I'm always trying to learn something new, guitar at the moment, because I find it critical in slowing down time (subjectively); otherwise days, weeks, and months just shoot past. Learning or doing something new anchors periods of time to something particular, something difficult, and keeps your brain squishy. I apply this thinking to music too, so because I don't want to get stuck for the rest of my life with my current taste in music, I'm often listening to new music. I recently became aware of Loyle Carner, creator of exquisite confessional hip-hop. While listening to my new favourite artist, the song Not Waving, But Drowning suddenly came on, featuring not the words of the famous (though new to me) poem, but rather the author's thoughts on the poem.
I’ve mentioned before that I was born on easy mode: White, male, heterosexual, and to affluent parents. Because all problems are subjective, which is why you can be unhappy even though other people are worse off, these conditions haven’t let me to a happier life, I’m still struggling with my own life. So it dawned on me the other day, that maybe what I need is something to overcome, a challenge that is.
I’ve had so much time off in past weeks, due to an injury, that I after enough time ran out of pedestrian things to ruminate about, and dug into my greatest unfixable regret. I know that what I’m about to describe isn’t my fault, and I’ve known that for at least fifteen years, but still I feel guilty.
I’m named after a person of my grandparent’s generation, and as people of that generation are wont to do, he went ahead and died (I’ll refer to him as “he/him” from now on, in the face of all syntax conventions). I visited him in the hospital once, but he was asleep and we let him sleep. There was another later opportunity to visit him (I’m sure you know where this is going), but I was busy playing a video game, and had maybe reached a new boss or some such. My father later told me that he was awake, and was asking for me, but I never spoke to him after he was hospitalised.
As I mentioned in my last (super cheerful) post, I've started asking my self more questions, but that's also something that's accelerated as I've traded my old stressful job for one that has left me with a surplus of mental energy. So now that I’m in a better place, I’m also in a worse one, as my questions led me to a dissatisfied place; where previously I was strongly dissatisfied with my job, now I’m dissatisfied with my life.
I don’t know if I ever had confidence in the life-choices I’ve made. Though I have a fancy degree from a premier university, my heart was never in it, and I passed solely by hard work meant to spite the people who didn’t think I had it in me. But now that I’ve been out of the educational system (where I spent nineteen years) for a few years, I’m asking myself a lot of questions that I never did before.