I’m going through an odd period, up in the noggin, if it hasn’t been obvious to my six regular readers. I’m seldom excited by anything, I think I’m susceptible to some odd mood swings, and I’m often times feeling anxious or troubled by things that I’m not even sure I can really explain much less comprehend myself. I stop wanting to communicate with people that I don’t have to communicate with, and I just want to kind of be by myself and hope the metaphorical cloudy weather passes without there being any harsh rains.
I spend a lot of time trying to figure things out myself, and it seems like each day brings another possible personal revelation to why it is I’m feeling the way I’m feeling. However, as is the case with human beings, the mind is constantly moving, and some thoughts and ideas stick better than others, and some fade away or become forgotten.
Today’s thought process is surrounded with the desire to simply attempt to isolate and identify the things that are eating at me. Granted, identifying them and trying to rationalize them isn’t going to instantly make me feel like I’ve found some miraculous cure or anything, but if for anything at all, at least it’s giving me something to write about, when the rest of the world is seemingly so stagnant and boring, or at least the rest of the world I feel comfortable seeking out, behind the prying eyes of a potential Big Brother.
Ultimately, the root of everything troublesome, I believe stems from my job situation, which hit the mother of speed bumps back in May. I embarked on the summer vacation that I never wanted, treaded some rough waters since throughout it, and despite the fact that I did secure new employment fairly quickly, there’s often times the lingering doubts in my head that things feel unresolved, and that I feel like I’ve left some personal and professional happiness on the table somewhere along the line. Niggling doubts like this eat at me often, and in a way, feel like they’re really restraining my ability to be truly happy about, or find enjoyment in things.
However, more recently, I’ve got some unfortunate woes on my radar that require attention, time and money in order to overcome. None of them are particularly horrendous, or truly hazardous to mine, or anyone else’s health or well-being, but they’re things that I’ve put off for as long as I can, and they’ve gotten to points where they probably shouldn’t be put off any further.
Not to be overly vague, they’re home improvement issues, where I’m learning quickly about shortcuts and cut-corners employed by builders, paying unfortunate dividends in a house lived in after 11 years of existence. Things needing to be replaced, but they’re things that I’m not qualified and probably not capable of trying to do myself without risking large-scale repercussions to my home itself. In one hand, I’m actually glad that I’m accruing this kind of experience, because I think it will make me smarter in the future when it comes to home purchasing later down the line, but in the other hand, I’m disgusted by the builders for doing the things they do like this, that affects me adversely in the present.
It’s not even so much about the money it’s going to cost in order to fix these issues, but it’s the fact that it’s going to take so much time. It’s like I wish I could just throw money at one company to spend a single day to fix two key problems and be done with it until the day I move out of this house, but naturally it’s not that easy. I’m learning the differences between what’s considered specialty work (necessitating specialists) and what’s considered less-priority (outsourced labor), and the unfortunate fact that I probably will not be able to knock out all my repairs in one fell swoop, no matter how much money I’m willing to pay, and that getting my two key repairs will necessitate at the very least, two separate days and two likely costly bills.
Not to mention my home internet has gone out inexplicably amidst all of this, so it’s making it slightly more difficult to do research and make progress on things, or blow off steam playing League of Legends in the evening. The frustration of Comcast dicking around with god knows what in my surrounding area, with the connection status (that I’m frequently checking on my phone) is constantly changing from “outage” to “no outage” to the blinking lights on my modem that signify that there’s no internet connectivity regardless. I just want things to work, and it frustrates me greatly when they’re not, especially when there’s no logical rationale to why. I’ve been seeing Comcast trucks around my area over the last 48 hours now, and I’m glad that it’s clear that something is being done, but the fact of the matter is that my internet is not working when it says my connection is not facing an outage, and it’s frankly pissing me off.
It’s pathetic how dependent and reliant people like me are on the internet, sometimes. To think there was once a time when wanting to check something or compose an email required dialing-in to a physical computer, and now I’m getting bitter and frustrated over not being able to check Facebook on my iPad from the comfort of my bed.
That being said, there’s no guarantee when this post will actually make it up, if I can’t upload it while home.
All this crap, while the calendar is creeping along, and things and events that I should probably be looking forward to more than I am are fast approaching. And I simply can’t really get that excited about them just yet, because I’m a patsy that can’t seem to handle the stress of seemingly inconsequential problems.
Ultimately, anyone reading this rant about me whining about how things aren’t working, and how difficult my life is probably thinking what a fucking bore of first-world complaints I must have. I’m not even going to try and disagree with that thought if that’s what’s being thought, because it really is just that.
However, that is something that I should feel fortunate about, that my daily life’s current biggest issues are things like these things, that can be solved with money and time. It’s just that my life in general is, knock on wood, fairly devoid of severely massive and legitimate problems, that when I have complications like these, albeit inconsequential to some, are frustrating to me, and I think I have a general poor sense of stress management, in a way.
And it occasionally affects my behavior. I know I’m generally a cynical person by nature, which I’ll be the first to admit isn’t the best character trait to possibly have, but it gets tiresome to me when I’m so often accused of being negative. I’m fully aware that ultimately, there’s nobody but myself to blame for pigeonhole-ing myself to that kind of reputation, but sometimes it feels like that when it comes to me, there are shorter triggers than there would be for others, just because I have a tendency to be cynical.
Nothing makes me feel more alone than feeling like people don’t have my back, or are willing to even try and be on my side when it comes to a conflict. And when I feel alone, I feel like shutting down and shutting the doors to the rest of the world, and just going to sleep or something and hope a new day brings better fortune.
I don’t want to be negative, but I like to believe that I’m also a very analytical person that tries and sees as many perspectives or angles as possible in everything I can. Perhaps I should be less vocal or verbal about every thought I have, but the drawback to such a hypothetical trait is that I’m going to see things that aren’t always in the same shiny bright lights as what others might see.
The thing is, I occasionally get so downtrodden by negativity that I actively seek out feel-good stories or things that I know will lift my spirits and make me feel good about the world we live in. Ironically, such things are just so hard to find sometimes, and it just leads to a perpetual cycle of despair in the world that good is so much harder to come upon than not good.
I know everything will be okay, but it will take time, and I don’t want to wait for them to be solved. Frankly, I don’t want to use the money either, but that’s unfortunately unavoidable as well, no matter how much time is additionally necessary.
The takeaways from this long rant for me are that I need more patience, I have a lot of first-world problems, and I could certainly use some work at coping with the stress that comes along from my first-world problems. It’s by no fault of anyone else that I end up acting like I do, and I hope that by trying to identify and isolate my issues, I can perhaps be slightly more efficient at trying to better them.
