Category: grown man problems

A look at of problems and struggles of all types that come with being a so-called, twentysomething, grown man.

The Wandering Twenties – A Few Thoughts on Feeling Lost

Lately, I find myself spending a lot of time trying to figure out what I’m doing. In our age, it’s the common struggle of twentysomethings; all the uncertainty, bumbling around for years, worrying about careers and the future, but meeting it with a special kind of indecision that ends up being the equivalent of that really out of shape dude struggling to walk the treadmill right after New Years.

At 26, I feel like I’m beyond most of the general struggle as far as my peers go. I’m not stuck waiting tables or shriveling up in misery each day at some dead end job that I can’t get out of. I’ve got a good job. I don’t see myself needing to find something more substantial in my foreseeable future. More key, I’ve got a general career path etched out. I’ve got goals, ambition, and all that stuff, but I also have an idea of how I’m going to get there; a rough map, and I feel well-equipped enough to have no problem maneuvering myself in the direction I want.

And that really handles the biggest thing I tend to see as far as those around me come. In fact, it almost feels like my friends my age are almost exclusively in two classes. Married, on average, now with a kid or kid on the way, and projecting the sense that they have their life ‘together’ because they have no choice but to, or the others. Those of us who aren’t married, ranging from single with no idea when or how anything substantial is going to surface as far as companionship goes, all the way to the ones in long-time relationships, where you have no idea what they’re doing or thinking because they don’t, they just are in it because they always have been. And that class commonly projects all the uncertainty, all the wavering.

I think the emphasis from that last paragraph should be perception….. (click the title to read more)

Smiling Practice

This morning, I made it my personal goal to hold a good, genuine smile during my drive to and from work. I did OK on the first leg, and we’ll see how the second leg goes, but besides being a mood augmenter, the personal challenge is eye-opening to a lot of things.

The thing about smiling is that it seeps into your mood. If you’re smiling, and by that I mean replicating a genuine looking smile, then eventually the line will cross from just forcing that smile to actually smiling, and because pleasantness and happy emotions are so strongly bonded with that facial expression, that smile gets you feeling better; feeling good.

What Stays Personal? Thoughts on Personal Blogging

I am an endangered species – a personal blogger

The blog. A web log. In Internet years, these things have become antiquated. When blogs were new, the concept was mostly personal. You didn’t have news entities or people making a living off of the thing, people just wrote about what they wanted and put it out there. I’d wager that most anyone doing such a thing in the early days of blogging never did this with the idea of anyone else really reading it, we just did it because we could, so why not? It was the same principle as building your own website in the 90’s. You probably had nothing of worth to really share or create, or if you did, you didn’t stick with it long enough to get that good at it, but it was something cool to do online, so why not? There’s no better reason to do anything!

Closely associated with the birth of the blog were services like Xanga and Livejournal, which turned into everyone you knew having one. This was kind of an unfortunate time for the Internet. At least with Tumblr, everyone can just post stupid pictures and quotes, because as soon as most people (kids) start putting down words, it just gets messy.

Heart Matter, Mind Matter, and the Stuff Left Behind When You Leave – Life is Significant

It’s a Thursday with no plans. It’s raining outside. It’s a little chilly. It’s dreary. It’s been a long week. If I don’t put out something real this time, I doubt I ever will. I’ve got a lot ready to pour out. Spare me just a few paragraphs to get into why I’m here today.

Something that’s always scared me is my lack of middle ground. There is the whimsical fool who floats clumsily like a butterfly just out of the cocoon, and there is the somber, pensive one who slowly processes and feels every single thing at the pace of a thick liquid slowly staining into denim. There really isn’t anything between, barring the neutral, transparent me, who simply is there to exist, and contributes nothing either way. I really am a person of extremes. I have to get used to this.

These two sides both have nothing but admiration for the other, because they have everything their counterpart lacks, and today, the somber one reigns, and today, the somber one is at his best.

I’ve been through a lot of life lately. I think over the weekend alone, I visited the respective zeniths of everything that I can hope for, everything that I imagine to be perfect and complete and right, to the brink of despair, hopelessness, confusion, and continued hauntings of my past. I know that all sounds so dramatic, but it really was a very expansive personal ride in such a condensed amount of time. It’s what happens when you get gunned down by rapid fire surprises. I think I am through that tour through Willy Wonka’s Psychadelic Tunnel, and overall, I’m just so content and happy with it, because after all those years of stagnation, it was ultimate confirmation that I’m alive again; in the figurative sense. I had myself a spoonful of life. What’s not awesome about that?

The Pristine and The Ugly

I’ve grown up so much in the past couple years. Especially in the past 6-12 months. A lot of times, it is easy to assume — time has passed, I must have matured some more! Check yo’ face, cause often times that might be the only way you’re maturing. I am talking about growth that I can visibly, circumstantially see.

I’ve been keeping a personal blog since I was at least 16 or 17, and it has been one of the most instrumental pieces in my personal growth and discovery as an individual. When I think about it, it is a measuring stick– a qualitative, wordy measuring stick. I don’t know how anyone could live without one? Not necessarily a blog, but a means to personally measure where they are in life like marking our height on the wall over the years.

I am paranoid of stagnation.

Personal Gallery: Struggling With Emotional Abuse

For anyone who has read any of my postings, or heck, had a real conversation with me, you know that I’m very candid about my past; my emotions and struggles and all sorts of that type of stuff. I’m pretty sure a majority of stuff I wrote on here for a 2 year period was related to things associated with a pretty severe bout with depression, development of a very inhibiting level of social anxiety disorder, my break-up, dropping out of school, and so on. Those were all challenging events, but I overlooked that I hadn’t talked about one thing that hadn’t properly talked about one thing; prolonged emotional abuse.

The depression, the anxiety, the extreme exile, all of these things were obstacles that required a sort of emotional-personal training and rehabilitation in order to overcome and grow beyond, but this one aspect is one that has represented more than an obstacle; it has reshaped me as a person, and even now, I am still suffering the effects from it.

A critical reason why I have always shied away from this subject is because it is hard to talk about it without feeling very incendiary. It is just hard to talk about it without it feeling like a smear campaign against another person, and it is far from that, and I’d also say that a lot of it was out of control of either person in my case, but there were so many factors that fell into place ‘just right’ that, for two people who were new to serious relationships, didn’t have the experience to see all the trouble on the horizon and take measures to make sure that the relationship can’t sustain these destructive qualities. I kind of look like it as sort of a relationship immune system. We were still babies. We didn’t really have much of one, and it only took a few bacteria to exponentially grow into a debilitating disease.

And much further than that, a lot of emotional abuse is self-derived. You might be able to trace the pattern of thought to a case in which the other person felt the need to control how you feel once or twice, but it only took those few times to develop it into a habit of the self. It is just a nasty, ugly mutant.

So with that said, I just reiterate, one more time, anything I say in what I am writing is in no way saying anything against a specific person. This is someone I still hold in the highest regard, and knowing her so well all those years, I know that we’ve each taken everything from what we had and grown more than the baby from Honey, I Blew Up the Kids after that shrink ray got set to reverse. Sorry if you can’t help but get the wrong impression about someone because of this, I can’t help you if you do, but I am finally going to say some things about it, because, as always, I write here mainly for myself, but I do recognize people read this, and I try to hide it, but I like that. That fact is always in the back of my head, and many times, I write this very personal stuff because I think there is always someone out there who stumbles in here, then ends up being able to relate in some way. Anytime someone tells me they read my blog, and that it reached them in some way, well, that really does mean a lot to me. Ignore me trying to hide it.

Close relationships are weird, because they are kind of like classified CIA files, how long is long enough before you can declassify certain information? There probably is no answer to that, and maybe I make too much public, but I’m going to take the easy way out and chalk it up to the writer’s curse.

Alas, onward!

PART I – EMOTIONAL ABUSE AND YOU (click title to read more)