So, the Lord has bestowed upon me another stone. My car has been having a couple issues lately, the auxiliary port stopped working so all of my drives have either been silent or me just playing music off of my phone while it sits in my lap. Well, this morning, I go out to drive to the park like I’ve been doing and it looks like my battery is dead. It seems like I left the headlights on last night, which is way out of character for me. It was like 7:00 a.m., so no one I knew was awake or around to give me a jump. I waited around for a bit, but was sort of antsy to at least go run before it got too hot. So I ran to the park and back and then called up someone to come give me a jump. I’m a little worried about it, though, I’m supposed to drive out to Athens, Georgia on Friday for a concert, which honestly sounds miserable now without a functioning speaker system.
Other news from the day is as follows, I had a Pop Tart and some yogurt, then fell asleep for a second. The issue with my waking up early to run is that I haven’t really adjusted my falling asleep time accordingly. So, I fell asleep on the couch until about 9:00 a.m. Then I puttered around a bit, answered some work messages, sulked, and then headed to the gym at 11:00. I might be delusional but I do think my arms are slightly bigger than they used to be. I’ve been kind of abusing my body, running at the park, rowing at home, gym whenever my arms and back feel better, crunches and push-ups until I collapse into a pile of limbs on the floor of my bedroom. It helps, I think. The downside is my eating habits haven’t changed to match, so I’m perpetually starving and also perpetually without appetite. But I haven’t noticed myself like shrinking or my ribs poking out so I guess it’s fine for now.
Today at work and also while sitting in the parking lot of a noodle restaurant (despite my hunger, I just couldn’t go in), I read a short story by David Foster Wallace called “Good Old Neon”. It was uncomfortable- I really related to the narrator, which was definitely not a good thing, seeing how it’s about a guy who struggles so much with his identity and his faults, his apparent “fakeness” and lack of a genuine self, his struggle with always perceiving his actions through the eyes of others, looking for favorable outcomes and how to achieve them that he takes a bunch of Benadryl and crashes his car directly into a stone bridge. The short story is told after the fact, while the narrator is in the afterlife or is a ghost or something. He explains his upbringing and different occurrences in his life that keyed him into his isolation and his narcissism, specific meetings with a shrink to figure out the problems, and the disappointment when the shrink reacts the exact way the narrator thought he would. Now, I don’t completely relate to this guy, thankfully, but there were a couple passages that really resonated, which, again, seems to not be a good thing. Specifically, the compulsion to act according to how you will be perceived, the fear that that compulsion is all you are with nothing underneath, and the distaste with this made-by-committee persona. It hurt- a lot. And it made me think about what I wrote about a couple days ago, that feeling that I have even when I’m being productive. It feels like a vine going from my stomach and around my heart into my throat. “Who am I doing this for? What do I want to accomplish? Do you even want to do this? Or do you just want to be seen as doing it?” The same feeling applies to the blog. Am I writing because I want to, or is it some veiled attempt at pleading with you, the reader, to perceive me as thoughtful, worth-reading, emotionally aware, etc. Am I doing all this, all the exercise and writing, to get back with an ex who I know is moving on from me, to demonstrate my growth and changes in the wake of her decision? Honestly, I can’t say for sure, and it crushes me inside. I don’t know why I’m doing the things I’m doing. Sure, I want to be more fit but I don’t know if that’s because I want people to perceive me as fit and therefore more attractive/deserving of affection or if I just want to be more confident in myself (though, that feeling, too, is rooted in the perceptions of others) or if I genuinely want to be a healthier person that I can proud of. I can’t find it, my reasoning. I don’t know how you even figure that out. Does everyone labor under these compulsions?
I don’t know, it’s a downer. There’s a person I want to be, ideally, but even that ideal person is someone who I would like to be perceived as. Is there such a thing as being someone independent of the expectations and judgments of others? I don’t know, I just don’t know, if there is, it is an experience so counter to my own existence that it might as well not be the case. My best assumption, and by best I mean the assumption that prevents me from crashing my own, music-less car into a bridge, is that everyone contains all of these forms of motivations, and the difference is in how severely you identify and agonize over them. I can accept being neurotic to a depressing degree, but I can’t accept being neurotic to an alien degree.
The way I’m coping with this, currently, is that source of motivation doesn’t matter and that the value lies in the doing. As long as I get up and run, go to the gym, eat, put myself in the world, pursue hobbies and look at career paths, it doesn’t necessarily matter where the motivation comes from. The end result is the same. But I’m just not a consequentialist at heart, I can’t buy that. I want to have pure and aspirational motives, to be earnest in my growth for the sake of myself.
I’m trying to be earnest and honest here, but that’s hard. Like the narrator from the short story, I have some idea of how all of this will be perceived. That tortured him greatly, though his was his parting notes to his family and coworkers, and I would not like to feel that way. So, I tell myself it’s natural to write with perception in mind. Again, I don’t know how to exist any other way.
What is to be authentic? Is there a real, true you, lying in the loam under the rippling water, that you are beholden to, and to be authentic is to act in accordance with this nature? Is it to be consistent in your actions with others? Is it to create a persona you’re happy and proud of and act in accordance with that? Or is authenticity identifying the base motivations you have in all you do and accepting them? Is it necessarily a good thing to be authentic? Is finding out who you are even something someone can do? I don’t fucking know, man. Honestly, you don’t need to think like this to function in everyday life, which is why I think I might just be a little too neurotic for my own good.
There’s a quote about free will that always gets to me. It goes something like “Man can do what he wants, but cannot will what he wills.” That is to say, we can make whatever decisions we want, but the mechanisms behind those decisions, the outcomes we want from the decisions, those are ingrained in us and unchangeable by any effort on our part. Maybe that’s what it is to be authentic, to know what wills you.
I don’t know, rereading this makes it sound like I’m going through a crisis. I’m not. It’s just one of those days where you miss people badly and think about why you are the way you are. At the end of the day, I’m going to go get on the rowing machine after this, heat up some food, watch Seinfeld, and get another four hours of sleep. Again, my cope is that it doesn’t matter why you do things, the doing is where all the value lies. My cope also extends to even if doing things for strange reasons isn’t good, hopefully by continuing to do things, I’ll just develop good habits to take with me once the momentary motivation fades. Who’s to say?
Again, I’m not in crisis. Most days are good days where I’m smiling and happy and social, loving life and the things within it. Other days I think about what’s happening under the surface and about my future and past and don’t smile. I think that’s natural enough.
jeez, louise 