New Year’s Thoughts

Here’s a try at a different kind of post. Today, on New Year’s Eve, I want to talk about something more personal. Part of why I decided to use this website at all was because I don’t like social media much. I’ve never known how to be popular or make friends in any setting, and social media is far more difficult for me. I can’t read anyone over a post, I don’t do trends or topics of the day, and there’s this way people interact with stuff on social media that I don’t know how to play to. I’m not great in group settings, so I can’t help but short circuit trying to think of what kind of post would get people’s eyes on something I made. All of that is a long way of saying I want to talk about why that is, how I think, some of the things I struggle with, and what I want to work on as we all head into this new year.

My whole life, I’ve been overwhelmed by the scope and volume of my own thoughts. I have a feeling that some of what follows may sound like I’m self-aggrandizing as a suffering genius, so I want to make it clear I don’t think that’s the case. What I mean by feeling overwhelmed isn’t some massive flood of brilliant ideas, just literal white noise of thought. I always have an inner monologue no matter what, my trains of thought can happen simultaneously and crash and overtake each other, and I often am consciously aware of what I refer to as my subconscious. Not that I know that’s what it is; I don’t know if you’ve ever experienced this, where you can hear the future echo of a thought before you think it. It’s not in words yet, but as I feel it coming forward, I can make out all of the words it will be, and then think them “out loud,” as it were. Anyway, point is, all of my thoughts are happening all the time, my emotions are turned up to eleven, and it’s my job to slow it all down and straighten it out. It’s a lot for me to handle.

I have to stop and think about what I’m going to do and say beforehand, give myself some directions. I often feel as if I can’t do anything without a plan, and if it appears like I’m talking or acting fluently on the spot, it’s because I already had that script written. A goal of mine for a while was to get better at giving myself directions, and now I think I’m a lot better at it than I used to think. The real issue is that I chafe at all of this, all of the time. I don’t want a script, I want to express myself. I want to speak and act freely, just let everything flow out of me. I want people to know how I feel about them, and I want to seize opportunities to make myself happy. I often feel trapped by a sense of “the rules” and how I can or can’t act, and like most things in life, that’s all in my head. For as freely as I want to act, I also don’t want to hurt people or isolate myself from others. As a young queer person with no energy for passing, I spent my whole childhood convincing myself that I was cis and straight, because I’d have to do something if I knew it weren’t true. The world I lived in appeared to be one where if I expressed my feelings the wrong way, I’d hurt people and get hurt worse in return. The only way to prevent that from happening was to avoid the issue, even as part of me knew the truth. And for all of what that experience means, I don’t bring it up merely for its own sake. It’s a great example of how I continue to live today, constantly afraid that if I break “the rules,” I’ll end up losing the chance to get the things I want. So instead, I’m bottled up, constantly being bombarded by my own desires while not knowing how to express them without risking even the possibility of a better future. So I have very little of what I want; my only friends live far away, leaving me with no one to hang out with, I have no romantic life, and I’m always just outside the grasp of all the great people who try to reach out.

Of course, I know a lot of this ends up falling on my shoulders. I’ve thought it before, I’ve heard it before. In theory, I could just stop telling myself no so much, and I’d see how the world isn’t as harsh as I make it out to be. Like, I know things aren’t that bad. I have a great capacity for trust in others, a real faith in humanity. And quite frankly, for someone who’s always afraid that everyone hates them, I don’t actually care that much what any particular person thinks of me. I’m very much a cat person: I do things at my own pace, on my own terms, and I spend a lot of time crouching in my bathroom sink. If someone doesn’t like me, it’s on them, right? So yeah, this is all my fault, isn’t it? Makes me real dumb, making such a willful mess of my whole life. I’m really a huge idiot, a waste of space, a dumb bucket of fear that can’t even stand up for themself. I could go on, and have, in beating myself up about this. Any time there’s some obvious problem in my life that I’m not fixing, it’s my fault, and that makes me a worse person, and I feel even more like crap, and I can’t do anything. In theory, I’m doing this to feel responsible, to feel empowered to take action, but that’s never how it works. I just feel terrible. I like that quote from How Do We Relationship, “Guilt is just another form of ego.” I’m pretty tired of pumping up my own self-importance by attacking myself so much that I lose all motivation. Difficult trap to get yourself out of, if you’ve never been there.

There are many ways I constantly feel inadequate. I feel unequipped to handle anything in life, and trying to think through any scenario fills me with the same feelings of dread and anxiety. I can’t get as far as figuring out what I do and don’t have that could help me solve my own problems. For example, though I feel unable to read a room or figure out what others are thinking, I actually think I have a better grasp on it than I realize. I match people’s energy as if by instinct. That’s why group settings are so difficult for me; there’s too many signals for this antenna to receive. But like, one on one, I could probably do a lot better than I give myself credit for. Instead of feeling held back by a set of rules in my head meant for a wider world, I should trust my instincts about the person I’m talking to. I’ve had these moments where I could swear I was reading people’s minds by the look on their faces. And sure, that could easily be me playing up a common skill like it’s something amazing, like how I sometimes think I have impressive walking skills, like an idiot kid. Common skill or not, though, I should use it more.

That’s really what I want to get at with all of this. At the heart of all my problems, there’s a fundamental deficit of trust with myself, at least on behalf of myself. I’m afraid of trying things out because I might not commit to it, and that makes me feel like an imposter, somehow. I can’t bring myself to voice my own opinions in contentious settings because my passion could make me look like a jerk, or double down on something I don’t really think. I’m afraid to lose the dream of making friends and being able to kiss people by making some kind of social mistake I can’t see, so instead I simmer in frustration. Yet despite all this, I keep getting up and trying new things out, because my brain never lets me off the hook. I sometimes where a pair of DD breast forms to work now, with my more femme outfits, and they feel amazing. A lot of people at work use my pronouns, too, and I want to stop and appreciate that more often. I’ve gotten a lot better at falling into conversations on topics I haven’t thought about before. Even this website is something I couldn’t consider in the past, with my silly, self-indulgent fanfiction and my comics. Like, I actually sat down and made a few comics! And then I let other people read them! I can do a lot more than I think I can, and moving into next year, I want to more consciously push in that direction.

One last insight into the way I think, as I wrap this up. There are times, relatively often, where I’m thinking about something, and instead of being overwhelmed by white noise, I can feel my mind pull back, way up to the stars, and I can see the world. The image in my head is a big ball of interconnected blue lights, each one representing a different idea or subject and the thread that connects the whole world together. Whatever that is, that network of thoughts and ideas, it’s huge and overwhelming in a different way. It’s like that feeling of seeing an entire person’s mind on their face, but for my on interiority. I can see it all, I know it’s all in there. What I really want, moving into the next creative chapter of my life, is to be able to take control of that. To be able to step back at will and see it all, to learn how to follow the threads, and get to the core reason I’m interested in a project so I can build on it now, instead of after years of on and off redrafts. I have a hard time getting to those sorts of insights because I don’t trust myself to put anything that feels vulnerable into the world. I’m afraid I can’t take the hit if I get hurt. But hey, I’m still chugging along and pushing these boundaries at a snail’s pace anyway, because I’m a glutton for punishment. Why should I be the only one to dish it out? It would do me good to let others pick up some of that slack. If being hurt by others is all I’m afraid of, then perhaps naively, it seems like it can’t be much different than what I’m doing to myself right now. I know from experience that when I see something from the outside, it’ll appear less than my hyperbolic expectations. So yeah, I guess, in theme with the day, my New Year’s resolution is to trust myself to get hurt. And to be more physically active, maybe get myself tested for ADHD, and learn to abandon my obsession with the rule of threes.