Ruined

So Emilie and I broke up.

Well, in all honesty, Emilie broke up with me. And as I reflect on it, I totally deserved it.

We started our relationship way too fast and way too strong. I have a tendency to get excited about things and become very intense. In fact, this is what turned her off to me and ended our relationship. I was too attached to her and the idea that I had finally found someone who could fill that void inside me in order for me to become my best self.

Towards the beginning of our relationship, I remember thinking to myself that I was going to ruin this for myself, and I did. I put too much pressure on her and tried to force her into basically living a lie to herself. I was so thrown off by how quickly she had fallen out of love with me that I clung on to whatever I could. In all honesty, she should have broken up with me two weeks prior, but I convinced her to try and keep us together. All of this for selfish reasons. This is not how you treat someone you love. And I do truly love her, she is wonderful and I just can’t shake these feelings. It’s going to be a long healing process, but I’m trying to persevere.

I’m surprisingly not as broken as I thought I would be about this. Obviously, it’s hard not to talk to her and see her at all, but what I did to her wasn’t fair. I blamed her for things that were all my own personal choices. I was too intense about spending time with her and it drove us further and further apart. I just have to accept this and move forward and try and work on the things that really drove her from me.

Part of me hopes that one day I can rekindle something with her. I’m currently giving her the space and time she needs to recover and we have talked about how we’ll be friends after we heal. As I continue to reflect, I just know I want her in my life in any capacity. She didn’t deserve what I did to her, she deserves the universe. I’ve never felt so selfish in my life. She showed me that I do deserve love, and I pressured her into being someone she didn’t want to be.

Right now, all I can do is focus on myself and making myself into the man I want to be. I need to figure out how to channel all of this raw energy inside of me into positivity and working energy. I’ve been getting better at dealing with my anxiety and depression. I’ve been so-so sober for the last month, having broken it only 5 times, including this past weekend when we broke up. But I like the way I feel when I’m sober. No coffee, no weed, no cigs, no alcohol. And I’ve been vegetarian for the past month or so, due to her, and I don’t plan on stopping that either. I want to be a healthy person, physically and mentally. I want to build the self-confidence and self-love I know I deserve. I want to start pursuing the things I want to, like starting a music blog, jumping into Improv and Stand Up, learning how to play and write music.

I want to live more presently. My planning out of events and being so intense about going to them turned her off to me completely. I want to become easy going. I’m working on building a daily routine to channel my energies and take every day one at a time. Obviously, I’m still going to buy concert tickets and try and plan certain things, but the pressure I put on her to do these things with me ultimately drove her away from me. I want to ground and center myself. I want to be less attached to everything.

I need to learn how to accept “No” for an answer. The main thing she criticizes me on is that I know what I want and I can be insistent and forceful at times to get her to do what I want. And as I look back, it’s true. I never meant it as disrespectful, I only wanted to shower her with love, appreciation, and experiences, but it turned sour and ruined everything. All I wanted to do was make her happy because she made me happy. But I guess in turn it was a selfish desire to keep her in my life that made me do these things for her. And not being able to accept her saying “No” is what ended up crumbling us. I wouldn’t listen to her saying “No” to our relationship. I couldn’t take the “No” of loss of sexual attraction. I couldn’t take her “No” to going to certain experiences we had planned out. And because of that, I’ve lost a woman in my life that has meant so much to me in such a short amount of time.

I need to take what I’ve just written and encompass it. I need to learn from it. It’s definitely something that’s been hindering me for ages. I get way too excited. I get way too intense. I guess I’m not as good of a listener as I thought I was. I need to accept “No” for an answer. I need to not be selfish and try to fix everything just so it benefits me.

This short-lived relationship has taught me a lot about myself and it hurts to know I could have done better.

Animal Collective, 03/22/06

Dumb

Client: Here's a script. We're paying you for 2-minute episodes.

Us: This script ends up being 3 minutes. Can we cut it down to 2?

Client: Yes that sounds good.

Us: Ok. Here's the 2-minute version. We cut this, this, and this. Do you approve?

Client: Why did you make these cuts!?

Us: .........We are cutting them down to 2-minutes because that's what you're paying us.

Client: Ok. Put this and this back in.

Us: Ok. We put this and this back in.

Client. Ok. Put this back in too.

Me: Wtf was the point of this entire process.

This is Bullshit

Dance goals

Float

I've been fascinated by the idea of sensory deprivation tanks since literally before I remember. I was reading an article about them last week and it cited all these excerpts from Richard Feynman's memoir, which was one of my favorite books in high school. I had totally forgotten that he had written about them, as I have a terrible memory for details in books I read a month ago let alone a lifetime ago. But I'm guessing this was the first seed of interest planted into my ever-thinking-scatterbrained-mind-brain. More on that guy later.

But first, another guy. Float tanks are a pretty hip/hippie thing, something that's good for the mind and body, fitting right in with the whole health conscious trend that everyone who is cool is totally into these days. I dabble rather deeply in the waters of health conscious trendiness, and everywhere from the yoga studios to the trader joes, I'm met with the same confident and enthused persona of someone cool enough to get a job at a trendy place like this, i.e. too cool for school. School being me.

When the elevator door opened to office-building basement that had become Float Lab, I was expecting the same young go-getter-behind-the-counter to be waiting for me, but at first there was no one. Adrian and I chilled on the couch, and eventually a tall gangly man in his early fifties came out from the back rooms. He had a thin pair of wire frame sunglasses on and wore an old gray t-shirt. His hair was short, a bit sparse, and unkempt.

"You guys don't have phones or anything?"

He spoke in a voice who's box had surely witnessed many a drug pass by. Adrian and I were like "yeah we have phones" and kinda showed them to him.

"Ah," said this wise hippie elder, "so you guys are already into it. Normally everyone's playing on their phone. They need something to play with."

I play on my phone plenty. I'm gazing into the abyss of an iPhone screen at this very goddamn moment. But having this man think that I don't do that felt like I'd just proven to an alien that not all humans are worthless. The man was in and out of the waiting room as the rest of the clientele filed in. Once the other four floaters had all arrived he came out to do his little spiel, but not before shooting Adrian and I a look and nodding towards the other couch. We look over and see all four people staring down at their phones. They were two couples too, not even like they were just awkward loners. Classic teacher's pet moment. Also this guy looked so natural in sunglasses that I forgot we were in a windowless basement.

Anywho I guess I should also cover the float since I already decided to title this post 'float'. Similar to mushrooms it was just a good check-in. Even though I feel like I'm perpetually checking in with my mental health, I always have so much going on and this and that obligation that I never really have enough time to reflect on my reflecting, and so on. So having two hours where that was literally the only thing I could do was good. Using last year's mushroom as a checkpoint, I'm still not where I'd like to be mind-wise but my nervous anxieties and self-attacking thought tendencies seem to have chilled out significantly. But still my mind is a bit further from my control than I'd like it to be, so once again I'm learning that I want to meditate more. So fuck. I really have to actually stick to that or else this blog is just gonna make me look more and more like an idiot. And there's already enough idiots on this blog.

So it's to the meditation chair for me. Peace out, idiots.

<3

Jesse, you promised us a post...

Where the fuck is it?