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crowd surfing
Sep. 3rd, 2005 03:24 pm(aka don't go changin')
Anyone who knows me at all well knows that the couple of years of my life have
been severely lacking in hugs and puppies. This has, if anything, been
getting worse of late, not better.
I've been responding in the way I normally respond to this sort of thing - by
carefully and painstakingly building up a wall to shut out the world and the
people in it, brick by mental brick. This isn't a new habit - I've done it a
couple of times in my life in the past.
The first time I realised that this was happening (something like 15 years
ago) I was lucky enough to become friends with a wonderful person who just
bludgeoned her way through the wall and freed me from my self-imposed (nails
hand to forehead) exile. She didn't even realise that I'd spent so long
building up my sense of isolation, but instead just crashed through without
knowing.
This sort of luck isn't something you can rely on, though. It's also hardly
fair to expect Someone Else to come to rescue you from yourself all the time.
(cue Björk's "Army of Me" here)
...
The last couple of weeks, it's been getting bad enough that I was starting to
thrash around looking for a way out. I was seriously considering taking a job
over in California just to break the blockage.
This seemed a fairly drastic step, and of course it really wouldn't fix the
problem, merely move the problem to an interesting new location. This would
also involve cutting off a whole pile of friends, which would be wrenching.
It also seemed to be running away from the problem, which I wasn't happy
about. There's also the "living in the United States of Hell" - while the Bay
Area sucks less than most of the US, until they get around to seceding
(probably taking Oregon and maybe Washington state, but please leave Los
Angeles behind!) it's still part of the US. Fuck that.
Instead, I decided to go for the more direct approach, and just say 'to hell
with this' and start opening up again. This is not as easy as it sounds - it
meant trusting people a lot more than I thought I could handle, and
(obviously) leaving myself open for pain and sadness.
...
It's (in my mind) something like crowd-surfing. You lay back, vulnerable and
trusting that the people holding you up won't decide to just drop you on your
head for fun. It's exhilarating, frightening, but (hopefully) a fun ride.
Rather than just trying to do this with baby steps, I instead just went for
the head-first dive. The problem with an incremental approach is that it
gives you too many opportunities to back down. Once you've dived off the
stage, the decision is made - you can't leap back.
...
The results have been, I have to say, extremely rewarding. I'm actually happy,
for the first time in approximately an age or three. Well, OK, I'm also happy
while I'm travelling, but that's hardly a fair comparison - meeting new
people and seeing new things is always going to be a way to get you out of
the dumps. Unfortunately, it's not really practical to be a full-time
traveller - and it doesn't actually mean you're happy, just that you're
finding a way to avoid thinking about things for a while. "Ooo shiny" is a
nice way to distract yourself.
As usual, it's only when someone else mentions that "it's so nice to see you
happy" that I realised that I was in fact happy. Introspection is for
poetry-writing types. No wait, fuck - I'm posting this to livejournal. Oh
well.
...
More importantly, as far as I can tell, this happiness isn't a result of any
particular situation or person, but is instead something a bit more...
fundamental. It's the rewarding sense of having tried this leap into the
seriously seriously scary unknown, and finding that the crowd is willing to
catch you and let you surf across them.
...
So there you go. It turns out that despite my somewhat hostile view to the
teeming masses of humanity, you can do well by carefully choosing people to
trust , and doing it.
Obviously I'm not recommending this for everyone, or comparing my situation to
yours, or anyone's. This is just What Worked For Me, and as something of an
explanation/apologia for why I might seem like I'm a bit different to how you
expect Bitter Anthony Of Sarcasm to be. I promise not to cut down on the
snark - my sense of humour will still be the same savage sense of dark and
unsubtle satire you've all come to know andlove tolerate. There will
probably be a bit less bitterness (well, I hope so) but that's not a bad
thing.
...
The nasty dark part of the mind tells me this happiness won't last, but for
the first time in a long time, the hopeful part of the brain says "maybe it
might", and it's actually loud enough to drown out the dark bit.
And what the fuck, I'm going to surf the crowd for a while.
Anyone who knows me at all well knows that the couple of years of my life have
been severely lacking in hugs and puppies. This has, if anything, been
getting worse of late, not better.
I've been responding in the way I normally respond to this sort of thing - by
carefully and painstakingly building up a wall to shut out the world and the
people in it, brick by mental brick. This isn't a new habit - I've done it a
couple of times in my life in the past.
The first time I realised that this was happening (something like 15 years
ago) I was lucky enough to become friends with a wonderful person who just
bludgeoned her way through the wall and freed me from my self-imposed (nails
hand to forehead) exile. She didn't even realise that I'd spent so long
building up my sense of isolation, but instead just crashed through without
knowing.
This sort of luck isn't something you can rely on, though. It's also hardly
fair to expect Someone Else to come to rescue you from yourself all the time.
(cue Björk's "Army of Me" here)
...
The last couple of weeks, it's been getting bad enough that I was starting to
thrash around looking for a way out. I was seriously considering taking a job
over in California just to break the blockage.
This seemed a fairly drastic step, and of course it really wouldn't fix the
problem, merely move the problem to an interesting new location. This would
also involve cutting off a whole pile of friends, which would be wrenching.
It also seemed to be running away from the problem, which I wasn't happy
about. There's also the "living in the United States of Hell" - while the Bay
Area sucks less than most of the US, until they get around to seceding
(probably taking Oregon and maybe Washington state, but please leave Los
Angeles behind!) it's still part of the US. Fuck that.
Instead, I decided to go for the more direct approach, and just say 'to hell
with this' and start opening up again. This is not as easy as it sounds - it
meant trusting people a lot more than I thought I could handle, and
(obviously) leaving myself open for pain and sadness.
...
It's (in my mind) something like crowd-surfing. You lay back, vulnerable and
trusting that the people holding you up won't decide to just drop you on your
head for fun. It's exhilarating, frightening, but (hopefully) a fun ride.
Rather than just trying to do this with baby steps, I instead just went for
the head-first dive. The problem with an incremental approach is that it
gives you too many opportunities to back down. Once you've dived off the
stage, the decision is made - you can't leap back.
...
The results have been, I have to say, extremely rewarding. I'm actually happy,
for the first time in approximately an age or three. Well, OK, I'm also happy
while I'm travelling, but that's hardly a fair comparison - meeting new
people and seeing new things is always going to be a way to get you out of
the dumps. Unfortunately, it's not really practical to be a full-time
traveller - and it doesn't actually mean you're happy, just that you're
finding a way to avoid thinking about things for a while. "Ooo shiny" is a
nice way to distract yourself.
As usual, it's only when someone else mentions that "it's so nice to see you
happy" that I realised that I was in fact happy. Introspection is for
poetry-writing types. No wait, fuck - I'm posting this to livejournal. Oh
well.
...
More importantly, as far as I can tell, this happiness isn't a result of any
particular situation or person, but is instead something a bit more...
fundamental. It's the rewarding sense of having tried this leap into the
seriously seriously scary unknown, and finding that the crowd is willing to
catch you and let you surf across them.
...
So there you go. It turns out that despite my somewhat hostile view to the
teeming masses of humanity, you can do well by carefully choosing people to
trust , and doing it.
Obviously I'm not recommending this for everyone, or comparing my situation to
yours, or anyone's. This is just What Worked For Me, and as something of an
explanation/apologia for why I might seem like I'm a bit different to how you
expect Bitter Anthony Of Sarcasm to be. I promise not to cut down on the
snark - my sense of humour will still be the same savage sense of dark and
unsubtle satire you've all come to know and
probably be a bit less bitterness (well, I hope so) but that's not a bad
thing.
...
The nasty dark part of the mind tells me this happiness won't last, but for
the first time in a long time, the hopeful part of the brain says "maybe it
might", and it's actually loud enough to drown out the dark bit.
And what the fuck, I'm going to surf the crowd for a while.
