Soul Searching

The redundancy of my blog posts must be getting annoying. It seems that I pick a theme and myopically focus on that one topic--pound it until there is nothing remaining to pound. But my soul searching has begun in earnest. I'm doing things that I never, in a million years thought I would be doing at 21. Going back to things that I left behind when I was 16 and 18. Finally, not shirking responsibility and looking for the easy way out. Everything in life has to come to a head at some point and everything happens for a reason. Again, as the last post intimated, a lot of those propitious things happened this summer (a summer that is still not entirely over, yikes!). There are definitely things that I should have considered longer, looked at from every angle and tried to see through initial reactions. Would I take anything back that I've ever done in my life, that is to say, do I have regrets? Honestly, not at all. I've MADE every decision, having always been aware of the ramifications and consequences (although certainly not the full scope of them).

My biggest obstacle at this point is to avoid finding instant fixes and ephemeral crutches--crutches that for me have a habit of becoming obsessions of the worst ilk. As a very wise person observed once in a conversation that may now be forgotten -- or stored in one of those drawers shoved back into some remote corner of the mind (and the homunculus lost the key) -- I use these things to fill in for the holes that I know are there, the holes that I have been too much of a coward to attempt to patch appropriately. My two most "reliable" crutches over the course of the past five years: Alcohol and Bodybuilding (as antithetical as the two of them are it is undoubtedly true). I've never been an alcoholic, not by a long shot, and I've tried to avoid it as much as possible when my emotions have been out of control. Nonetheless, it was always something to resort to in dark days.

Bodybuilding, on the other hand, has been to me what alcohol is to an alcoholic. I do have some obsessive tendencies (most of which I'm discovering for the first time in my life, or maybe rediscovering) but bodybuilding allowed me to subvert them. It's easy to become consumed, that's what the lifestyle requires. How can one think about anything of monumental importance when the next meal looms an hour around the corner, when the workout is just not right and needs some tweaking to make the teardrop more pronounced in the quadricep or to add those awesome striations in between the pectoralis? See what I mean, constant distractions, always something to do. So while it helped me channel my obsessiveness into one socially acceptable (sublimation Freud calls it) path, it distracted me from more important questions and from dealing with obsessiveness itself. Bodybuilding, as one former victim writes, is brought on by a bug bite and most will tell you once it bites you can't ever be cured. Every bodybuilder is a bit narcissistic, so it's hard to watch your weight go down and your muscles atrophy (undoubtedly hardest is to here other people comment, "looks like you're getting smaller"), hard to see something that so much time, money, and effort has gone into dissapear in a matter of weeks. I was thrown into a situation this summer (of course, I think I subconsciously propelled it along) that necessitated a significant reduction in the amount of effort I was able to put into bodybuilding. Food became something tangential, although still a habitual five meals a day when nothing was going on, and workouts became a matter of convenience--I'll do it if I get to it sort of thing. I'm now lighter than I've been in 5 years at 190 pounds, down 20 pounds since I left Utah in May. Returning here has brought on the comments, but they don't bother me. I feel content with the way things are, I'll gladly sacrifice size for a flexible schedule. Check that off the list. Now the obsessiveness.

I found a new avenue and the most unfair avenue possible to channel that obsessiveness. One person has very recent firsthand experience with this. Don't worry, it freaked them out-- as it should have. Thankfully, this person has had the gall to tell me how bad it freaked them out. Hopefully a problem caught before it metastisizes.

I've learned a monumental amount this summer. A lot about politics, a lot about working for a non-profit and in the "professional" world (the dialectizer hardly counts as professional liesure though, lol); but most of all, I've learned a lot about me. That learning isn't done, not by the longest shot. Ironically--or maybe it's a matter of portentuousness--some of the best learning for me in this most trying time has come from my conversations with two of my closest friends who are going through the hardest times in their respective lives. Both of these people are beyond a shadow of a doubt two of the most impressive people that I've ever met in my entire life, two people whose frienship I will be eternally grateful for--frienship without which I wouldn't be where I am, in so many ways. I won't even pretend that my battle compares to theirs, but it is MY battle nonetheless. Someday the smoke will settle for the three of us, but I do like my triangle of stability. You learn who your friends are when the going gets rough, I've never been more sure of that fact than I am right now.

Enough from me tonight, it's late and I've got a certain book to read. Peace.

P.S. Most amazing music in the world: Senses Fail and Anti-Flag. I have three favorite bands (those two plus AFI) for a reason, they always seem to have an album that coincides perfectly with my attitudes and the situations of my life. For Senses Fail especially, I seem to rediscover them at a time when their lyrics mirror so exactly what I am going through. So, let's see what their new CD (due out in October) has in store and how much it mirrors my life at that point. For right now, check out Senses Fail Still Searching--most of it is on their myspace page.