Mon Dernier Jour de Travail
24 Mar 2006Endings are always strange to me. I’ve never been an ender. I like to start things, and I like to keep them going.
At points in your life, you have to make decisions. No matter how much you may hate making them. You have to make decisions, and you have to live with the consequences. You can’t let those consequences consume you. You can’t let the consequences of previous decisions consume you either.
I am guilty of letting myself be consumed by many things. World of Warcraft. Bad relationships. Past experiences. Sure, these are the things that make us who we are, and some of them we have to hang on to, but some of them we do have to find a way to let go of for our own good.
Once upon a time I let my life be consumed by work. All I did was work. During the rare times I was awake and not at work I would complain about work. This was horrible, and destructive, and it affected everyone around me. I never wanted to be “that” guy. I still don’t know how it happened.
I deal with stress in a very simple way now. It is either important, or it isn’t. If it isn’t, I don’t stress over it. What exactly is and isn’t important is generally fairly arbitrary. Here I am picking my life up and throwing it all over and moving across the country. What are my concerns? I hope I find a place to live within the first couple of weeks out there. I hope I don’t end up having to spend too much money on useless crap. I hope I can find a way to attend, or have someone attend for me all of my raid groups MC/BWL raids.
Those first two, those are normal stress concerns. That last one, that comes from a messed up sense of value. Or does it? When you spend enough time with a group of people, good or bad, they start to become your family. Surely family is an important concern?
We all need to find our own balance in life. That ratio of us vs. everything else that makes us feel complete. Some of us need a lot of us, some of us need a lot of everything else. I’m still working on finding mine. I’m sure some people spend their whole lives searching for it.
Back to how I deal with stress. Stress hits me like an ocean wave hits a rock. It hits hard, but it breaks over me, not the other way around. In many ways this leaves me feeling detached from things. Right now, I am barely involved in this major change in my life. A lot of the time it feels like I am sitting on the outside watching it happen to someone else. Eventually, when it has all passed by, I hope I get a chance to enjoy it.
Other people, when they get hit by the wave, they get pushed along with it or crushed by it. There is nothing else they can do. They are just there floating in the middle of it all slowly getting pulled out into a sea of despair. There is nothing anyone else can do for these people. They have to decide to swim all on their own, and they have to swim back to that shore line.
Unfortunately in that place that they are, there is nothing but darkness. Darkness is the great equalizer and the great seperator. Most people faced with the darkness imagine everything horrible that could possibly happen and they get consumed by it. It just piles on top of all of the bad things that they are already dealing with by getting worse. It stacks, and stacks, and stacks, until something breaks. Other people, take that bewilderment and despair and start to imagine that there is a rope there, or a life preserver, or a flashlight and they start looking for it. They start working toward it. They start making it happen.
I used to blame the world for everything bad that happened to me. I used to believe that the world owed me something. The world wasn’t listening. It didn’t care. So I said “Fuck you world!” and I set out and started doing things myself. I started taking those steps toward shore. It has been a long trip, and I’m still on it. I’m on the shore, and now I can see the mountain. I’m not ready to stop yet, so I’ll keep pushing. I’ll do everything I can do, because if I just give up, well then, it’s over before it starts.
Here’s the kicker: How do you really know that it has even started yet? Maybe this is all just the prequel for the main feature. So you have to keep pushing. You have to keep going. You have to tell yourself it doesn’t hurt. You have to tell yourself this isn’t the end. Some days you will get kicked in the teeth and fall to the floor, but you just have to get up.
I’m not someone who hopes. I don’t pray. I don’t even believe in all that much. I push forward though, to discover. To know. To find. Good or bad. You will always get some of each eventually.
It’s not about hope. It’s about self.