Crossroads

Have you ever found yourself at a crossroads?

Okay, stupid question.  And irritatingly rhetorical.

Anyway, the reason I ask is because the other day, I found myself at a crossroads that was both metaphorical and literal.  This certainly wasn’t the first one I’ve encountered, but it was unique in that I saw it coming a half-mile away.

Before I delve into this, let’s back up a bit.  Those who know me (or have read my previous posts on here) know that I have felt, well, stuck for a long time.  I’ve been out of college just over a year, and I’m still right where I was.  Moreover, I have been stuck since before I even went back to college.  True, I have changed, grown, and matured a great deal, but my overall situation in life is still the same.  I still live in the same damned house.  I wrote a novella-length post back in January about my goals for this year, and nearly six months into the year, I can’t say I’ve done much work approaching any of them.  Sure, I’ve started brainstorming ideas for posts for both my blogs, but aside from that, what have I done?  What have I accomplished?  Zip.  Nada.  Zilch.  Zippo.  Nil.

I wish I could explain this.  I really do.  My parents and friends ask me all the time, and I can’t even begin to offer an explanation, not even to myself.  Everything I come up with in my head just sounds like some lame excuse or rationalization.  So I just plod on the best I can.  But it’s not the best I can do, and I know it.  That’s what really bugs me.

My time in college was instrumental in showing me that I am capable of far more than I give myself credit for.  For nearly as long as I can remember, I’ve had a lot of issues with self-doubt and anxiety (it’s odd to think I’ve had so few issues with peer pressure given my generally negative self-view).  I’ve always preferred to keep a low profile, to blend in.  I don’t like attention being drawn to me.  For reasons I’ve never fully understood, I didn’t ever want to stand out, even if I deserved it, such as my natural gift for music (if you don’t believe me, then I will state for the record that even typing the phrase “my natural gift for music” made me feel uneasy, as if I was giving myself unwarranted hype).

Does this have anything to do with why I’m still stuck in the same rut I’ve been in for six long years?  Honestly, I don’t know.  But something tells me there is some kind of correlation that I either can’t see or am unwilling to see.  Something keeps holding me back.  I’ve written countless posts and journal entries (no, I won’t share those.  I write those by hand on paper for a reason.), but I never seem to be able to quite ascertain the problem.

So what does this have to do with the crossroads I approached the other day?  That afternoon, I finished reading Felicia Day’s memoir “You’re Never Weird on the Internet (Almost!)”.  I’ve been a fan of hers since discovering Dr. Horrible’s Sing-Along Video Blog and The Guild, and even had the pleasure of meeting her at a book signing for the above-mentioned memoir.  What I didn’t realize was how much her life’s story paralleled my own.  We’re both gamers, musicians, EVER so slightly opinionated, and we both have pretty serious problems with anxiety.  The way she bared all of her problems in the book was inspiring, especially when it came to the difficult ones.  Some of them I already knew bits and pieces about, such as the #GamerGate fiasco (I won’t go into detail here, suffice it to say that what started as one guy acting like an asshole due to a nasty breakup somehow devolved into an entire movement dedicated to misogyny and harassment of the worst kind, all under the guise of promoting “ethics in journalism.”  Feel free to Google for more information on the subject, but be warned: there are some truly nasty trolls involved in this particular scandal), and how she wrote a heartfelt opinion piece asking for peace, only to have her fear of retribution come true (she was doxxed, meaning she had personal information leaked on the internet for the purpose of allowing people to contact and harass her.  Ain’t the internet great?).  I have actually withheld opinions on topics out of that exact same fear.  I almost didn’t post my tirade about the NSA’s illegal spying because I feared what might happen.  But I pushed forward.

Unfortunately, as most people know, and as Felicia notes in her book, there is only so much one can do to push oneself, to keep plodding forward.  You have to find the motivation within yourself to keep going.  I was able to keep going for some time due solely to the fear that surrounded me.  In my early adulthood, I went through some very dark times, and my fear of what would happen if I strayed from the path expected of me kept me going.  Fear, while a terrible thing that often controls us, can be a powerful motivator.  But in recent years, my life has become very stable, and I’ve finally been able to bury my past.  So now I need to find a new motivation, and that’s not exactly something you can just dig up.  It can’t just be manufactured or willed into existence.  But you can find it by examining your life, by looking for patterns and correlations that don’t seem to make sense.

This is what happened to me the other day as I approached the crossroads that was both literal and metaphorical.  I had finished reading Felicia’s book an hour or so before I went out, and had been mulling over it ever sense.  I really enjoyed the book, but found a great deal of inspiration in her story, particularly in those instances where she looked inside herself to find the problem.  That’s something I’ve never tried in full to do.  Yes, I’ve written countless blog posts across three different platforms (Myspace and Livejournal make me feel OLD).  I’ve made thousands of posts on Facebook over the years.  I’ve written dozens of journal entries wherein I tried to go deeper into myself because it was a safe place to do so.  I even saw a therapist for about six months last year (which I cannot recommend enough for those having difficulties; sometimes, just having someone to talk to in a safe place can make all the difference in the world), which at least helped me start to understand a bit about myself (perhaps, had I continued, I would have been able to take this understanding further; unfortunately, as I have graduated, I can no longer use student health services, and I can’t currently afford to see anyone due to my lack of a job or health insurance).  But I refrained from delving deeper into myself to find the reason I’d been stuck and unhappy for so long.  Maybe I was afraid.  Maybe I already knew the answer and was just fighting with my subconscious about it.  I wish I could say what it was, but I still don’t know.  But the other day, I think I might have gotten a tiny glimpse.

The crossroads I approached was a road near my house.  I had gone out with the intention of going to the GameSwap (a local game store that deals in basically every gaming console ever created, as well as games and accessories for them) to see if they had a GameShark for my Nintendo 64 (yes, I still own and play one, and, yes, I am old), followed by getting some take-out for dinner.  As I drove down the road, I was mulling over Felicia’s book, trying to figure out if and how I could apply the lessons she learned to my own life.  This thought process somehow intertwined itself with the thought process surrounding my desire to go to GameSwap, and something interesting happened.  Call it an epiphany, a realization, or anything else; it was one of those moments where vastly different thought processes align in just the right way to make you go “Huh.  I swear this occurred to me before, but somehow it actually makes sense now.”

What occurred to me as I neared the store was that video games, which have always been a love of mine, might in fact be the key I’d been looking for.  One of the things that Felicia discusses in her book is the fact that we must identify things that are a detriment to us, be they behaviors, thoughts, or objects, and we must get rid of them.  At the very least, we must modify those things so that they are no longer a detriment (there’s no universal truth on this one because it depends on the person and the impact the thing has on them).  Now, I’m not saying that video games are a total detriment to me; on the contrary, I think that they have helped me a lot.  They have offered me an escape when I needed it, much like music has for nearly as long.  But there is a fine line between helpful and detrimental, and skewing towards the latter often ends up being self-destructive.  That may seem like an odd term to use here, but I think it’s appropriate because anything can become self-destructive if you let it. 

Most people, when they think of self-destructive behavior, think of things like drugs and alcohol.  They think of things that cause both physical and mental harm, both to the person doing them and to those who care for that person.  But I say again that anything can fall into that category if you let it.  I think that I may have done that with many things, and that video games may just be the tip of the iceberg.  I don’t mean to say that I have an addiction; actually, I have my mother’s very un-addictive personality.  But that doesn’t mean I don’t take things to an unhealthy extreme.  My problem, as I see it, is that I use video games, amongst other things, as a way to hide.

I touched on this above, this tendency to hide.  Like the adage goes, it all started innocently enough.  By nature, I am very introverted, shy, and anxious; in other words, I hit the trifecta when it comes to avoidance.  I detest confrontation, and have always kept to myself.  It really wasn’t until my mid-twenties that I started to come out of my shell, and that was saying something considering the darkness and fear that I was going through.  Unfortunately, I think I’ve begun to revert in recent years.  As my fear-based motivation dried up, I found myself without focus.  Moreover, my fragile emotional state began to get the best of me.  Going back to school helped, but, in the end, I did what I do best: I hid.  And I’m still hiding now.  Sure, therapy and medication have helped me see through the window in the door, but I’m afraid to pull it open again.

It is precisely this that led me to the crossroads the other day.  As I drove towards the intersection, I found myself thinking about how much we are defined by our choices.  I have allowed myself to become defined by my own self-destructive behavior, preferring to hide from life instead of live it.  I decided that the approaching intersection was a choice beyond the simple “right or left” (well, it was a four-way intersection, so I guess it’d really be right, straight, left, or U-turn).  If I turned left, I could go and purchase the GameShark I wanted (or something else related to video games if they didn’t have one in stock).  I definitely wanted it, but it occurred to me that if I did, I would basically just be enabling my own self-destructive behavior.  On the other hand, I could just as easily turn right, go get my take-out, and head back home.

It took me only a few seconds to decide.

“Screw it,” I thought.  “I’m just gonna get food and go back home.”

Turning right was so simple, so effective.  But it was one of the few moments in my life where I knew, beyond any shadow of a doubt, that I was right.  Video games may be a wonderful thing, but I, like many others, have too often used them for the wrong reason.  A beer now and then is great, but if you start hiding in the bottle, you miss out on life.  I think I’ve been doing the same with video games; as I said, I don’t believe I have an addiction, but I do let them distract me far too often.

This, unfortunately, is but one symptom of a larger problem, and it’s one I still don’t really know how to correct.  As I’ve noted above, I’ve had glimpses of it before, such as preferring to do a lot of my creative writing by hand in order to avoid distractions on my computer (damn you, Facebook, Wikipedia, and Netflix!).  I’ve also noticed that I tend to be happier and work better when I’m not in this house, which has led me to consider starting to go to coffee shops or the library a couple of days or so a week so that I can really get things done, be it working on projects or finding a job.

What this comes down to is that I need to start identifying all the things in my life that are self-destructive, that hold me back.  I’ve already been doing that on a subconscious level by cleaning most of the garbage out of my basement (filled two large trash cans!), and by going through my own things in preparation for moving out.  This house was my family’s home for a long time, and, as such, we accrued a lot of stuff.  Most of it was already either sent with people as they left or thrown out in our purges (the first one quite literally filled a dumpster; there are no words to describe how good that felt.)  I’m the last one here, and I feel the weight of this place on my shoulders.  That’s why I need to get out.  That’s also why I’m trying to get rid of as much as possible; getting rid of things that no longer serve any purpose is an extremely cathartic experience.  By ridding myself of both destructive behaviors and objects that do nothing but give me stress, I can finally allow my psyche to begin the healing process that has eluded me for so long.  I can finally move forward with my life instead of hiding from it.

I’m not going to pretend that everything is rosy now, or that I’m a new man (besides, as a writer, I detest such clichés).  Change is seldom that easy.  But I think this was an important step.  The first step to fixing a problem is to admit that there IS a problem; just as an alcoholic can’t change until he admits he’s an alcoholic, I couldn’t see how much I was hiding until I admitted to myself that I’m hiding.  By realizing just how much I hide from life, I’ve taken that first step.  I don’t know when or where the next step will be taken.  I don’t know how long the path is.  But I know where I need to go, and even if this isn’t precisely the right path, I’m at least moving.  Considering that my entire adulthood has been overshadowed by fear and anxiety, that’s a hell of a first step.

There’s an old Chinese proverb that says a journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step.  I’ve always added a second part to that that says the direction in which you step doesn’t matter; all that matters is taking the first step because you can always change direction.

No path is set in stone, so, in the end, it’s all up to you.