Everything Is Lost in 2021

I think I might be starting to go a little stir-crazy. I don’t even know if it’s so much from the pandemic and the requisite isolation as it is just being where I am in life. I work with a few people at a small lab, and I kind of just do my own thing for the most part. Headphones in, listening to youtube videos or music and cutting plants all day. On my breaks, I’ve started walking around the facility. Sometimes I jog for a bit if I feel good. I think it’s a third of a mile or so when including the abandoned greenhouses at the back, right before the farmland starts. I have no idea what they’re growing, but it’s all farmland out in the boonies where my lab is. Anyways, I work, and then I come home, and hang out with the roommates. Once or twice a week I’ll play a game online with a couple Medford friends. Maybe a bit of chitchat from a handful of people on Discord. That’s it. That’s my entire existence. It’s what I’ve wanted for such a long time. And yet I’ve had it for almost a year and am only now really feeling okay with it. Only recently am I able to focus and be more productive, benefitting from the lack of distractions, because I have almost no friends now. Fewer old habits to keep up, fewer inhibitions toward being open to change. Fewer hands holding onto the person I used to be, fewer eyes scrutinizing me while I reinvent myself.

I feel like I have changed a lot, under the surface. Ever so slowly I am becoming more confident, more indulgent, focused on doing what I want to do. Not worrying about trying to please others so much, throwing parties and almost always being the person to text or call or set up hangouts. There are no hangouts. There are no parties. There are no friends really. When the pandemic ends, I don’t expect that to change. I’m not going to go out of my way to affect that sort of change. I’m not sad about it. I feel quite pragmatic. It just seems so inevitable. I have less in common with so many of the people I used to try to keep up with. A year of not talking certainly doesn’t help. After a while, what is there to say? There are definitely people I care about that at this rate I may never see in person again, and it’s okay. Everyone seems to be coupled up for the most part, having kids, settling into careers, being homebodies. They don’t need me. It doesn’t seem like they need anyone else really, outside of themselves. If the different friend groups have started hanging out again and didn’t add me back in, well, that’s fine too. All the hangouts were perpetuated by me, for the most part, to keep in touch and see people that I was already keeping in touch with and seeing somewhat regularly. It’s not an obligation for everyone, but I don’t see there being urgency to resume it when the pandemic ends. Keeping on for the sake of keeping on only lasts so long.

Maybe I’m wrong. I have no clue, I haven’t sought out any sort of feedback of the sort. I don’t talk to anyone about my thoughts. It feels kind of like I was a teenager, except even then I had diary sites and friends on instant messengers to confide in. All of that is so far gone. This is the last vestige of that, and it won’t last forever either. Back then, I was hiding from the world, I couldn’t find somewhere to fit in. There was always that longing, and the inability to really trust that I was cared about. I’m not hiding now, I’m in the world. I’m just a ghost. People cared about me, and I disappointed them. I blend in, present but disconnected. I don’t try to form bonds whenever I start a new job, or try to hold on to them when one ends. I know it’s pointless. I find reasons not to reach out to people. I exist in the present, but am not present. I only think about the future.

That part hasn’t changed. I’m just less naïve. I’m what my younger self feared I would become, I’m his nightmare in the flesh. Mid 30s, out of shape, alone, unknown, not really any richer than I was back then, having to try harder and harder to even get back to where I was before. The fear would keep me up at night sometimes. Fear of death, fear of failure, fear of embarrassment, fear of always being alone. There is no reason to have those fears, because it’s all come true. I may as well have died, as it feels like I live a different life, holding the memories of a stranger. I’ve failed at almost anything I’ve ever tried. I’ve self-sabotaged so many potential relationships, moved laterally and stayed poor instead of moving up anywhere and being closer to comfortable. Made no progress on my dreams of being a wrestler or musician. Been alone almost the entire time. Haven’t had sex in an embarrassingly long time. All of the women who maybe something might happen with in the future are gone. No friends of friends, no cute coworkers, no threads left unexplored from the past. There are no possibilities. Had opportunities to collaborate on music with friends and let them down. Had people I worked out with that I flaked out on. When I think about the few people who I think did believe in me in the past, I can feel the disappointment in ways I never could previously. Unviewed, unspoken, but nonetheless existing. The dying enthusiasm that I see more and more clearly with time in retrospect, looking at the dissolution of my bonds. I’m a failure. A fucking loser.

It doesn’t bother me. I’m numb to that pity. I simply can’t let it mangle me any longer. I look around, I consider myself, and my life, and realize one thing: This is it. If nothing changes, if nothing improves, this is all I’ll have. Furthermore, this is the best it will ever be, and it will only get worse from here. I’ll become older, more out of shape, struggle further to make connections, suffer in stasis as the doors of opportunity to my dreams close permanently.

I. CAN. NOT. ALLOW. THAT. Period. I’m a ghost, I’m lost, I barely exist, but I do exist. I’m starting from so far back from where I could have, but I’m putting in the work. I’m finally in it for the long haul. No quick-fixes. No miracle diets, no keto. Fucking diet and exercise and tracking everything. That’s the only thing that works. That’s the only thing that will not only help me lose the 35 or so pounds to get to where I was before, but it’s the only way I could ever improve upon that. I want, someday, to be able to consider myself an athlete. To be able to be athletic. Not ripped, not a six-pack, but just toned and strong and able to do things I could not physically do before. I’ve never been able to say that. I don’t have much to offer anyone, dating-wise. I’m an average height overweight male with slowly thinning hair who ekes by financially and doesn’t own a house here, hell I’ll never be able to afford to live on my own here. That’s not a lot. So I’m finally not really expecting much to happen with that. I need to improve myself to seriously have a chance at something decent. In the meantime, I need to work on being social. I’ve kind of forgotten how to do that. I fucking hate how I look, I hate taking selfies, but, well, I need to make effort with dating sites in the meantime. There’s nowhere to go to be social for now. I’ve just started playing bass again. I moved to a different house that is not on top of a big ass hill, so I’ve started biking again. It feels great, although I get winded easily. Instead of beating myself up about how bad I am at it now, I realize that there is so much improvement I’ll be able to do if I’m consistent. I finally got around to getting a portable treadmill, so now I can play Switch or watch TV while exercising at home. Eventually, I plan on getting a standing desk so that I can walk while I’m on the computer. I am slowly trying to change my lifestyle, because the things I want require a certain lifestyle. One that I’ve never committed to.

I don’t want to talk a big game or make promises until I actually have something to show for myself. That takes time. I have so much less time than I used to, but I accept that things that are worthwhile are going to take time, and I need to be patient. Also, I have no one to tell. Fuck Facebook, I haven’t used that in years. When I have something to brag about, maybe once I make some songs, then I can use it. A couple times I’ve lurked on it recently, and it gives me this weird anxiety. Many things involving the past do. I also can’t relate to anyone. It’s mostly regurgitated nonsense, people sharing videos or posts that aren’t their own. At best, it’s insane bullshit. At worst, it’s suddenly conservative family members from back home spamming rhetoric I’m confident they don’t understand. That’s a whole different can of worms. I could have visited home last fall, but chose not to because, you know, pandemic. Even once it’s over, I don’t know if I want to. I’m afraid of what I’ll find. Even just talking to my parents, they are vastly different now. They had no political affiliation before, or at least never mentioned it. They were generally pessimistic, mistrusting and cynical, which I presume extended to politics. I don’t know when they became Trumpers, but it’s fucking annoying. They have a right to believe whatever, but I don’t see it as being genuine or particularly informed. I think the pandemic has left them scared and afraid, desperate for a return to normalcy, and so they believed the obvious liar that claimed that he could make everything go back to normal. I called my Dad on my birthday last month and at some point he was ranting about Biden, and saying that Trump did so much for everyone. Like, what are you talking about? We grew up relatively poor, and that’s never changed. I guarantee my parents’ lives did not improve in the last four years, though I haven’t been home to verify.

I can’t relate to my family at all anymore, and I wasn’t close to them before. I accept that as my fault. I could have tried so much harder. There is a hole where that bond with family once existed, that now doesn’t, and that nothing else could fill. Now, it’s like…what is the point? The Trumpism is going to take a long time to leave them I fear. I’m not interested in having more of the annoying, pointless debates that I’ve had with my parents in-person with them and even more of my family. I don’t fit in. I never felt like I fit in there. Hillsdale was not nearly as bad as I believed it to be growing up, but it was still not for me. Portland is not either. I don’t belong here. I don’t fit in anywhere. I had my chances, and it didn’t work out. I felt most at home in Medford, but there were no opportunities there. I’m somewhat stuck in the past emotionally, but am also disconnected from it. I don’t feel attached to the present. I need to believe in the future and its possibilities. Not as a delusion like before, that things will somehow work out in the future, but that it is a destination that hard work now and every day can lead to. I don’t know what is there, it may involve none of the things that I desire. But without the belief that tomorrow can be better than today, I think I would honestly lose the will to live. As crap as the world is and as disturbing as the trends for most things in the future are, for me personally, at this point the only thing I can control is my belief in the future. I will work, by myself, at building a better future for myself. I don’t fear failure, because I know it intimately. It can’t stop me anymore. I only fear wasting any more time than I already have.