In terms of my personal life, I have a lot to be very happy about, and I am. I love my wife more and more each day. Every day I wake up and see her is better than the day before. I am finally starting to get optimistic about my professional life too. I had a wonderful meeting with an extraordinary woman named Dwayne Berrett, who runs a "Career and Life Management Consulting" service in Fresno. In fact, I will totally plug her website, right here. She helped me to sort of organize all the ideas, thoughts and ambitions running around wildly in my head and work on focusing them into a clear, concise plan of action to get from where I am to where I want to be. I left our meeting feeling incredibly inspired and re-purposed. I have a plan of attack now, an idea of what I need to do to achieve my goals, and that's a wonderful and incredibly relieving feeling, as though a huge weight has been lifted off of me.
So why do I just want to lay in bed all day long right now?
I think I might be going fucking crazy. Either that, or I'm just an asshole. I dunno, maybe it's a little bit of both. For so much of my life I've felt like Sisyphus, eternally pushing a giant rock up a hill, just to have it roll down right as I reach the peak. I've become so used to that feeling that maybe I've developed a sort of Stockholm Syndrome when it comes to disappointment. Like, I'm happiest when I'm miserable, because that's a problem I'm used to dealing with. Lately though, people have been coming into my life and just being wonderfully kind and helpful and helping me to get out of this cycle of repetitive disappointment and it's great and I appreciate it beyond words, but at the same time it's foreign and weird and it's like I'm kicking some terrible drug. It's like I'm recoiling as the poison of apathy and lowered expectations leaves my body. I'm starting to see a light at the end of the tunnel and that shit is BRIGHT! It stings my cloudy eyes, it burns my pallid skin, and I'm afraid that beyond that light is going to be a happiness and sense of accomplishment and contentment that I'm not ready to feel.
All around me, I see little changes to the life that I've grown accustomed to that are actually rather significant. I see my friends reaching some similar forks in the road that I see before me and making some tough choices and the ripple effect of their decisions affects me, both positively and negatively. My friends are my world, I care about them like family, and I feel their struggles as if they were my own. In a sense, it's comforting, because I know that I'm not the only one who feels like I'm standing on a precipice and trying to decide what my next move is going to be. At the same time, it's a glitch in the matrix, it's the introduction of a foreign body into the ecosystem and everything is reacting, and whatever the ultimate result is, there's going to be a lot of adaptation and acclimation before things return to "normal." I know things are going to change for the better, I can feel it with a certainty that I can't put into words. Right now it's like riding a scary ass roller coaster, I feel like this could get really ugly really fast right now, but I know in the back of my mind that that's how it's supposed to make you feel and in the end everything is going to be ok and I'm going to have a perverse desire to do it again and again all day long.
I know what I want to do.
I know where I want to go.
I see what needs to be done to make that happen.
I'm prepared to do everything that I need to do to accomplish my goals.
That may all seem like basic self-affirmation to some of you, but for me, that's the result of a 35-year journey through the desert that has finally led me to an oasis. Now comes the realization that I have to get the hell out of this big ass desert I got myself lost in first, and that's not going to be easy. Like I said, it's almost become fun wandering aimlessly for so long, it's a familiar sense of senselessness. I'm kicking the heroin of lethargy, apathy and self-doubt. It sucks. I want to just throw up really hard five or six times and get it all out of me, but it doesn't work that way. I have to sweat it out, long and slow. I have to writhe in agony as it tears my guts up on the way out. I have to go through the detox and the withdrawal and the psychological battle against my own comfort with discomfort, my happiness in misery. My tolerance level for disappointment is exceptionally high, I'm used to large doses of it on a regular basis, but now it's time to quit, cold turkey.
Why am I telling you this? Do you care? Fuck it, I care, and that's all that matters right now. I guess I'm just sort of making my declaration of sorts. I'm sharing my weird, psychological journey. When faced with a lack of something of substance, externally, to pontificate about, I reach inside, pull out a big gooey hand full of sticky muck and slap it on the screen and hit post. I'm kicking some bad habits, these are my Basketball Diaries
. You know, that gives me the perfect idea on how to end this post.
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