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To continue

2005-03-20 - 1:24 a.m.

I'll write about the weekend with Casey and her friend shortly. Or never. Some option like that.

For now I need a fresh perspective on exactly what's going on. It may be one of those times in your life where everything is perfect: you're in the place you're supposed to be. I get that feeling alot here. When I was younger I used to worry, think, wonder about whether I was going down the right path. If I was doing things right. If I'd done something wrong somehow that didn't seem quite right.

I still constantly wonder if I'm performing something correctly, or sounding like I'm supposed to in a given situation with a certain person. So while I still often think of whether I'm doing things right and the horrible idea that I'm not...I do get the sense that, somehow, through a series of coincidences and ideas, I've ended up where my brain thought it'd like to chill for awhile.

That's the sense I get. Somehow, what I'm studying, what I'm doing, where I am all make sense. It all makes sense without making any sense at all. It's a rightness that lacks understanding on my part.

Love is like that, really. I think truth might be, but that's a blank-faced pauper if ever you've seen one.

So things generally seem right. I can get lonely from not having any close friends, or feeling disconnected from things and people, or wondering if somehow I screwed something up and what I've created will suddenly crash all around me.

But the world hasn't stopped. Not my world, anyway, and I'm still here--and it still feels right.

What I'm wondering about and what this free weekend has made more clear is this:

Am I genuinely and utterly fulfilled by being pensive and kinda sad but occasionally happy about small work-related things? Do I really like mostly lacking human input about what's going on in my life and having noone question me or what I'm doing? And finally, am I achieving balance through such a seemingly unbalanced life path like this?

The big "or" would be:

Is all of the above really right...or have I somehow completely deluded myself so much, so successfully, and so extensively that I can't even think or feel like anything else will work? Or matter?

It's confusing, you see.

Trying to gauge it just by my feelings, I really love what I'm studying. How inflammation on a cellular level causes massive hypoglycemia temporarily...how lack of energy leads to withdrawal behaviors...how chronically withdrawing from things is the root of many mood and anxiety disorders. It's fascinating to me. It's also what I think might be at the root of whatever I am--or maybe part of the trunk.

There's an "isness" to it. I need to pursue it. It's an addiction to know about it. I don't even care about this nonsense about getting a degree. That isn't important. Figuring out why this inflammation seems to do this for so many people, how it might be a big reason why people suffer...how it might be a big reason why I sometimes suffer and just can't approach new people and things without help or a friend...THAT is what is important.

The "isness" of what I'm studying feels right. I don't think it's a delusion.

The same goes with my advisor. I honestly wish I could tell the man how much I admire and respect him. It nearly brings tears to my eyes to think about how kind he is, how supportive and thoughtful and encouraging when I come across a good idea. It's absolutely unspeakable, but I hope somehow it comes across sometime, some way. I feel the same in different ways about Sara, more in terms of how she's helped me with stuff, been supportive, mostly just the way she is. It's not attraction..but like with Dr. C, I just feel unspeakably grateful.

This is so strange, writing like this.

But the main point. Have to focus on that.

Where things seem off sometimes are the social and free-time aspects. Maybe I have the work and career thing down...but I'm still focused too much on those and not getting the full picture.

How do I explain this adequately. We'll do the free-time thing first. While I work as a scientist and get paid to do research in psychology, there's so much else to develop and pursue. I know everyone has some sort of talent that they try to indulge, and to varying degrees of success do something with.

I have a few of those talents. The photography is good, I love that. The writing takes up alot of time, but I love it too in a different way. Somehow the whole shamanism/spiritual work thing gets into the mix too. I wish I had more time to do things with all of those. I guess they're not going away. I mean, I don't feel my talents erroding, more like I just pick 'em up wherever I last hung them up.

And not to diverge much, but that spiritual part is the toughest. I get this weird sense in my head--been there since I was a kid--that I can help people come to terms with and overcome fear, or things related to it. I've never told anyone this, but I remember drawing some pictures as a young kid. I remember one of them very well. It was a part of a storyline. Somehow there was an ark filled with people..I think children mostly..and I was trying to sail them past some horror that'd kill them. I think it was Jason. You know, hockey mask. Silly maybe, but that--that memory really seem to pin down that aspect well.

And so I seem to help people heal wherever I go. I've learned that sometimes I don't need to do that and can have normal friendships or relationships. They do happen sometimes. At least I think they're normal. You can also help in a way that people don't know or realize. People tend to resent others with whom they've been exceptionally vulnerable. Somehow I engender exceptional vulnerability.

I need to reign this in.

With regard to that healing work, sometimes I get a sense that there's a spiritual aspect to it. I've only gotten patchy, bizarre glimpses into this. I have no idea what's delusional or real in this regard. I'm entirely in my right mind, have never heard voices in the sense of normal voices you hear. Yet, at the same time there are a great many things that have happened that warrant some...spiritual kind of explanation.

These are amorphous, vague, things I sense when I'm half asleep, when I concentrate on what feels like life that travels in streams through the air and along the ground.

It's an agnostic experience. I don't disbelieve in the presence of entities without bodies on this planet, whatever they are. I've seen things like them crop up in many places. For one person it's an animal guide, for another the hanging feeling like something is watching them or near them. It can be explained by the brain, I suppose--but there just seems to be something else besides the idea that I'm deluded.

So I have no firm concept of exactly what this is, this spiritual, healing, nature-like aspect. It makes perfect sense, but I can't hang my hat on anything solid.

Faith is bizarre enough. Feeling driven or compelled to say, do, or act on certain things for people is stranger still. I guess on some level I'm intimately acquainted with how people tie themselves down in thick chains of fear.


But I've talked so much about that part that I'm afraid the main point has faded. It's this:

All of this feels right, about where I am, where I work, what I'm doing, even (though it seems unhealthy) the detached feeling I have about almost everything and everyone. What puzzles me is if it's a lie. Can you so thoroughly lie to yourself that you can't even recognize it? Even when you're trying your damndest to figure out IF you're somehow deluding yourself?

I've tried and thought, drunk and sober, about it...and somehow I think that I finally have gotten to an "it feels right" state of being.

There are some parts that don't quite seem ideal, though. I mentioned the hobbies, the spiritual..thing, and the fact that I have noone I can share all of these life aspects with. It doesn't seem at all possible to know someone like that.

But the part that I wonder about most...that seems scary in a way but comforting...is that those less-than-ideal situations will resolve themselves.

I genuinely feel somewhere that they'll either happen, or they won't...and that it's ok either way.

And I am resolved to that. I'm resolved. That's fucking scary. If it were that I just shift from one female to the next with periods of singleness in between, not really finding fulfillment...that's ok. I don't mind that. If it happens that way, I'm alright with it.

If it happens that I can't do any of those other things...then that's ok too. If they do, they do. If they don't, somehow that's ok.

But some societal impulse in me wants to say that I should fight tooth and nail for those, that I might just be sinking in a quicksand of myself in not grabbing for them. Yearning for them. Needing them.

But with the only kind of honest that comes in the early morning, I genuinely think at the moment that those things--while good and great--ultimately may not matter, might not be important.

And that's alright.

It seems likely they will be. But if they aren't part of whatever path I'm taking, I can deal. I won't suddenly break down. I won't pine away and grow sad and bitter and wail about the why of it on long, open walks in the night.

While those things matter a great deal, and I'd like them to happen, there's something else going on...something that compels me.

This compelling, this sense of rightness about doing certain things..this seems to be the closest I can get to my personal truth. I don't know what it is. I don't know if it's delusional and utterly destructive or just peaceful.

All I know is that there's a feeling of peace and contentment about it, that is far deeper than the kind that comes with no work or worry for awhile.

I get the feeling that following this...whatever the fuck it is...is the right course of action. Wherever I'm going with this, following my own lead, is where I feel and think I should be.

It's not perfect, or zen, or even mostly happy. It's hard and cold sometimes. But there is this "rightness" to it--and I am compelled to follow it to its natural conclusion.

I don't know, but I will continue.

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