I've thought long and hard about this recently and have to reach the conclusion that it's the one thing that gets in my way the most.
Two days ago I bought a motorbike. The day after tomorrow i'll go to pick it up and ride it home. It's exciting, but all I'm doing is worrying. I have to ride on roads I barely know with 2 hours road experience which happened almost two months ago. The winter gear i've bought won't be warm enough and I won't be able to handle it. Somebody will find a way to steal it from me within a matter of days. Weirdly the thought that I might drop it and kill myself is at the bottom of the list. It's ridiculous.
What will actually happen on Wednesday? I'll get there, look like an inexperienced moron (I am!) and then ride away. I'll likely never see anybody that watched me stutter away again. I'll stutter in the next scene, but again, those people will be gone moments later. I won't have an accident because i'll be being extra cautious. I might get in a few peoples way, but that doesn't really matter. The winter gear i've bought is perfectly good and a lot more expensive than I originally intended. The bike may get stolen, but it probably won't, and if it does, I might manage to make an insurance claim. If I don't, it'd be a bitch, but it wouldn't ruin me.
I won't even enjoy it.
Of course I will. I enjoyed the CBT didn't I?
Every day?
You still enjoy driving don't you?
I suppose.
Take this dumb back and forth between my brain and itself and apply it to practically any non-routine moment in my life. After my recent house move I spent about a week feeling like i'd made a huge mistake. I don't feel that way now. I'm finding life significantly more interesting here than the rut i've left.
Once the moment on which the worry is focused passes, the backward view is always rosy, but I'm tired of only ever enjoying my life in retrospect. Not only do I want to look forward to things in the future - I want to recognise that i'm enjoying myself right now.
I'm just too busy worrying. An act, if it can so be called, that serves absolutely no purpose.
Like any over-analysing prick I can't help but feel other issues are behind this. Probably not the one i'm about to discuss. I have a second thing to talk about and I've edited out a tenuous seg because it just didn't make sense. I'll put three dashes instead. Damn i'm rusty at the writing.
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I constantly complain (to myself pretty much) that I never manage to meet any interesting people - most specifically women - that deviate from the norm. In this case norm means dead end job and eventual lacklustre marriage. Last weekend I met one that clearly deviates, but I ended up with the whole concept being flipped on me then smashed in my face. She had no idea how to politely say what she meant and was insulting and I for my part reacted badly, but the crux...No, sadly I must be honest - the exact words she used were "you'd be more attractive if you were passionate about what you did". This is something I believe. Not just attractive, but happier, content, calm - all of the good things, yet when someone says this to me all I feel is angry that I've been called on it, because I have no response. I've known for years I needed to do something, but I still don't know what and that's the only excuse I have, which seems pretty invalid. I have vague beliefs that passion can be sucked out of an activity by turning it into work, but not strong ones.
It might have been a mistake to take a new job that was so similar to the previous one. The extra money was a huge incentive for me, but very specifically to be used to further longer term plans. Do I want to quit? No. It's not that I don't enjoy it. I've not being doing it for nearly long enough to be objective yet. It just feels like only half a change at a time when I could have used a full one.
This is a little more candid than I tend to be anymore, and as always is mostly for me to look at in 6 months to decide what i've learned and whether I was right or wrong. I do miss writing more frequently but a symptom of that old rut was a lack of interesting material. Perhaps now there'll be more to say.
So, to wrap it up. Birmingham - yeah, I moved to Birmingham in the end (fucked up isn't it) - I like being here. The new job - too soon to tell, but time enough to admit it could go either way... Or not - I might just miss being the guy mistaken for a genius due to 10 years of industry knowledge and strong technical skills. If that's what it is, that will probably come back in time. It's not real genius anyway. Look at this shoddy writing. Read something I wrote a few years ago. They were much better than this one.
