What the future holds…
My life has been a giant amalgamation of pain. Be it emotional or physical, it’s always been a part of my life. I feel pain when I go to the gym. I feel pain when I eat or don’t eat. I feel pain when I love people and I feel pain when that love gets away from me. That pain comes from a place inside me that doesn’t love myself. The part of me that doesn’t love myself kinda doesn’t want other people to love me either. It’s a self destruct mechanism installed in my brain much like the kind you see in an evil lair in a movie. Maybe the analogy fits… maybe my brain is an evil lair. I don’t know. It’s spinning way too fast for me to get a snapshot in focus. Maybe that’s why I’m a comedian though…maybe I’m trying to earn a mass quantity of love from an audience for a short amount of time rather than complete love from one person which feels impossible.
My life has been hard and I can’t help but wonder how much of that is self imposed. My stupid big mouth and my stubbornness will get the best of me yet. I don’t know how to work on things in the past but I can be proactive and focus on the future. I can’t fix the past but I can fix myself. I can work on who I am and learn to love and value myself again as I haven’t done so in a very long time. And I’m doing so because someone very near and dear to me said some things to me that no one has had the courage to say to me in a long long time. Probably over 10 years. When I was most depressed and low and deep into drugs years ago I kind of wished that someone would hold an intervention for me. I wouldn’t even need the intervention but just knowing that someone cared enough about me to point out the problems they saw with me so I could better myself. Nobody did this. People just enabled me. Most of all audiences. People would tell me I was funnier when I was depressed and/or drunk. Maybe I was but it’s not a very good long term goal. I just did drugs and drank myself to death until I decided that i didn’t want to do that anymore. Now I have my splurges a few times a month but I’m off the rigorous 7 day a week program I was on before.
My friend laid it all out on the table yesterday as people often do when you push them to the edge like I did and I tried to not accept what she said because accepting it would mean two things that I don’t want to acknowledge. One would be that I have these problems and as you get older change seems less and less likely and is definitely met with resistance. Nobody wants to change the routine or rut they’re in because it’s comfortable. The river forms the Grand Canyon and then it stays the course. It doesn’t go off and start another canyon. As people we need to constantly change and that’s very hard but re-inventing yourself is very important and a sign of self awareness and intelligence. The other thing I’d have to acknowledge by accepting what my friend is saying is that someone actually sees my faults and cares enough to tell me. That’s the hard part for me to accept. Maybe because nobody has said anything to me when I was so much worse than I am now why would someone tell me to fix myself now? Maybe I’d considered that since I’d hit rock bottom and came out of it stronger I thought the work was done… Maybe I got tired of self improvement. Whatever the reason I still need to acknowledge that more work needs to be done.
I don’t know what the future holds but I know that am going to change the way I see it. I don’t even know where to start. I’m going to spend more time reading and writing. I’m going to find a safe and healthy way to live my life that is balanced and clean. Excess will be a thing of my past. Being extreme is fun as a kid and it’s tacky as an adult. I’m going to find some good friends to surround myself with. I’m going to exercise more and also start listening to new and different types of music. Not exactly a total overhaul of my life but more focus on the good things and less emphasis on the shitty things I do.
We all have two sides to us. Usually a fun and lovable side and a shitty side that you try to keep wrangled. The shitty side wants to make bad choices and do bad things even if it knows it’s doing just that. I want to focus on the good side more and see if I can’t fix the bad side. The problem I see is that I’ve done so many crazy things over the last years that everything I’m doing now feels very mild to me but to an outsider I look like a crazed maniac. I’ve been so good at living two lives. I’m not a liar or deceiver I just keep that side for certain situations and the good side for the fair weather friends. Its weird how the loved ones are the ones that get to see the worst side of us. We save the smiley face for the world and bring the baggage home with us. We take those we love for granted and know that they’re stuck with us so we can mistreat them…but we shouldn’t.
In the words of my mother, “what’s the lesson honey?” What is my lesson? I just lived through something… what did I learn? That’s tough. It’s tough because we all know when we grow as people but it’s not always tangible. I can’t make a list of things that I’ve learned but I can feel the growth on the inside. When the wound over heart heals the tissue gets a little bit tougher. You don’t want that skin to get too tough or you’ll be lonely forever but, in the same breath, if it’s too soft you have some heartbreak coming your way. Trying to find the medium is an art. Some people have built up so much calcium around their heart that they could cut glass with it. Some people have so much heartache that they’ve built a solid lead box around their heart and they don’t open it for anyone. Some people have earned the right to hate the world. It’s sometimes easy to hate those people because sometimes it feels like they don’t care. It’s easy to see the anger in those people and ignore the sadness that caused it. It’s easy to put those people in a room like a freak and judge them from a distance and throw nickels at them. All it does is cause that shield around their heart to just get thicker and heavier and harder to penetrate. The world is full of assholes and some people get stuck dealing with all of them. I’ve been very lucky to come from where i do and the family I have. It’s really just luck of the draw. Who gets the easy life with the good role models and who gets the shit on a stick version of a family? It’s totally up to whomever deals us our cards. It’s the only thing about us that we can’t change.
So we’ll take the hand we’re dealt and do the best we can with it. I’ll never win a Nobel Prize or find a cure for cancer. I’ll never hit a ball out of Dodger stadium. I’ll probably never know the joy of being good at anything musical. But I can be a better friend. I can be a better man, a good man. I can be trustworthy and loyal and dependable. I can be more self aware of my affect on other people and less self absorbed. I can be more sober. I can love and be loved. I can spend more time listening…to people, to myself and to the world around me. I can be much healthier…mentally and physically. I will begin seeing a therapist just to have someone to talk to. Maybe it’ll make me feel less lonely. Maybe I can find things to do when i feel lonely that are positive and social things, like going to a free event or the gym or just getting a hobby. Spend more time doing things for myself and less partying, staying out late and self damaging. I guess it’s all part of growing up. It’s all stuff I see grown up people doing but I’ve never really felt like a grown up. My job tells me to remain a child forever but I think certain parts of me have some growing up to do. It’s so ironic when I tell people to act like adults when I don’t feel like one at all.
Most of all I need to work on being judgmental. I was always very unbiased as a kid but as I’ve gotten older I’ve become conditioned to making judgments on people based on their behavior and the way they look but I hated when people did that to me as a kid. A certain amount of judgment has to be passed for your own safety and sanity obviously but too much can be hurtful. I’m too opinionated I guess. But until I better myself I’ll have to keep my opinions to myself because nobody likes a hypocrite.
Thank you Sara. For your friendship and trust and loyalty. Thank you for telling me things I needed to hear and thank you for being such an amazing part of my life. I’m sorry for everything you’ve had to deal with over the last year and a half. You’ve meant the world to me. You’ve changed my life for the better. I’m forever grateful to you. And I will always love you. Wherever or however you are. The girl I love was on my phone last night and I talked to her like she was a stranger that I met a year and a half ago. You have grown and changed so much and have made me so proud of you. You did everything right on Saturday and nothing seriously wrong. It’s me that won’t let go of the past. But I’m letting go now. Maybe it’s too late. But maybe it’s the least I can do after all you’ve done and how little I’ve done. I’ll make you proud of me one day…like I am of you today.
