My Yearend Evaluation 2009

I had a moment of clarity the other day.  When looking back at the year, I had completely forgotten about all of the awesome things that happened in 2009.  I didn't blog about most of them.  I probably should have or at least made some mention of them somewhere.  Hell, I don't even have any journal entries of most of them.  I seem to just want to stew in the drama and I failed to really dive into a lot of the fun and positive moments, and there were many.

So what are some of the cool things that are worth mentioning?  Well, for one, I had my first real gay date this year!  I lost my gay virginity during that date too.  Just a few months before my 40th birthday!  That 40-year-old-virgin thing was a stigma in my family that I DID NOT want to try and live down.  Seriously!  How funny is that? 

Well, I guess you would just have to understand my family.  

OK, so what else happened?   I don't remember a lot of stuff.  I should have written it down.  I think the "losing my virginity" thing has completely overshadowed anything I care to think about at the moment. 

Anyway...

I think this goes without saying but I'll say it anyway, this blog is a small part of my life and it's an even smaller part of my daily mental process.  I have used it to open up an even smaller window into my head.  Sometimes the view was an honest and sincere searching of my soul, other times it was wrought with whiny, self-centered, self-pitying and otherwise pathetic pandering of my ego.   But, either way, it was the shit in my head at the time it was written, so at least that accounts for something.   Right?   I think it does. 

I'm a normal, happy, person most of the time.  I have an OK job where I write software (sometimes) and I do it really well.  I have hobbies in music, filmmaking, writing, photography, renaissance festivals, dressage, walking/hiking, biking, BDSM, yoga, blogging etc.  The list goes on.  I stay busy. 

But like all normal people, I have my bad days.  And it just so happens my bad days get dark, really dark.  Dark, in that I will have those moments where I swing to the irrational suicidal thinking.  Rest assured those moments have been happening with less frequency and shorter in duration.  Two years ago, I would be in a stupor of suicidal planning for months at a time, long gut wrenching months of anxiety and despair.  Now, the anxiety bit is missing and the rest only lasts for about an hour, then it's gone.

However, no matter what, I always feel a deep heavy sting moving into and during the holiday period.  That sting I noticed became more and more prevalent around 2004 after the last of my siblings got married.  It reached its worst in 2007 right after my mental breakdown and has tapering a little bit since, although, this year felt like a step back somewhat.  That's something to explore some other time.  I may even write about the event in 2007 too.  I still have some work to do to sort it out though.

Most of my posts happen after I've been pondering a concept or situation in my head for a while, in some cases months.  Some of them have been rants, some of them haven't. But all of them have been a process for me to clarify as to who, what, when and where I am, and what I'm trying to accomplish.  And in the end they have succeeded in getting me to see, albeit sometimes grudgingly, what my hang-ups really are. 

No matter what the realities of my mental state, conscious or unconscious, I needed to sort some things out in a public way.  So this blog, in addition to the comments I got back, really ended up giving me some profound self-realizations.  Not the ones I was setting out to realize, but nothing ever happens the way we intend. 

Because I worried too much about making my blog some sort of self-important, quixotic, beacon to the world, I got too self absorbed which weighted it down on the dark side.  Not that would be a worry to me but, -- and here is me pandering to my readership again -- it did leave the impression that I am unhappy.  Ironically, unhappiness was precisely what I was worried people would think.  Well to be honest, the last three months I was very unhappy.   And, as much as my ego hates to admit this, I was very much using my blog to bask in my own self-induced victimhood.  Not that there is anything inherently wrong with that per se, it is what it is.  However, it ultimately accomplished something good in the end.  In order for me to understand what was happening, what was going wrong for me, I had to travel that path of wrongness until I hit a brick wall.  It seems unfortunate but how else do we learn?  I have a hell of a lot of book knowledge on these subjects, but awareness and perspicacity only comes from experience.

I'm proud of myself. I really came though this year.  After all of that coded nagging in my writing and day to day life, I finally cracked the code.  I finally faced my fear of what people think of me.  Not only did I crack the code, I processed it so that I would no longer get stuck on it again.  I had a sudden and dramatic shift in my thinking when I hit that point.  So, from this point forward, I know things are going to be very different.  I don't know how or in what way, but I do know it's not going to be the same old shit that I have been doing.  Granted, it will probably be the same old shit I write though.  The ups and downs are still going to be there.  But, will I care what you think?  Yeah, in some ways I will, but not in the same way that I've cared in the past.  It's different.  How different?  It's wait-and-see.  I don't expect any reader to notice but I will and that's all the really matters.

It amuses me when the media looks back on a year well before the year was even over.  I can't really look back on something until it's in my past and I've had a chance to let hindsight and my shady memory shape it into some sort of perspective.   It's still too soon to get any real sense of the profound impact this holiday season has had on me.  All I can say is that it was profound enough to cause a shift in my thinking, a shift in my consciousness.

So, looking back on the year, I have been able to come to two absolute conclusions.  1) I realized I had set out on this blogging adventure for completely the wrong reasons.  2) No matter what the original reason was, it didn't matter; I still learned a shit-load about myself in the end.  

So, here is to a new year that just happens to be called twenty-ten.