Trying to push the entries down a bit, that’s all. I guess really I’m spending a few hours thinking about the ways in which I do and don’t relate well to the world and trying to re-impose some meausre of will power after a summer in which I’ve given in to myself in situations where perhaps I know better… or at least, should know better…
I am looking at potential career and academic courses in a critical light, and am thinking that — knowing myself as I do (including some recent getting re-acquainted) — hard science or social science is not for me. Anthropology is a bad idea. It becomes clearer to me every day that I have to find something to bind myself to, a way of expressing myself which will become my crutch, more important to me than any person or any event for the rest of my life. Something I can’t possibly lose or be deprived of, which I can focus my attention on incredibly, encountering people often and closely enough to keep me away from myself and my daemons but not dealing with them long enough to allow any real attachments to form.
Some sort of numbness and addiction that is paradoxically also productive and healthy.
Print photojournalism: candidate number one. Subsumed under this possibility are every factor I need: travel (i.e. the ability to run away), people with whom I associate but not for long (so that I cannot expect too much or care too deeply), self-expression (communication without having to involve other individuals directly), the ability to insert myself into dangerous situations when I begin to feel it (so that I will have no choice but to extricate myself once again, thereby distracting myself from… everything)… and at the same time, an ability to still feel love for the world, for people in it, in some way that is beneficial to others, and ultimately, to me.
Sounds like a plan. Sounds like it was made for me. Barriers to entry can no longer be considered, after this summer I don’t know that I really have a choice — unless I can come up with some similar proposition which excites me a little more (although the travel angle of this one continues to interest me greatly…)
But “being okay” — something I’ve consistenly told myself I can do — doesn’t really work for me. I am who I am. You can’t cure yourself of yourself. I can moderate things, I can grit my teeth and make sure that I don’t hurt people (well, usually) but I can’t just be happy “being okay” and living like everyone else. My life has been my life and the subconscious resirvoir of memory will never be emptied, nor will a lifetime’s worth of learned survival techniques ever truly be erasable, even if I have learned not to try so hard to survive.
And why should I want to change so very much? My viewpoint, my core, give me perspectives and sensations that others don’t have and don’t understand; sharing these can make the world a better place. I think it would be a waste to spend years in some sort of “therapy” just to make myself into a fit suburban American-guy lacking in any creativity or fury but stable as hell with a nice car and clean clothes.
Better to be dirty; better to have to scream.
