This should take you like 6-10 minutes tops to read. Give me this at least
This should take you like 6-10 minutes tops to read. Give me this at least
I thought about it for a bit. It's probably a sudden loss of passion involuntarily and without closure. A part of me feels like this doesn't make sense at a glance. What do I mean by involuntarily? What exactly is passion? Since I'm obsessed with semantics, I feel the need to explain myself here.
When I speak of "passion", I mean anything you enjoy-- a subconscious feeling of comfort, a physical activity, one's company-- and do so to an extent where it becomes intertwined with your own identity. You cannot imagine life without it. There was still a time where you did, and there will be a time where you do it again. Our bodies and minds decay and, albeit we now age incredibly slow (compared to previous times) while a caste of hilariously rich Americans "biohack" themselves to test just how long we could defy death, we acknowledge the concept of such as an inevitability as does the rest of conscious life. We're not that special yet. There will come many times where you will have to let go of things, people, and place and you surely have already. We have to also accept that losses will occur that sting much harder than others.
This is by no means a thought exercise tailor-made to shock you with as much existential dread as possible by making you list off who or what is next on the chopping block off the top of your head. You know I go off the dome (on the dome? if not off the top) when I write this shit. If something did occur to you though, that must mean you've accepted it as an inevitability sooner or later. It's only right to assume you would expect some type of closure alongside it. This is where I put emphasis back on the word sudden. Bigger than the day you come back from vacation to return to your shitty service job not long after, it's something stripped from you in the blink of an eye, never to return to the way it was before, if at all. Nobody is equipped to handle these sorts of situations, even a superman in the eyes of others, a model citizen who has done none wrong in the public eye, can turn his heel overnight in an inability to cope.
Kirby Puckett was a center fielder for the Minnesota Twins far before either you or my time (old people are prejudiced against on my blog). 12 seasons, 2 World Series', Hall of Famer, just about everything you'd ever want to accomplish as a professional athlete, yet 12 seasons for someone of his caliber seems extremely low. It's not particularly out of the ordinary per se, but Puckett wasn't the type of guy to just "retire at the top". This is because it was and, despite still being at the top of his game by the end of his age 35 season, was forced into retirement due to factors out of his control. In the preseason of 1996, he woke up suddenly and completely blind in one eye. Three unsuccessful surgeries later deemed the loss of vision to be completely unsalvagable. Unwavering, taking the podium in July of that year, he announced his retirement without a crack in his voice or a tear shed, as if in complete acceptance of what had transpired. We would soon find out this was far from the case.
In no particular order, he then:
So let me be completely honest here. If you had lost not only a functioning organ, but the ability to perform in something that meant so much to you in collateral to where it makes you spiral out of control in a fraction of time that it took for you to become a hero, would you or would you not kill yourself? If you were to give him one thing, he did not. Rather, he died of a stroke at 46 instead.
This sort of downfall is the source of my fear. All things considered, I've become desensitized to a handful forms of loss in my early life, but you just can't account for others. It can't just be a "me thing", when we are actively expecting an undesirable result, we incorporate wishful thinking into our perception of it. You did shit on an exam and you know it. Shrug it off. You get your grade back and not only did you do worse than you ever expected, but now you are suddenly shouldered with the conscious consequences of such. You're not thinking about it as a potential scenario anymore, you've been thrusted back into reality as if you caught fire. I feel like shit for the next day and change, and you expect me of all people to be able to salvage something from a personal castastrophe? Often times it feels as if you're not allowed ample grievance anymore, we must surpress that emotion and return to productivity as to not face further damages, even if not explicitly stated as such. Any more than a week's time and it feels like you've had a ball and chain attached to you in the ocean you're already drowning in. Even though sudden loss is the absolute worst of it, you just cannot afford to lose whatsoever. The world keeps turning.
Relationships, hobbies, athletics, I abstained in these sorts of things for a relatively long time simply because I was afraid of losing something. Drifting away from others, not being able to perform at a level I once was able to, injury, maybe just not being plain good enough in either my eyes or the eyes of others. The common sentiment is shared, and its affected my personal motivation in a permanent way. I constantly put half of my heart into endeavors into art, programming, and the likes, all the while being avoidant to every single opportunity presented to me by every body imaginable. Only now do I realize that, if I'm so afraid to lose at this caliber of all places, it's almost if I'm inhuman in some ways. Being unable to be malleable in the face of my smallest failures, allowing myself to potentially flourish in future endeavors, only exacerbates the fear of an extremely abrupt and devastating loss of mine. Although I've accepted I can't particularly "cope" in the way that Therapists want me to, I can too accept that my way of doing so isn't particularly devastating. Really, it just involves sleeping a lot. I'm mediterranean, what do you want from me? Do you want me to "work harder" to solve my problems? No. Fuck you buddy. Gyros UEFA Euro 2004 souvlaki recession.
Sometimes it still feels as if I have nothing particular to lose, though. I take pleasure in many things, and have began starting to take pleasure in other things. I run, I read, I'm slowly easing my way into drawing, and I love seeing horse girls getting down with eachother. There's someone in my life that I love. Yet, I feel as if there is nothing that's necessarily intrinsic to my identity. This fact and this fear of mine are intertwined in such a way that I can't even begin to imagine yet, but I'll make the pieces click together eventually. I've begun to look in my dreams.
It's a miracle that I can recall something like this so vividly, to a point where I've started to believe that I falsely implanted it in my head. I wake up in some room, presumably a dorm or apartment since it was not the house I currently reside in, and it is completely disheveled. There's still a modicum of order, yet the walls and floors are plastered with books and crumpled papers and the sorts. There's my bed and my desk, which only holds my computer. Under my bed is a myriad of books on the human anatomy, plastered in them are my own crude sketches over the much more refined works I'm clearly looking to replicate. In these pages are also photos completely unrelated to the material, as well as sketches attempting to replicate those. They were not stuck on, taped, glued, etc. It was as if they were a part of the material itself. I recall the view of a pitcher on the mound from the batter's eye namely, in with such mediocre color quality to where I had to believe that it was printed out, but it wasn't. I didn't know how it got there. I don't know how any of it got there really. It must've been so long since I opened it. I also recall a minor emphasis on game development.
What's all of this to say? Well, I'd like to imagine it's my motivation, or lack thereof, manifested in a bunch of material that lays as graveyards to corpses of past forays into various "passions" in which I've tried to engross myself in. Once forgotten, I now try to make it right in my eyes. A word on my own personal motivation, as if to say that I never wanted enough, anything enough, but little was actually stopping me from doing so. I think I need maybe 43 more long walks without my phone and several more lucid dreams to make sense of any of this. But maybe I should keep it up. Maybe it was positive reinforcement. Maybe I'm just