on the rare ocassion that I feel like a letdown

Another night. Another sleepless one, no less.

I spent most of it sitting on my balcony with the cool air in my face and my enormous quilt wrapped around me. The Nyquil is making me drowsy, but sleep has yet to join me and I am lost in thoughts and my funk that I get in sometimes when things don’t seem to make sense.

I get down sometimes. It’s difficult to say why, and there usually isn’t just one reason, but every now and then when the lights go out in the rest of the world, my eyes stay open and my mind is awake and dreaming of different times and places.

Often I think of the beautiful moments, and the memories and life experience that make up who I am and I reflect on where I have been with fondness and nostalgia. But tonight, for some reason, all I can dwell on are the things out of my reach, and how much I have failed at so many things when I am still so young.

I turn twenty-two this month. Twenty-two. Somehow it has been ten years since the divorces, unfamiliar heartache, family drama and all those other nights that were sleepless, only for different reasons. Somehow I am growing more and more distant from the girl that I was, the girl whose old stories and writings I read to look back on, and the girl that was so much younger than I am now, but who seemed to know so much.

How did I get so far? How does a person completely, entirely change?

I am usually an optimist. While I used to struggle with thoughts like these constantly, it has been awhile since I have sat and counted myself as a letdown.

I am a bad friend. Not always, and not entirely, and it rarely goes mentioned, but the more I think about it the more that I realize that it must be increasingly difficult to be friends with me. I have a really hard time calling people back, or remembering to be there for them when they need me. I am a wanderer, and never seem to be happy where I am (take now, for instance). I can’t stay in one place for too long or I feel stagnant and sedentary. Moscow, for example? I feel like I’m suffocating in this place. I am nostalgic and wish for times past (even though when I was there, I most likely was feeling the same way about some other era of life). I can’t imagine what my friends go through, having to listen to the same stories over and over again, having to be there for me and be strong when all I want to do is break out of where I am and change the world.

Oh yeah, and my dreams are impossible. I want to go everywhere. Literally. I spent part of today looking at places to volunteer abroad, and narrowed my selection down to about fifteen or twenty places. I will, likely, never see most of those places. I can’t afford to travel when I can’t even afford to live where I am now.

And that’s another thing. How can one person be so terrible with finances? I am, literally, thousands of dollars in debt. Granted, a lot of it (most of it) is from school, but not in student loans, because I am ridiculous and didn’t research my options before decision-making. But I am working thirty hours a week, barely breaking even as it is, let alone making enough money to pay off minimum payments on a credit card that I never should have obtained in the first place. Now I have no car that functions (until I magically come up with money to buy a new alternator), no money to spend on anything except for very-cheap and inexpensive food, a cell phone that is insanely-simple and frequently runs out of minutes, leaving me feeling even more lonely that I was already. There is nothing worse than a night like tonight, when all you feel like is a failure, and all you want is to hear the voice of a friend that loves you, and you have no minutes to call people with.

Seriously. I have given up playing music as often because even some of my closest friends make me feel like it’s nothing special, especially when they say things like, ‘well I would compliment you on it, but I am really just as talented and we are the same, so I know we don’t really need that from one another’ or ‘when you play I think it’s just because you cling to that as something that will make people like you.’ No, that’s untrue. People like me very easily and I even gave up performing entirely for a long time to make sure that it wasn’t just a way to get attention. I was gifted with a really cool talent and ability, not just the ability to sing some notes, play some basic chords, and make them resonate correctly, and can actually write songs that make sense and move hearts, and I don’t use it. Not even a little bit. I sit on my own time, when no one is home and within earshot, and then and only then do I express myself the way that I used to. It is only then that I play real and sing out loud, because I don’t want to appear to be self-glorifying and conceited in front of others. So thank you world, now I have a complex.

Moving on.

Spirituality? I have no idea where I am at or where I am going, or what I even want from God. Even then, I’m not sure if he is still waiting around to listen after all of my bitter diatribes about me feeling badly when really I am just too lazy to chase after him. Honestly, a whole huge part of me wonders how it is that the entire world has thousands upon thousands of belief systems… what makes my specific choice the right one? Doesn’t every single person in the world feel that their convictions are the right ones, and that there is no possible way beyond the path they are walking? That their path is the true path to enlightenment and offers the best answers for the basic questions we all inherently have inside us? I do believe in God, and I do love him, but it is a love that is somehow always changing and being redefined by my experiences. I know that faith is the unwavering, illogical faith in what is unseen, but at the same time, how do you sleep at night knowing that if you die in the morning, you might have lived and died for all of the wrong reasons? I can’t sleep.

This fluxuates from month to month, but sometimes I drink a little too much and when I drink I am not a happy drunk the majority of the time. In fact, most of my biggest fights and tears have happened over alcohol. Might as well start calling me by my father’s name. And I have taken up the ocassional habit of smoking while in bars here in town, because they allow cigarettes. Mmm… breath that smells of ashtrays and the wafting scent of liquor.

Relationships? Oh don’t even get me started. I have been needy, desperate, dependent and relient, and while I wouldn’t say I am those things in my relationships now, I still always seem to seek out and find guys that are incompatible with me. Not better or worse, not angels or assholes, just different. Just wanting different things than the other could ever give them. How is that fair to either of us? Besides, if we both change to be what the other one needs, we will cease to be who we really are and will cease to chase what we really wanted in the first place.

But I digress, and I sincerely hope that this is Nyquil talking instead of myself (I really think it is, because reading over this, it doesn’t really sound like me at all, and I am bordering on exhaustion… and exhaustion without rest always means over-thinking).

So, just a recap: not a great friend, impossible dreams, lack of vehicular transportation, financial
disaster, ocassional-drunk, chain-smoking, musical dropout, spiritually-apathetic, relationally-retarded, nostalgic mess of a human being. Beyond all of those things, I also have the uncanny ability to be two-faced, can have a really bad work ethic, I procrastinate (though I do somehow manage to get everything done), I have problems following through, and I lie ocassionally to make myself look good.

The personal ad writes itself. I am going to bed now.

postscript: I know I have to 'be the change if you aren't happy' and 'be your own person' and 'follow your dreams' and 'explore your talents' and all of those cliches. I also am aware that they are mostly true. I just was up way too late to have anyone remind me.