really think of her much anymore, and when she does pop up in someway or another it’s something that doesn’t hurt and I can acknowledge the thought goes away just as quick as it came. And I am happy that I feel like I found a friend group that I can text and do stuff with, but then I feel a little bit scared about the fact that I have done the things and filled the niches I thought I was missing and here I am still not necessarily content with my life. And I think the scary part is losing what seems like a solution or control over a problem, and realizing that it’s not that simple.
One of the things that comes to mind if I try to triage what is causing this could be my relationship status. And I will say that I am very grateful that it feels like I’m a different person and I have grown because I have had essentially two relationship prospects that I am content to walk away from because I can recognize that there are certain things that matter to me very much. Especially communication and conflict resolution. I’m very happy that I have started to read the book nonviolent communication because I think that really did help me recognize things I wasn’t aware of before. I did pride myself on communication before and now this only makes it so much better. And additionally I do think that communication is a skill that is severely neglected, and often is the thing that is now a dealbreaker to me. And I remember that an earlier version of myself viewed the problem as a certain emotional skills are something that are very rare, and so the optimization objective is finding someone on the higher ends of the distribution. I think currently it has shifted more to something like finding someone that meets my criteria, regardless of how many people will reach that or how reasonable even that is. And I think the fundamental change that has enabled this is the fact that outside of sex and maybe physical intimacy, I am able to satisfy all of my other niches in life. Meaning I don’t need a partner and because of that I am completely content with the possibility of not having a partner for the foreseeable future. And I know that it is a very cliché thing to say that, but I think in the past I have said that I don’t need a partner but that means that I really do want one though. It’s like saying that I don’t need a car to get to work because I could always walk for four hours, but I very much want a car. But right now I don’t feel like I have any of those heavily burning wants, especially proven by the fact that the current relationship prospects I am content not pursuing them. One thing my therapist pointed out with how one of the people is essentially a much better fit and overall healthier partner than E was, but even with that and knowing that if I was to engage in the relationship it would be essentially better than my last one, I still do not want to pursue it. To me I think that that is a very solid signal for growth, and I’m very proud of myself for that. And I think the thing that I’m very proud of is the fact that this is not a conscious decision that I have to make but rather something where I understand that this person is not at all a bad person, and there are a lot of very admirable qualities about her, but there also are certain things that I don’t see them that I would like to see in my lifelong partner. Like it is a very important thing to me that my partner is able to handle criticisms and take accountability without excuses or defenses, but rather with empathy and curiosity. And I don’t think that this is at all common and it’s a very rare thing, and it’s not that someone is a bad person or shitty communicator if they don’t do those things, but for me I think I’ve learned that that is something that I really really value and for my specific childhood that makes it matter so much more. And I think that I am really growing to fill the cracks at my childhood left me with. And that is something I’m very grateful for.
I didn’t go to the gym today and so I spent four hours making a massive almost 6 foot tall elephant of cardboard as a decoration for my living room until I get furniture also that I can make this stupid fucking joke of the elephant in the room. To the two friends that I showed it to they lost their shit and thought it was the funny as fuck. And honestly I’m kind of just happy that I get to make things that are silly and stupid and I also cooked today, and it was a very super simple meal but it tasted delicious. It was also very cheap to me and I’m happy that I took the time to do it. A made fun of me and was pretty rude because the dish was not up to her standards, and I did voice how it was out of place for her to say the stuff that she did. She didn’t respond super great but whatever I don’t need her to respond in any kind of way.
I think cooking has started to become a little bit of an insecurity for me, because I’ve had a couple experiences now with female friends that grew up cooking that make fun of me for my inexperience. And it feels really unfair to me because growing up I didn’t even get the chance to cook or to do anything like that, because I was forced to do academics 24/7. A mentioned how she would cook with her family and that was a big bonding time for her and I’m really happy for her and I think it makes it exceptionally shitty to me to have it rubbed into my face how I didn’t have anyone to teach me this stuff. And so I understand that I’m really inexperienced and not super aware of a lot of things that might be common knowledge to someone else. And I understand that it might seem to someone else that I’m completely clueless and naïve, but it’s really hard to try to learn these things on your own without help. It’s one of those things where you don’t even know where to start and you don’t even know what you don’t know. I ruined so many nonstick pans because I was cleaning them wrong and that’s something that might seem super obvious in hindsight but how the fuck am I supposed to know that a pan is not supposed to be scrubbed? And I feel really defensive with stuff like this because I’ve encountered a lot of people that just cannot put themselves in the shoes of remembering what it was like to not know something. And this is something that I’ve noticed a lot as a double standard. For the things that I grew up knowing because that’s all I had as a child, I’ve been very conscious about the fact that not everyone had the same experience as I did and so it’s never someone’s fault for not knowing something when it was something they should’ve been taught. There’s no point in shaming them and it’s not fair to do that either I find. And I think everyone agrees with that philosophy until it comes to something they don’t consider it applicable to.
I did an over two hour leg workout with a ton of drop sets and failure and I feel good. I do believe that I have a life worth living and I would like to experience it and I’m grateful for all of the additional chances that I get to be appreciative for what I have.
I apologize because this is gonna sound so incredibly cringe and I swear it’s not in a fucking Redditor way, but I do think I have a fairly high IQ which just corresponds to pattern matching, and I wonder if that is my issue in a way. I talked with my therapist today about why I felt so horribly bad after spending time with friends, and there are other reasons there but the biggest thing was just the severity of how bad I felt afterwards, and specifically the fact that I had suicidal ideation. And I believe the reason for those thoughts was because I felt like I was slipping into depression even though I was doing everything I thought I needed to do. And as a result, I start to feel this desperate panic, and the way I described it to my therapist was like a hostage taker telling you that they needed $100,000. You somehow managed to scrape together enough money to pay off the ransom and when you finally do that, the hostage taker refuses to release the hostage. It is the desperation from already being faced with something so incredibly difficult and managing to do it all to find out that it is not enough, and you are still in square one but with less resources and less direction. And when the threat is a depressive episode, it is enough for me to start to indulge in the thoughts of killing myself. But a lot of that is because I remember how incredibly horrifying and hellish a depressive episode is. And when I start to feel those first warning signs, I am like a crab in the pot as it starts to boil. I am desperate to avoid what is almost guaranteed hell. Except for the fact that in the past that have been the case, but in the present it’s not nearly that bad. Still it is horrible and I wish I didn’t have to go through it sometimes, but it is nowhere near an episode like I am afraid of. One of the fallacies that my brain tries to trick me with is the fact that because I am doing all of these other things, that is a big reason why the episodes are not nearly as bad as they used to be. Nowadays more often than not it’s just one or two days depressed rather than weeks or even months. I also now have the tools to break myself out of full of those cycles, and I also do have those social networks fostered well enough to help me out. And so I think a lot of the fear and desperation comes from the pattern matching. Using the crab analogy, I start to feel the water heating up and I’m desperate to do anything to avoid the incoming pain of being boiled alive, but in reality the water is just going to get warm to hot for a bit, and then go back down. And even if I logically know that and even though it through data, depression is a pretty efficient thing in the sense that it also convinces you that this feeling will not go away and it is going to stay.
Another thing from therapy today was that I should remind myself how I exist, and so statistically since I don’t think I am so unique person, there will be other people out there like me, and I will be able to meet a girl that I feel matches me. And additionally I will be able to meet her at a time where things work out and at the location where I am. And for what it’s worth I do see very concrete tangible genius in myself especially in this small stuff being able to recognize certain red flags that prior would’ve romanticized. Additionally the fact that I am willing to step away from infatuation to rather wait a little bit longer for a partner that I feel more confident about. I think these are all things that past me has not always exhibited and I’m very proud of myself for that and I want to recognize that progress. I am proud of the person I see myself becoming every day.
I asked myself would I be willing to give to stop feeling this way. And I feel like it’s a very cheap thing to say anything. But I think pretty early on that list of anything that I could give would be my life. Speaking candidly, I could just kill myself if I wanted to stop feeling like this. And I weirdly end my train of thought there, and I just sit with that thought. I think about that one quote someone said, something along the lines of how we both love each other but at the same time we both drive faster in the rain. And I think that I’ve remembered it horribly, but to me it is saying how you can love someone else and that is separate from the fact that there’s this passive yearning for death.
It rained today. I kept gunning it in my car because I loved the feeling of losing control when the acceleration stopped from traction slipping. I shot around corners going over double the sign. I thought about why I liked the call of the void there and I think it was heavily because it’s just taking death one step out detached from my hands. If I died from something not my fault I wouldn’t be too upset. I don’t like feeling this way.
Holy shit she continued to Trauma dump and just doesn’t have the awareness to recognize what she is doing, and I honestly just feel sympathy for her but at the same time I less less want to be her friend if I’m being honest. I think loneliness is a trap because people trying to get out of it look for a quick solution in the form of someone, and it doesn’t really work that way, it’s more of a gradual process that takes consistent efforts from different directions. I feel like recently with both of the women I was at one point interested in, it became a parent that they are not exactly happy with their lives as is, and I think they see me as a way to improve that. And I want to remind myself about how a relationship has a foundation in both of the people, and for the relationship to be a good one it needs both of the people to be happy with their lives as is.
So today I from pretty much random coincidence sent a message in my works new grad channel looking for potentially more people to play a board game this Sunday. One of the people that messaged me seemed pretty cool and we have good conversation and they seem like a pretty cool person, and eventually I realized I have met this person before, and she was the girl at an earlier event that I thought was absolutely beautiful and I really wanted a chance to talk to you but I didn’t get much of a chance to. It seemed like she was very interested in getting to know me more, and to hang out, she even asked me if I want us to get drinks tonight which I said no too. I thought it was almost divine intervention that this person is showing up especially because I really wanted to get to know them from the little eye interacted with them earlier, but at the same time after talking a little bit more it became pretty apparent that they are somewhat similar to me in terms of background and mental health issues, except for the fact that they do not have it really under control. They seem to be very much struggling with it and also other general patterns that I remember going through and seeing in myself. I guess this is kind of like a mini test, of me recognizing the red flags and putting the brakes on before I get attached to this person or I have them kind of fall for me just due to codependency. I think the fact that I have my life so visibly together is a big thing that causes women I’ve interacted with as a recent to kind of latch onto me, but maybe it’s also for different reasons who knows.
I know it’s really nerdy and stupid but I wanted to fit a Poisson distribution or whatever to the frequency that I meet people that I feel interested in, because I believe that’s a distribution for random events like this. From that I would be able to fit a distribution and find an expected value and be able to apply things like the secretary matching problem to find unexpected value and variation for that, but I know that I won’t be able to perfectly model anything like this and it’s more just for the love of the game if I’m being honest. I really enjoy all of the art stuff I’ve been doing recently and the creative things, I’ve noticed I almost never gain anymore and I want to do my art stuff or play music and I’m really happy with that.