Déjà vu

If you read my previous post you'll not be surprised to learn that I haven't been in a great place mentally for the past few days. I've been trying to make decisions about my future and where I want to go from here. In an attempt to understand where I am and how I got here I decided to look back at my journey. I have had several blogs over the years, all of which have been purged from the internet for various reasons, but I have backups of a few of them that were lucky to survive the hard drive crash a few years ago. The most popular of those blogs had over 600 posts when I took it down so there was quite a wealth of content to dive into.

Upon reflection I can honestly say that I have grown as a person for one simple reason, I hated what I read. It's not that any of it was particularly offensive or grating, far from it, most of it was quite benign, but that was part of the problem. I've always stressed the little things and let the big things take care of themselves, and my past writing really shows that. I didn't like what I read because most of it alluding to my daily struggles and although I am sure many people took comfort in knowing they weren't alone when they read it, for me looking back it just dredges up memories I would rather forget.

I can't remember who said it but I remember a YouTube video where the creator said you haven't grown if you don't look back at your younger self and cringe. That hits home right now because my priorities have shifted quite a bit. When I was younger I was all too eager to take on the world, and as my recent debacle has demonstrated now, I'm all too eager to avoid it at all costs. I died a thousand times on every hill I fought my way up, but now I just want to lie down and take a nap. I'm tired, not just physically, but mentally, emotionally, and recently spiritually. They say to be a better writer you should read, as much as you can; so that's just what I have been doing - the focus of that reading my surprise you.

I have been reading the Bible, the Tanakh, the Quran, and quite a lot of Occult texts including A.E. Waite's History of the Rosicrucians and Israel Regardie's account of The Golden Dawn among others. I guess you could call it soul searching, I don't know exactly what I expect to find, I'm driven by curiosity more than anything else. This comes after several years where philosophy in the more conventional sense had been my focus, I read Symposium, Apology, Crito, and Phaedo of Socrates by Plato, and various works by Aristotle, Nietzsche, and Marcus Aurelius. That too came off the back of trying [and failing] to read the collected works of William Shakespeare.

What stands out among all these works for me is just how similar they all are, despite the first impression that they are worlds apart and you would expect them to have nothing in common, yet spend any amount of time reading them collected together and the same themes emerge time and again, ultimately the act of reflecting on the nature of being and being human specifically. At times it feels like we're all aliens trapped inside human bodies desperately trying to understand how we ended up here - and yes, I have read L. Ron Hubbard too, including the leaked texts - for the sake of clarity I am not a Scientologist.

I've reflected in the past upon the Queer perspective in particular that arises from going "off the rails" that society has built for us and the feeling of disorientation when you have to decide without direction where you want to go. This idea in itself has been espoused and explored by others with far greater ingress than I could do justice so I'll spare you the ruminations that would reiterate what you already know or have already read. Let's be honest, if you're here reading this post you "get it" already I don't need to try and convince you.

I'm reluctantly coming to accept the reality that every option I have is shitty in its own way, with the implication being that I will have to pick the "least shitty" option or the option I can live with, or to not make a choice at all. I am in uncharted territory, like I said before, I have always focused on the small things and left the big decisions to take care of themselves and it had always worked for me before. I trusted in a higher power to guide me to wherever I needed to be, but I've felt like that power doesn't want me to move and I can't understand why. Every path in the last 10 or so years I have tried to take, something goes wrong, and these aren't just me making excuses.

Objectively, terrorist attacks, economic crashes, a global pandemic, and my Mum getting Cancer, have all derailed plans I have made over the past 10 years, all of which were out of my control. I meet resistance with every choice I try to make, even when I choose to stay put and look for employment here I still meet confrontation as my previous post detailed.

I have grown as a person, that much I can attest to, but my life seems to be locked in perpetual state of stagnation. I don't know what I'm "supposed" to do next, and I don't know what I want anymore. I used to want just to be happy, and I was always able to find happiness in the moment, but I haven't felt happy in a long time and everything I try to do that would normally make me feel happy leads to nothing.