The Stories I Tell

I’ve tried this post a few different ways, but still haven’t figured out what it is I need to say.

To a large extent, this year was just far too big to try to recap.

Where would I even begin? In the same year I graduated college, moved 2500 miles away, visited 10 national parks (and plenty other things), my brother had and then got over a life-threatening condition, I moved to yet another state…

It was a lot. This year was a whirlwind.

At some point this year, I was talking to a close friend about the pandemic. Specifically, we were talking about how despite its extended duration, and how long it felt moment to moment while we were deep in quarantine, in retrospect it seemed like no time at all.

I’ve heard lots of people say things like this. The entire pandemic “year” was actually much closer to two years, but you could be forgiven for thinking otherwise.

Why did it feel like that? And perhaps just as importantly, why did the three weeks in which I graduated, moved out of my beloved college house, moved away from my home, and roadtripped to an entirely new beginning, feel like years had gone by in what was in fact only 21 days?

What is a worthwhile life?

This is a question I’ve always struggled with. With all of the triumphs of this year and amazing experiences came countless new beginnings and experiences in a world that felt ceaselessly fast when I most wished it would stop.

So many times it felt like I was running on a treadmill that was constantly speeding up. Every time I’d regain footing for just a second, it’d speed up and I’d lose my footing once again.

It’s exhausting. It can feel like a beatdown. In some of the worst moments, my lifelong mental health struggles and tendencies toward nihilism eat at me. The treadmill continues on, I feel further and further behind, I continue to tumble, and it can get genuinely difficult to even want to get back up, knowing you’re just going to get knocked down again.

What could possibly make this worthwhile?

I’ve been struggling quite a bit in the time since I last posted here. I moved to Florida to be with friends once more, and for a little while, that solved all the problems I’d been having in Montana.

That didn’t last long.

I arrived in early November and… still don’t have a job. Hundreds of applications all for two interviews without calls back and a couple zoom links to pyramid scheme webinars. Tried some more dating, had what looked like it might be my first success in years, and… crashed and burned. Plus, since I’m living off of a rapidly depleting savings account, I can’t even really afford to do anything. I have a surplus of time, but can’t really do much in the suburban retirement community I live in.

To put it mildly, all of this has done some very poor things to my mental health. This culminated in one of the worst depressive episodes I’ve had in years.

I spiraled, hard. I felt like a loser. I felt like I was doing nothing right. I was starting to feel like maybe the “real world” wasn’t a place I could make it. I surely couldn’t continue on the downward trajectory I was headed. I felt like I was putting in effort, but that effort was amounting to nothing.

I felt that maybe this… wasn’t worthwhile after all.

And then, nothing changed. Absolutely not a single material circumstance changed.

I’ll still be jobless when I go back to Florida in a couple weeks. I still won’t have a partner, or even a New Year’s kiss, despite my efforts. I still won’t live in a place that would afford me a surplus of new experiences, available on a daily basis, like I had in Montana.

Nonetheless, I feel better about the position I find myself in. I feel more capable. I feel ready to keep moving forward. I’m not naively ignoring the circumstances that helped create my previous feelings, either.

So what changed?

I told myself a different story.

Taken out of context, it wouldn’t be all that difficult to take a scene in a movie and replace a soul crushing score piece with a laugh track, or vice versa, and entirely change the way the scene is interpreted. Further, in any medium, a given piece can have an infinite number of interpretations.

I’ve learned life is no different. The difference between a pessimist and an optimist in a given circumstance is a mere matter of the story they tell. It’s not deeper than that.

I am fucking more than a few things up right now.

This does not make me a fuck up.

The things I am doing right now are not the things that I am. For a lot of my life, I’ve had difficulty separating the two. My attitudes toward myself as a human being are too often dictated by how things are going.

The problem with this is, the thing we perceive as “right now” is dictated by fate. The past never once dictated that right now would exist, and the existence of right now does not once dictate that there will be a next right now.

I don’t get to decide which of any of the infinite set of things will happen. I only get to decide how I react to those things.

Yes, this is Attitude by Jay Wright. Yes, I’m acknowledging things that countless religious traditions did thousands of years ago. Yes, I’m rehashing well established practices in clinical therapy. So yeah, I’m reinventing the wheel.

Regardless of whether that is true (it is), I’ve never just been able to believe something just because it’s “obviously” true (I just wrote and then deleted a whole rant on why the word obvious is the worst word in the English language, but I’ll spare you. Suffice to say, nothing ever has been, is, or will be obvious. It’s a nonsense word made by and for lazy morons who can’t defend their position).

Point being, I’ve always needed to learn things the hard way, and this year, I’ve learned this simple truth the hard way: be intentional in the way you act and react.

What is a worthwhile life?

Well, from my limited inquiry into the matter, one that is filled. Those 21 days back in May felt longer than the entire pandemic because I filled them. I ran, though I did not know where. When it rained, I danced. Name a cliche, I was doing it.

The past few months in Florida, I haven’t been. I’ve been taking my right nows and putting them in the box labeled “later” that doesn’t actually exist. My habit toward procrastination has always been my biggest vice, and it’s a far bigger problem in life than it is in school, the place it’s most often mentioned.

In school, there’s a deadline, and school goes on. In life, you die. Eventually, you run out of luck and there isn’t a tomorrow in which to do things. The stakes are unbelievably high, and this gets paralyzing when I can’t force myself out of the rut it can create.

The thing is, all you have to do is do. Just… something. But do it. Doing, properly, contains an implicit “why.” There’s a purpose in doing, even if you don’t know it yet. Definitionally then, it takes thought.

This is why the pandemic flew by. While it was necessary, during quarantines the vice grip of habit took hold and created days, weeks, and months in which we rarely did anything. The only concrete memories of the pandemic most of us have are the things we CHOSE to do to break the routines. The daily walks, the new hobby, or whatever it was, that is what you and I both remember from our ceaselessly mundane days.

Life often is mundane, by necessity. There’s a lot of it, and not every day can be the most unique day ever. Still, I can do something any day. Anything done intentionally that breaks up the routine is doing. Eventually, those doings too will become routine, but maybe a better routine. Then there will be space for new doings, and so on and so forth.

I can improve the circumstances.

This year has been as wild as I’ve been told your 20s can be, and it got overwhelming at times. It was a complete sensory overload, with little time to really sit and reflect.

My journals are far more empty than I’d prefer them to be, and the hiatus in this blog is evidence that I haven’t even been doing the bare minimum in reflection. Mostly, though, I stopped because I wasn’t doing anything. If I’d tried to write a blog post, I wouldn’t be able to recollect a single thing I really did.

Moving forward, this blog will regain its weekly presence in my life, at a minimum. I’m taking some time to review some of my favorite albums and movies from this year as well, so there’ll be a post on that to follow.

Regardless, intentionality will be the word of the year for 2023.

I will react and do with intention, and in doing so I intend to learn to stay grounded in right now, not bogged down by the past or paralyzed by the future.

When I write in my personal journal, I conclude with some things I’m grateful for, and at least for this post, I figured I should do that as well. No story here, just a list, mostly in chronological order. There’ll be some wild jumps in terms of significance.

• Villanova University
• The humanities students, faculty, and classes
• My college roommates
• The encouragement I received in creating and maintaining this blog
• The mostly unearned C+ my game theory professor gave me that let me graduate
• Graduating and continuing to maintain contact with the closest friends I’ve ever had
• The 2008 pickup that carried me through 10k+ miles without any major hiccups
• Cuyahoga Valley, Indiana Dunes, Badlands, Wind Cave, Mount Rushmore, Devil’s Tower, Yellowstone, Grand Teton, Glacier, Theodore Roosevelt, and Voyageurs National Parks/Monuments
• The job that afforded me time to do those things and the one new friend I had to do them with
• The doctors who found and removed my brother’s tumor, and those who aided his recovery in the months following
• The friends and extended family who did everything in their power for our family this year
• The family who’ve abided my constantly changing life plans, and who helped give me the strength to deal with our most difficult challenge yet
• The entire American Heartbreak album by Zach Bryan
• Once again, Greenlights by Matthew McConaughey
• The professors who’ve helped me in my college career and grad school search
• The grace of a few friends who’ve particularly aided through my current financial hardship
• The friends who’ve listened without judgement to woe is me rants, and who’ve seen me through to better days
• The movie Everything, Everywhere, All at Once
• The indomitable human spirit (lol)

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