more

I have trouble at times, deciding the legitimacy of wanting more. There's the part of me that is (mostly) happy with what he has, who he is, where he's going and where he's been and wonders if this sense of needing more is just a by-product of everything and everyone saying "more is better" and I in my, albeit naive, struggle to fit in “feel" that I too should want more. And there's a part of me that feels I deserve more, and wanting more isn't a message from the outside letting me know I don't "have" enough but is actually a message from the inside asking for something or some things more fulfilling than where I currently am.

I vigilantly watch the messages I receive from the outside and place them where they belong as they reach me. Being someone who easily succumbs to the depths of depression, I know how damaging letting the “shoulds” the world has for me effect how I feel about myself. Despite my best efforts to the contrary, I have fallen victim to the mileposts others have laid out and likewise have fallen to the judgments (both of myself and of others) when they have not been met. It takes about five seconds of being on facebook to see what others have and feel like I’ve lost, miserably, in the game of life, and it takes much, much longer to realize that what they have is probably something I don’t want and that maybe I haven’t “lost” at anything. Those messages are there, though, and they are powerful, and if given enough time (say a lifetime of watching tv) they can become so deeply ingrained that they seem to be the “truth”.

Then there are those pesky feelings. Whoever invented them should probably be shot. (See paradox wars). What I have/am and or where I am going may simply not be enough. There may exist within me a void yearning to be filled with something that I do not have, be it the number of people in my life, the quality of the relationships that I do have, the number of video games, the amount of time I spend at the gym, the number of sentences I put in this post, the amount of time I spend alone, how many emails I get, the amount of time I spend out, how much I dislike lists. There’s a certain lack of tangibility inherent in feelings, part of that which makes them so difficult to discern, much less explain, which makes my list so lame. But feeling as if there’s something “wrong” is unmistakable, it may not be so easy to hunt down what it is that is wrong, but the feeling is unlike any other, and that is where to begin.

The subtleties are small, but they are there. They aren’t wholly non-interchangeable, nor are they mutually exclusive. I effort to live my life in the grey colored middle where life actually takes place and, at times, that means a conglomeration of two stark contrasts into a meaningful, and workable, middle ground. And, perhaps not noticeably, it can be both and neither at the same time. Not that either are good or bad, so long as they aren’t detrimental to who and what I am nor my ability to cope with the here and now. As long as that doesn't mean filling my life and my soul with unnecessary things, trivial pursuits, and shallow and/or vague relationships and unreachable goals, then how can anyone say it is wrong?

I’ve decided that I will struggle with distinguishing between my thoughts and my feelings for the rest of my life. I’ve never been very good at it.