Running on the wheel

If I have learned one thing on how to get better, it's that I really do have to keep doing them again and again, more and more, until I get better and better at them. How nice is it for the privileged Goku's of the world with their hyperbolic time chambers and their mentors who give them training, feedback, and a safe environment for them to grow? Perhaps a terrible analogy as it relates to me. 

Fall in love with the process. Just keep taking steps. Learn to peak your dopamine release during the process of friction. Enjoy the process and forget about the goals. Lose yourself in the flow of your actions and your work. Chase excellence and success shall follow. Lay down that brick as perfectly as possible and forget about the walls and the pathways and everything else. Just have that fundamental quality of faith that on the other side of your pain, there is something better.

If I keep saying the words and doing the actions, will they eventually start to become real? Days like this I can know everything there is to know and still feel defeated. Perhaps it is because I have fallen off the wagon and am struggling to get back on it? After you fall off the wagon enough times though, you start to feel like failure is inevitable. If you have tasted success, it seems like it just isn't possible for you. Days like this my mind is working against me and I am actively hurting myself.

How can I run away from my own judgment? How can I escape my own awareness? It sees everything I see. How can I slog away without slipping up? The pressure is getting to me and I feel terrible. Just one slip-up and it all comes crumbling down. I feel lonely and disheartened, I feel poor, ugly, and unlovable. I feel like a worthless failure who doesn't deserve to be rich and famous. I never wanted to be rich and famous. I just wanted to live a life where I wasn't miserable most of the time. I just wanted to make a positive impact on the world. Somehow it seems like I need to have big ambitions for doing something like that.

It feels like you have to be important and hyper-successful just so you won't be miserable all the time. It seems to me like I have to be so much more than I am just to be happy. Somewhere in my bones, I feel like I'm not good enough to be happy. Somewhere deep inside me, I feel like I need to be so much more than myself just to deserve love and attention. Everything in my entire life has made me feel like I'm not good enough for anyone. They told me that people can sense it. They told me that it shows.

Times like these I do want to believe in karma. Maybe I was a terrible person and this is my atonement for the atrocities that I have committed. No matter what I try I can't seem to get out of this pitiful prison of lonely misery. I numb myself with food, smoke, drinks, and flesh. I drown myself in worldly pleasures. I hurt myself physically to avoid internal anguish. I escape it all through made-up fantasies. In fake worlds made up by others. In anime, movies, TV shows, and in video games. The longer the better, the deeper the safer. 

What is the point of this awareness? It's like before you were tied to a chair with your eyes and ears covered being stabbed continuously without being able to die. Now they've removed the binds from your eyes and ears so you know you're being stabbed. You still can't do anything about it, except now you can just see it coming. You can brace yourself for it and feel your helplessness as a single thrust is finished and you see that bracing yourself did nothing to improve the situation. Instead of being useful, the awareness has transformed a blind experience filled with random spikes of pain into a continuous torture of neverending pain. 

I wonder if anything will ever change in me. If I will ever grow out of this senseless cycle. No matter how drastic a change I seem to make it keeps pulling the ground from under me in unexpected ways. Will it be different if I fall in love with someone? Will it change if I become famous? If I can afford a lot of nice clothes and self-care products? How about if I become good-looking and healthy? If I can breathe normally without my lungs aching from the years of self-abuse, will that make me feel worthy of simply existing? What if I make my mother proud of me? Will she ever even be able to admit it to me? What if my father starts to trust me? If those relationships were the causes of my wounds, will they become my salvation? What if they pass away before that happens? How about if I become useful to other people? What if I save their lives and become their messiah? One person? How about 2? Will that be enough? A 100? A million? Surely if I have a million people who cry because I die, that could heal my insecurity? What if I read 100 books? What if I write a dozen of them? 

Somehow a part of me stays skeptical about it. All this just to feel seen? To feel heard and understood and cared for? To feel worthy of existing? To feel appreciated and cherished in my heart of hearts. A part of me denies the entire premise. Something about it just doesn't add up. What if I make peace with this entity I feel connected to deep, deep within me? What if I make amends with whom I call God? Will that free me from ceaseless suffering and such furious self-hatred? I find it hard to believe. It seems the only way to find to the answers to these questions is to keep on going. The only hope I have to make this world better. The only chance I have at helping others climb out of their own hells is to keep trying, and more importantly, to keep living. 

I do know this much at least. The one thing I know for sure I cannot do. I know it deeper than any other influence, any other intuition. The one sound that echoes brazenly, reverberating throughout my entire being without stuttering for a single moment. The one thing I can see beyond the briefest shadow of a doubt, and can hear as clearly as a winter sky. "I refuse to give up". The capacity for it does not exist within me. If that makes me a coward or a fool I do not know. Yet above all else, I have been honest with myself beyond the best of my ability and the fact has become undeniably obvious. Defeat might be my middle name, failure might be as easy as breathing to me, but giving up? I am unable to articulate just how artificial and alien that idea seems. 

This is not something I am telling myself, in fact, I also seem to have zero skill when it comes to lying to anyone including me. I can lie to myself for a while but a violent reaction seems to rise up from somewhere deep within. Imagine my absolute and pure shock when discovering these words coming from a place deeper than that deep, so deep in fact that it doesn't even seem to come from anywhere within me. As natural as the law of gravity, inertia, and momentum. As natural as a man's death after his heart has been ripped out. As natural as corn popping under great heat and pressure. As natural as Matthew McConohay saying alright, alright, alright. "I cannot give up" "It isn't a possibility" "Giving up is not an option" "Quitting simply does not exist" 

Is that the byproduct of awareness? Is it the natural consequence of seeing the knife after being blind? Does it follow that you can break free from the chair just because you have seen yourself in it? Or is it something so much dumber than that? Is it a survival instinct so pure and simple that it isn't even impressive? Like having to take a shit after eating a lot of food. I have always been in awe of this realization that essentially all the organic life on earth has formed a literal chain that has transcended the boundaries of space and time in the face of physical entropy. This idea that ever since the first rudimentary organism in the life-nurturing bosom of the ocean became big enough to justify the existence of a circulation system. The fact that ever since that first creature gained a heartbeat, from the sheer dumb luck of mutation I am told, perhaps as a massive fuck you to the entirety of eternal existence through a stubbornness to stay alive so fundamentally supernatural in its force against the insurmountably astronomical odds stacked against it. Ever since that first heart started beating, that rhythm, that heartbeat, literally that ancient otherworldly, magical, reality-defying pulse that gave new power to the life of this creature, that very same momentum has been passed down from there. 

Over the course of a period of time so incomprehensibly ginormous, this baton changed an equally spectacular number of hands, changing its form countless times.  That momentum has carried throughout the ages and reached me after surviving the impossible. I would imagine that it is this very same force of nature that I can sense within me even now which tells me to go on. That is what it feels like. Perhaps a small fledgling in front of eternal entities like God herself, but to us mortals, what's the difference really? The clear message feels ancient and appropriate to the scope of that undeniable fact which is the miracle of life. I may be miserable and feel hopeless, I may lose all faith in myself or the laws of the world, but I may never even imagine myself giving it all up and somehow not dying then and there, literally unable to start again. After all that, I have to wonder, does anyone else feel the same?