It Makes a Sound
For a bit today, I started thinking about the possibility of switching from what I know and believe and who I think I am to what others were saying. I went through this same thing over my winter break where I considered the possibility that I should just go with what I see as boring and be just like everyone else instead of fighting it so much. I soon decided, that day, that those thoughts were stupid and there was no reason for me to slip into the stream with everyone else.
I'm glad I did.
But every once in a while, I have these days where before I can recall my own self I actually listen to what others have to say to heart. They sneak up on me, and in my completely loose state it's not hard for them to make me disbelieve myself.
And I guess I was just getting to that spot again, after having my professor telling me how marketable and well-rounded I am and how cool she thought I was and me being glad to hear the positive enforcement on my personality today. But I was sitting on this picnic table I usually go to, at the Starbucks on campus, drinking a coffee and smoking a cigarette and I began to think that my negative views on people were wrong.
Fuck that.
I don't think I'm judgmental and I do everything to avoid "being" this concept but it's just little things like that that sneak into my mind unnoticed and make me doubt everything I stand for and who I am and what I think. I even started to think, as I tend to do whenever I finally start to really free myself from the world around me, that I was drifting too far from my environment. I always say people are the only thing that keep me grounded. But I think I need to take even more of a vacation from them; really stick to my guns and be as uncompassionate to their feelings as possible so I can reach the speed possible to escape their gravity that holds me so. Then I'll orbit them and their world-- held by their force but free as can be.
The other analogy I was going to use in my post yesterday was the idea that I used to believe: when a tree falls in a forest and no one's there to hear it it doesn't make a sound because there are no organisms around to perceive the sound it would make. I now see that's bullshit in relation to me. I'm the tree that falls with no one around, but with the ability to get back up and continue growing. And one day when someone comes across me on a random excursion into the forest, I'll be there; tall and beautiful; only because I didn't wait for those sound waves to hit someone far off and for them to come running to see what I've done.
Something Solid
I've realized that the only reason I like to be crazy and go meet people and make sure I don't slip into a world of "everyone else" while I'm in public is because people are what make me who I am-- in the sense of, their perceptions of my actions are what assign a certain personality to me. They're all there is in the world; I can dance crazy alone in my room and sing loudly alone in my car but if I'm quiet when I'm around others, I'll be perceived as shy and other related personality types and not the person I really like to be.
Of course I know who I am when I'm alone. But "who I am" really has no meaning to me because I have no need to be one way or the other when there's no one else to pick up on which "way" I am. So if I want people to see me in the same light I see myself, I need to carry that personality consistently throughout all parts of my life.
So tonight I put on a wife-beater and went for a walk in the rain. I made a point to walk past some people in the hallway to make sure this craziness was perceived by someone other than myself. I don't need their verbal validation; I don't need them to tell me I'm crazy or that I'm sane-- that I'm stupid or doing "okay." Proving anything about myself to myself or anyone else is useless. I just need something solid in the world. Because I can see from any perspective, I can think about an infinite amount of possibilities and positives and negatives. But life is no fun when I do that. I become a ball of neutral-- no light, no darkness; no sound and no silence. I live in this world of hypothetical; this alternate dimension that exists but produces nothing useful.
It's this universe of nothingness that I try to avoid daily. In fact, not living in the way I want to is the only thing that depresses me these days because frankly, I'd rather enjoy my existence.
A Different Cycle
I'm learning when situations, ideas, environments are positive or negative for me. Everything in the world around me divides up a little better and forms according to my specifications more and more each day. This is good.
I'm also trying to stick with the "don't fixate" idea I've come up with. See, when you fixate on one idea, you become lost in it. And it seems that there is no one thing that is worth completely fixating on, due to the life-cycle of a thought: it starts as a simple abstract concept, possibly formed as a result of other ideas. The amount of information it is composed of is proportional to the thought's tipping point-- the point at which all the information that makes up that thought are not enough to expand that thought anymore; at this point, your mind can only speculate. And although it may provide some sense of comfort, nothing positive or solid will come out of speculation.
So I know these things. And I wake up every morning and go for a drive and try to remember to let everything flow through me so that I don't fixate on a single idea, and consequently live in that moment, know that nothing dies, etc. etc. But some days those thoughts become a contradiction themselves because I think I have to fixate on them to make them work and then I do and then shit falls through, plainly.
I think it's happened today. But it doesn't feel counter-productive this time; I reached that truly elated stage which I haven't had in at least a week, and then I had to deal with people so I started to whole people-cycle again, though I feel like I fought it slightly more than usual. I'm out of cigarettes but haven't bought more, I went to a job interview and laughed as I headed out because the guy was the typical salesperson-- and he was the one interviewing me; and then I had some more pseudo-frustration with other people. And at this point everything started falling down; the walls I had built, once again crumbled.
But this time was different. I've found comfort in knowing that not everything I do will work at this point in time. I'm used to it, not holding onto any thought as invincible and stable. Maybe it's because if I changed as much as my mind formulates a new "me," nothing in my life could be stable-- friends would leave, etc. etc.
But that's bullshit-- I shouldn't be concerned.
Yeah, talk about a bad case of the negatives.
Positive and Negative
This is life in a nutshell: you and the world. Inside you, there are two classifications of thought: positive and negative. Inside the world, you have an infinite amount of you's, each with an infinite amount of thoughts that fit these two classifications except you don't have control of these you's (we'll call them external you's).
You are like a points system. Positive thoughts give you a point and negative thoughts take away two points-- one for the negativity and one because the effortless nature of negative thoughts dictates that you have room for one more negative thought. Naturally, this is a recursively repeating downward spiral.
Negative thoughts don't get the credit they deserve in our world; in fact, they almost always sneak completely below the radar. On an individual basis, negative thoughts are the creators of depressing music; they're the birth of sad movies, paintings, and stories. They're the synthesis of your own negative thoughts and/or negative thoughts from external you's (and only these two things). On a broader scale, they're what most religions would define as "evil." And they come so easily because they are humanity's "default" setting. They are the things that happen to you that make you change yourself (for the worse), rather than enforce your current behavior. In psychology, they're appropriately named negative punishment. In philosophy, they're named subconscious motivations. These are the things that "just happen" early on and by the time you reach adolescence they have become a part of you.
Positive thoughts are the ones that build you up. They are the birth of smiles. They are the birth of laughter. They are a product of freedom from yourself and the world around you. Most of the time, however, they are so fleeting that they only last in these short moments of joy and laughter. And it is the nature of these transient thoughts that makes them the most rare of thoughts that can be thunk-- it makes positivity so rare that it can hardly be said to exist in our world at all.
So, ultimately, you have two ways to view life (since it is all relative to you): positive or negative. If positive thoughts are more appealing, know that they need to be fought for. If you're in the opposite side of the spectrum, step outside of you and view yourself as if you are really an external you. You simply need to realize where you are in relation to where you want to be.
At the end of the day, all that needs to be remembered is this: life is simple. People are complicated. Complication always overpowers simplicity, which is why our world/life "is" so complex. It doesn't have to be for you.
Putting a Title to a Situation
This isn’t the best thing to do. When I say situation, I mean anything that ranges from a state of mind to an environment to a relationship with another person. And this is why it seems, to me, to be a bad way of thinking.
I’m ever-changing; every day in my head is a different one. One day I might think I’m the shit because I can’t find it in me to care about anything anyone around me thinks. Another day I’ll think I haven’t changed at all and am accomplishing nothing. But I should avoid thinking them both. You see, the whole reason for changing myself has been an effect of me realizing that the cards I was dealt until this point in my life [when I finally gained some control] have been shit. Well, this same shit that I speak of occurs when I think of something solid—one of these titles; it essentially does the same thing as the obligations and expectations I’ve learned since birth that have screwed with my head: gives me something to abide by.
And that’s no good. In fact, that’s the whole point of not blindly accepting what you’re told from birth: you become a slave to these ideals and are never truly free (I’ll clarify free later). Yes, of course my parents had some things right that helped me become a good person and someone I actually like; but, just as well, they had some things wrong, similar to the other 6.8 billion of us—none of us have it all down, hence my personal never-ending quest for some kind of answers.
..And my search for freedom. What I mean by free is simple: truly your own thoughts; your own feelings; you. Obviously, in our social world this is a lot more complex than simply stating it. We’re all a product of society in one way or another, and it takes time to differentiate between causes for why you think/act the way you do and what novel conclusions you’ve come to on your own, using all the information you’ve gathered from the outside world. It’s not impossible, just difficult. So what I meant before was that realizing what inside your head is you and what is them will make you free. It keeps you in society but it keeps you above all the unreasonable and non-thoughtful ideas that have become reality in our world. In other words, you’ll be the one at the end of the day who isn’t upset with their life because they don’t have someone or because they are poor or any other so-called “necessity†that has been taught by the masses.
Putting a title on a situation infringes on freedom because it also rules-out flexibility more than it should. I’ll use “dating†as a title for an example.
Let’s say I’m dating a girl. I’ve known her a few months, but only really gotten to know her for the past few weeks. I think I like her; regardless of the reasons, I’ll leave it at that. Now, because of the dating title and inherent obligations (again, they’re already present based on society), if I meet another girl that I start to like, this is “bad.†For one, if I like her more than the girl I’m already with, I have to convince said girl that I want to “leave†her and break the expectations she holds me to as a result of our title. Even if I don’t decide I like New Girl more than Current Girl, if Current was to find out, again (depending on how invested she was in her expectations of me) I would affect her emotions negatively. This all seems silly to me—especially because of the expectations factor.
If you lower your expectations, you can’t be let down—this has been my mindset for a good while, because you can always go up. And once I internalized the fact that I can’t control anyone besides myself, it was even easier to give up all expectations I have in other people. But this is the main problem with having these titles I speak of. If you’re Current Girl in the example I mentioned above, you will have your “heart broken.†This will bring an onslaught of over-analyzations, what-did-I-do-wrong’s, the whole enchilada. This isn’t good for Current Girl, or any other human being, for that matter, that experiences this destruction of their expectations. So, quite simply, why do it?
On those days that I feel like I am completely free from what people around me think, it’s great. I consciously realize that I am, in fact, free from what all these other people think about me, and more subconsciously realize that nothing can bring me down—that is, until I let them in. This only brings me down because I expect that no one will affect me. If instead I walk around feeling free from the people around me and simply ride it—not recognize it—then I can continue to live it, all the while remaining flexible when I have to interact with people close to me, such as friends—people I do have to let it, even if it’s just a bit. In this case, it’s about managing your thoughts and when you start to realize how good of a mood you’re in or how on top of the world you are, you have to stop it and literally distract yourself. This keeps you free from not only others but also the darkest parts of yourself, which is half of the struggle in life.
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