An Open Letter

I maybe could have done 5. But I stopped at 4. I almost hate myself for that. It's just a personification of how lazy I am. I didn't give it my all. I didn't come close to that. How could I be happy with myself like this? It feels like I'm telling myself “I'm fine like this. I'm ok not progressing.” And that terrifies me.

I used to remind myself that “I am a list of the concessions I make.” And that list has just steadily grown. I'll cut corners everywhere. What a letdown.

Mac said in that one line “I'm more than what I think of myself, I really have to be.” I wonder what that problem would be like, I'm on the other shore of the same ocean I fear. I could be so much more. I know I'm better than what I am right now. But I see the obvious contradiction there, as I am myself. But I don't have to be. I could be someone who was disciplined, and not this thing I am now. I guess we both are in the same water. I need to be more than what I think of myself, otherwise there's no hope. I pray people can change – no I BELIEVE we can change; because otherwise I am trapped as this person. I don't want to be this person. But I also don't want to be anyone else. I guess I just don't want to be sometimes, until I am that person. I'm afraid that ego drives me, after all I just realized that I only want to be the good version of me.

Brand new city by Mitski gets it.

One of my favorite quotes is The pain of inaction is worse than the pain of the incorrect action. As much as I like that I can't help but recognize my shortcomings there. Idea after idea, project after project. All of them lay dormant in some notes app somewhere or else. Some died in my calendar, as an event used as a reminder long forgotten. Some lay in a Todo app I don't use anymore. Some hung on in a daily reminder until today I caved and deleted them, so they rest there never to be realized. As I prepare to move for the summer, I'm faced with all of the things I didn't do. I can't even blame it on perfectionism, as I didn't even start. I planned, but only in my mind. I never took action to do it. Some people struggle to ever get inspiration, and yet here I stand with the opposite. Overwhelmed at the start line. How am I not supposed to feel shame at that.

I consistently fall short of what I could be. I guess I can't think of any reason why I come up short. The second the pressure came off me, I sunk back down. Last quarter I had an obscene work load. And I still have powerlifting everything I had. Now I have almost nothing, and I half ass everything I do. How am I not meant to feel shame at this.

And with that I finish my first year of masters. I'm dead exhausted, I didn't even work out today. I'm very nervous about moving and idk if I'll be able to pack everything away. Oh well, only time will tell.

I guess the end of the year has hit me. I'm absolutely drained, and I have one last final tomorrow night. Home stretch, almost done.

I confronted that gross feeling of not being in love. This time I asked my therapist how I can stop feeling like the struggles I go through are unique, and how to realize and have that reassurance that everything will be fine, and I am just young and dumb. This question was used to close out several others before, and even before I could finish it I realized the same answer shows up again. Depression is playing a trick on my mind, and I cannot fall for it. Personification aside, if my brain gets a sharp drop in dopamine, then of course I will attribute anything I can to the cause of this.

Consider this: imagine I have a reinforcement learning agent in some super complicated environment. If I suddenly drop its reward for nothing, it will attribute that pain to whatever actions it’s doing. It could be doing the task correctly, but because of this drop, it will blame that action for this consequence. But in reality, it did nothing wrong (or right). I just dropped its reward. I need to remember that I am the same – when the dopamine levels just plunge in my brain I shouldn’t attribute it to the first thing I see. As rational as this is, it’s hard to remember this in the moment – because I am just the agent. I don’t see what’s going on outside or anything like that. I just have to have the foresight to understand this is just how the game goes.

I have a final tomorrow at noon so I prepared to sleep early for it. I guess I’ll call it here, goodnight me.

24,923 mph. That's how fast something needs to go to break free from earths gravitational pull. There's different cosmic velocities also – 3,000 mph for the moon, 7,900 mph for mars, and something more than 40 mph for a 2014 Prius C.

40 isn't much, but when whipping around the twisting back roads behind the university, it borders that boundary. There's some belief I have that if I can just go fast enough, I can outrun any fears or feelings that lay behind me. 40 mph wasn't enough to break it this time.

Sometimes I'll turn the lights off on the car so I drive almost blind. Something about going fast on a straight stretch with no guide on what's ahead feels like it should be intoxicating. But it isn't. I turn the lights back on after a few seconds. This time I started to brake to take my exit, and I saw the red glow in my rearview mirror. For a split second, I thought I was being flagged down by cops – but after the light doesn't change to blue that whole fear/fantasy goes back into some corner of my mind, until it's next performance. That brief scare is enough to remind me that I don't want the rest of that fantasy, and I slow back down to the legal limit.

30 over wasn't enough to escape it's pull this time, but I'm sure I just need to go a little bit faster. Then I'll be free.

I ended up sending a message to L on faith that she would understand and not double down on it – and she completely did. She apologized profusely and said she was just trying to banter and didn’t mean it. I’m very happy I did reach out to her, because in my mind I was afraid of doing that, on fear of a negative response. The reality was the opposite of that – she didn’t mean it in a negative way and all of the things I was paranoid about weren’t true.

I’m glad I checked my unconscious brain, but at the same time pre workout like that is far and few between lol.

L & L lol – I couldn’t let that one go unnoticed.

I met L today in person for the first time, we’ve known each other for 2-3 years now and we play games almost daily. It was a nice day, we hung out for like 6 hours or so. I guess you kinda do know someone after spending hundreds of hours with them, other than some strange quirks here and there. The second L comes in because I noticed they set their status as “that fucker is kinda short 💀”. For the record, I am 5’9.5” last I went to the doctor, so I’m 5’10” with shoes. This person’s 5’6” or so, so it’s not like they were my height. I am most likely not going to see L in person for a while anyway, so it has no consequence at all, but this comment did for some reason affect me way more than I thought it would.

My gut reaction is to defend myself – my posture is naturally pretty bad, but I also noticed I was never standing fully upright and was being incredibly passive with my body language, which I attribute to not wanting her to feel uncomfortable or scared at all. I was always leaning against something, or sitting down and never stood straight while facing directly at her. After all, she is a few years younger than me and is way more at risk meeting up with an internet friend if I was a murderer compared to the other way around.

I guess I kind of take offense to things like these because they feel emasculating. I’m not rigidly masculine in a traditional way, so it’s not emasculating in the same lens of toxic masculinity – but I guess I just feel weak and vulnerable. I grew up incredibly short, weak, and fragile. I ended up eventually growing around 10th grade, got physically stronger, and mentally tougher over time. Those are all things that were never guaranteed to me, and I had to work hard for some of them. I have a fear of going back to that state I used to be in. Or maybe the fear is being perceived in that state I was in. I didn’t think that anyone could be attracted to me, and I guess by some continuation of that love me like that. As time went on, I ended up becoming someone who was more self-sufficient, and stable. Now I have people consistently finding me attractive or wanting to pursue things, but I guess my mind has not caught up with the rest of me. I still see myself as the person I was for 90% of my life – weak, frail, and unloved.

I set my status to “Somehow every body of water leads me back to this ocean”. I guess I wanted to go back to my roots and sadpost, but I can’t really do that when I have a ton of students constantly reaching out to me over Discord given this strike. I set the status while in the shower in my childhood home – a place tied to a lot of horrible emotions for me. That image is synonymous with all of the pains I had growing up, and I felt like it was almost inevitable to end back up there. No matter how far I climb, or how deep inland I run, the rains drag me back into the ocean where I drown.

Professor on strike, I have been trying to help students as much as I can for their sake. I had my first meal at 8pm while starting to drive down to SD, which took another 4 hours. Too tired.

Today was the first time in a while that I had some semblance of a fire. I once heard someone talking about the problems with dreaming – and how it was just prematurely getting high off of an achievement. I felt like it was just stealing joy from that thing if it ever did happen. I don’t know if I stole joy or if there wasn’t much to begin with, but I at least felt this with my whole lifting goal I guess. I had watched so many videos of Matthias Steiner and just wanted to chase that high. I wanted something to overwhelm me, and fully encompass me for just a moment. I wanted to shake, just like he did on that stage. But when the time came, the lights were more of a soft glow. Faint enough that I didn’t notice they were on. I somehow find myself still getting high off of that dream, of some event that already had passed. I find myself thinking about just collapsing shaking in utter disbelief of my achievement in the face of adversity. I have to remind myself that it had already happened, and nothing like that happened. I miss the rage.