Biting My Own Teeth

I've become somewhat unlike myself in the past few months. I feel a lot like a different person who is masquerading as my former self. It's a bit unsettling but not really for the worse, as far as I can tell.

I've always been hyperbolically analytical and an obsessive perfectionist. Crafting sentences before I spoke them was a regular occurrence and sometimes an all day affair. Honestly that endeavor was just in pursuit of some measure of stability or control but I could never find it because whenever I tried to tip the scales even by the smallest margin I couldn't help but fall on the extremity, the periphery of what might be a reasonable response. I have identified at times as aggressively introspective, and other times I've been totally inconsistent with and wholly unaligned to any kind of self-awareness at all. I haven't really ever successfully or consistently struck a balance between the two, until now. I'm perched about equidistant from both edges wondering if this is where I'm supposed to be, the place for which I've always been searching.

I'm forcing myself to write this because I know I need the release but I can't think of a single thing that I care enough about to write on. It's not that I'm apathetic. I love a lot of things and people with great fervor and dignity, probably with a greater capacity for love than I've ever had but I also feel like I'm just living mechanically... 'going through the motions' of life, if you will. I've been more disciplined than ever in my school, work, and training of my physical body. I've committed myself to many things and have been consistently seeing them through and that's great but it all feels very empty, like my energy is fallow and my discipline's in vain. That sounds more cynical, melodramatic, and sad than I want it to but I don't know how else to describe this unfamiliar, neoteric philosophy I've been living in. I have typically wanted not necessarily to explain the world through ontology and metaphysics, but at least to describe it in a way that can acquiesce to my fickle whims for explication of everything I am in relation to everything that is.

I'm not sure if I'm even making sense but at least I'm putting it somewhere outside of my head. I haven't been grossly overthinking these days (with today being an obvious exception) but as a result all of my speech comes out in an extemporaneous warble of confused sounds that even I can't make out. Natural feels unnatural to me. I'm not sure who I am, where do the machinations end and does reality begin? It's quite melded together and has become inextricably intertwined. Am I just a fluid, organic, diplomat who can be whomever you need me to be? I want a damn explanation, something tantamount to understanding who I am. I've done plenty of searching of myself, what makes me tick, and the like but I still can't see if this is who I want to be. It's boring and safe but maybe that's who I am. I'm really tired of drawing parallels that don't lead anywhere and making subscriptions that no one else is buying. Maybe this is 'the sound of settling' and I just need to find some acceptance in that...maybe my brain needs to take a load off, and sit and let itself go a little. Maybe it needs a beer-paunch and potato chips. Maybe it's okay to not get it and that's where I'm arriving.

For once in my life I feel like a whole person and I have to say it's been immeasurably overrated. I'm not looking for the part of me that's missing anymore because none of me is missing. It's all here in all of its anticlimactic glory. For a while that was difficult to accept because I wasn't sure I liked what I had. I thought it needed an accent or a twist but all the accents and twists I found along the way have hurt me or left me or both. I'm not who I thought they wanted me to be. Sometimes I'm not even who I want me to be, but that will have to do for now because it's all I have.

I hate to make such a 'joyous' occasion sound so grave but the truth of the matter is that it is uncomfortable and painful to try to accept that I am complete because although the pieces that are here may facially change, I have the whole picture, and it's mundane like a billion piece puzzle that in the end displays a coat zipper. I don't mean to say that I'm done working on myself, or that I'm done living or anything of that sort but most of my life I've been looking for something to make me feel full and whole and alive and all this time I was complete and every extraneous thing that I allowed to envelope me was just as stupid as it sounded, it was a weak attempt for me to dispel what I must've known to be true. Nothing can make me more than I am from the outside. I suppose I could put the pieces together and paint over the parts that I don't like or something...

Here's where the puzzle metaphor falls off; I still have so much to add to myself, and learn, and figure out, and understand and I'm not unwilling but there is just something so daunting about wanting to change your reality and not knowing the first thing about how.