Pessimism/Realism

It's starting to set in just how little people care about the wellbeing of others. Usually when I blog I'm not straight to the point. For my own taste, it's pretty cringey looking at it, even if it's honest. Maybe I've been too hopeful. I'll try not to repeat myself too much like I have in the past. I try to not be a critic, I try to be happy-go-lucky, but it seems being a critic can be useful, especially when applied to myself. People don't usually listen to criticism anyway.

 

People seem to have this idea in their head of how they and others are. I've witnessed lots of habits from others, and I compare that to myself. I understand that I usually am more self-aware and more self-critical, at least in certain ways. Obviously like everyone else I have my blind spots, and to what degree I have them in comparison to others is a variable that neither I or anyone else can put a number on- but life is too big to put a number on something like that anyway. It seems like we're all just winging it here and even though scientists claim we have it all figured out I feel that the pursuit of knowledge is limitless... which is probably for the best. The amount of knowledge that we have is laughable at the face of infinity.

 

I've learned that, for one reason or another, people are manipulative. The reasons for this are infinite. They could have good or bad intentions. Even trying to determine or describe what manipulation at its core is, brings to light the fact that no one really knows what it means. Some words, probably most words even, are too broad to be taken as seriously as they are. Most people don't know what they're talking about and usually just regurgitate their opinions from others. Most people don't understand that just because an opinion is popular doesn't mean it's true. Most things that we believe to be true we don't really know for sure. The more tangible the subject is, the better that subject is for our personal understanding and truth. Theoretical information can be useful sure, but only when it's applied in a way that has noticeable results.

 

It seems the worse you perform and survive in this world, the more you'll be punished. The better you get at achieving your goals, the more momentum you have to continue upwards. That seems like a shitty system, it seems simple at first until you realize just how much harder you have to work when you're at the bottom of the ladder. It shouldn't be easier to maintain what you have the further you go up the ladder, it should be the other way around. If I'm having a tough time and I wasn't given the best cards then I should have much more resources available to me to get ahead. Then again, this comes into play your definition and opinions on the sources and essence of motivation.

 

I guess I'm just confused. I'm lost, and I don't understand things as much as I thought I did, but that's probably a good thing, and it's honestly pretty humbling. Comforting.

 

Well if you made it this far, thanks for reading. Have a good day.

I remember everything being abstract when I was younger. That song "At Last" by Etta James had such an IMPACT on me that really, really can't be described with words alone. It's like, that song had a direct connection with my inner soul. My mom showed me a lot of songs growing up playing them and me just kinda absorbing the information into my brain.

Stanley was the name of her boyfriend at the time. Always playing video games and watching cartoons, I guess that kinda became the basis of my personality as I ended up being a very eccentric mother fucker that was either enjoying video games and cartoons/comics recreationally or I was helping creating them.

All I ever wanted to do was have fun and not be interfered in doing so, so I guess as I got older I looked for ways to make money off of having fun, doing things that I was passsionate about.

My dad was kinda a control freak, so was my mom and that always scared the fuck outta me of the idea of people controlling what I could and could not do with how I could spend my time, despite loving them both to death. I guess at the end of the day the video games and cartoons/animations/art/comics were my path to happiness, maybe because I felt comfort in it and my brain felt stimulated by the new experiences that naturally came out of those forms of entertainment. There was a lot of thought provoking humor and perspective, philosophy even that came out of it.

I just remember it making me have fun. And that's all I ever really wanted. I just wanted to feel free and have fun enjoying things that stimulated my brain.

I started sort of remembering things at the age of 4-5. Maybe I started my life on the wrong foot as the school I went to cheered for me in kindergarten and that's why I pursued into that specific school district. At the same time, I wouldn't have the friends I have now and the life experiences and be the person I am now if it weren't for everything that happned as a result of that. In a way I'm grateful but realistic about the fact that I'm not all that happy nowadays.

Anyway.

I really liked cartoons/anime and video games growing up. Probably the best things about my childhood. I also liked hanging out outside and exploring the world and going to the store to the gas station getting snacks. My interests were always, ALWAYS the things that made me connect with people. I also thought girls looked pretty, apparently.

But above all the serious, intense music and dramatic display from the forms of entertainment I had growing up really made me had both hope and a strong sense of purpose of life that pretty much shaped my personality.

My dad was also a big fan of jazz, small independent musicians, coffee shops, and the internet. That's probably another huge contributor of my personality and why I work at a coffee shop. He wanted me to live alongside people that didn't particularly look exactly like me and I think that's another thing that truly stuck with me along with my care for animals and the planet.

If anything, I'd say once I hit middle school I really wanted to start creating things once I saw what other people were sharing for free and were getting recognized for. I liked the idea of promoting creativity and originality. I even ran a website to promote other people's creativity and to a lesser degree my own.

High school and my first semester of college was all about trying to figure out how to create things that I cared about, and from the moment I dropped out of college I decided it was all I wanted to do. Maybe I was just heavily influenced in my early life but I genuinely felt a sense of excitement and contentment from participating in forms of entertainment that sought to bring the viewer a sense of depth.

Depth is very hard to explain but I keep coming back to this word lately and I feel it's necessary to describe depth as a result of creativity. Creativity is this sort of ability to add depth, where depth is the abundance of new experiences that a person is unfamiliar with yet can bring them joy. Depth is the concept that a person can tranverse in an environment in which they have either not explored at all or not explored enough to understand or know everything there is to know about it. Depth in a way is an experience, and new experiences are sort of the point of life and existence itself anyway. We manifest as human being so we can experience what it's like to be human. We live the experiences of humans for the sake of it, it's essentially self-explanatory and self-manifesting as most things are.

Anyway.

I suppose I didn't really have much terrible things happen to me growing up and I'm grateful for that. I guess at the end of the day I'm just trying to find a way to have fun and enjoy the time I have with the people who's company I genuinely enjoy while delving into worthwhile experiences that make me feel safe yet simultaneously adventurous. Emotions are very nuanced and can't necessarily be explained with words alone, because there are a lot of experiences and memories that I have with emotions attached to them with no possible way to translate those emotions into the english language. My brain has been stimulated in a way that has so far been impossible to find vocabulary that is synonymous with my inner emotions attached to experiences with the world around me.

I guess you could say I just want to feel like I have what I want (whatever that is), and be satisfied with that until I die.

That's all.

Forward.

I don't ever want to know what it's like, to be doing the same exact thing every single day. If I was stuck in a loop, with no sense of progression whatsoever, where the circumstances of my life or even the smaller details never changed, I would hate my life. I almost got trapped there multiple times. Multiple times in my life I almost found myself getting close to never progressing ever again, but luckily it was only a temporary situation.

Getting up, working a job for most of the day, going home, making yourself food, and going to bed after feeing exhausted, is awful. I've had to live some days like that and it wasn't fun. Having no time to do anything different than you did the day before, with no sense of progression, all of your time given to someone else so you can get up and do it again, it's the quickest way to death.

I look at the decisions that I've made in my life over the past year or so, and I feel free. I took reign of my independence by getting a job and an apartment so I get to control what I do in my free time, and I got an office space which paved a path for me to consistently improve myself every single day in an environment which allows me to grow. I'm lucky.

I'm currenlty looking at this tutorial truck game that I'm developing in Unity. It's a project to help me get familiar with the engine, it's lead by a coach on the Unity website. As I look at the truck moving forward on the screen, I realize it's sort of a metaphor for how everything I've done in my life lately was to resist losing my ambition after dropping out of college and to resist settling into an uncomfortable loop of stagnation and lack of brain stimulation. I feel like I can get comfortable now doing this every day, without being on edge.

Because every day, I move forward.

Office Space

So I'm opening up an office space for video game development. We're gonna use it as a shop for 2 weeks of the year when the area is pretty popular. It's exciting.

We've also started doing more art for the card game, graphic design and stuff like that.

Hung out with a couple friends this past weekend, at a college and all over the city.

Will be seeing family today, suppose that's good.

I've been meditating more... It's been helping a lot with stopping my negative thoughts. It also, stops me from obsessing over the hopeful thoughts. I'm regulating myself easier now that I've been meditating, helping myself get to where I actually want to be. It's been becoming more and more apparent that every second I spend is very important. I need to utilize every second I have to continue to grow. I haven't done much, but I'm getting a little bit better each time at positioning myself better than I was before. Today, hopefully, I will surpass what I did yesterday. My goal is to keep exceeding myself from the day before every single day until I get to where I really want to be.

Feelings

Sometimes, you feel something. And you're not sure if you should feel exactly what it is that you're feeling. But you feel that emotion in response to a thought in your head. One of the reflexes to something like that, if you feel like you shouldn't feel the way you do, is to try and get rid of the thought or get rid of the emotion.

Sometimes, you feel trapped with this thought, and you fight everything you can to get rid of that thought.

Sometimes, the thoughts overwhelm you just because other people don't approve of something that you're thinking about, and it makes that specific idea so much more interesting. So much more alluring. The idea of it being forbidden makes you wanna chase it more.

...

The best thing you can do, is to take the thought as far as you can.

Think about it so much, so much in your head, that you realize how you actually feel about it. Allow yourself to feel an emotion without any regard for how other people might feel about it.

Once you do, you start to truly come to think about a situation for how you actually feel about it deep down. When you contemplate a thought for an extended period of time, you get to watch your body go through different emotional states and see how you would feel about the situation as a whole versus in a particular instance.

You will come to realize, that the thoughts with the least resistance, open up your mind. When you let go of the anxiety of thinking about something, or how you might feel about something or how other people might feel about it, you naturally achieve inner peace and let something go. You'll start to form a singular core feeling about it, which is rooted in other feelings.

Relationships aren't just about holding hands, kissing, being intimate, and being cute together. It's a lifestyle change, and it's up to you on whether you feel someone has the same lifestyle change as you. Sure, attraction is important. But your life is also really important and if you're going to include ANY person in your life, you need to make sure that they're going to help nourish and inspire you. They're going to help improve your life in a positive way.

There are things in your life that you never ever want to give up and you have to absolutely make sure that those are things that you never sacrifice in a relationship. Whether it's personal space, your friends, your interests, your family, or how you live your life the way that you do, whatever is important to you, you have to make sure that you don't bring someone into your life that has the power to influence you to stop.

Living in the present is incredibly important. It's easier to do that once you've confronted your feelings. Be honest with yourself. Feel whatever "this feeling" is without putting a label on it. If people ask you how you feel, you can tell them "I can't put it into words".

I kicked out my friend last night. She had a key for a couple days and we technically didn't break the lease by letting her stay with us for a couple nights (maximum is at least 14 days). But anyways, we kicked her out knowing she might not have a stable environment to go to, and we brought her in because we knew she had been in an unstable environment. Long story short it was too risky to let her live there with us, and she was changing things around too much. So I kicked her out, felt shitty about it, but luckily another one of her friends took her in and everything's okay. Thank god.

Sleep is nice. It's hard to not let that be the only thing to do.

Through my experiences with my own thoughts, I've realized I like everything in my life to be peaceful. I like peace. And I like being able to do whatever I want whenever I want. I like a vibe, a combined feeling of interconnected forces in my life working together. So I guess what you could say is every single thing I do in my life, I think about how it affects every other thing in my life because everything eventually connects together. I make sure things are peaceful and fun and loving. Things can be exciting, but I don't want stressful. Everything I do every day is incredibly important because everything affects me. I guess what I'm saying is, your soul sort of guides what you do in your life so that the actions in your life match your soul so you feel inner peace. Your thoughts and your actions are guided by your soul.

Some people's souls push them to become serial killers. My soul on the other hand consists of empathy. That's part of why I like peace, because when other people are relaxed, so am I. At the end of the day, I make sure that other people feel happy. I, a lot of the time, feel responsible for other peoples' happiness. So I make sure that what I do never makes someone feel sad or uncomfortable. But I know that I can't always control that, and lately I've been working on self-love and self-happiness. It's not selfish or bad to be self-caring or self-confident.I can't help other people if I don't help myself first.

Freedom from Perfectionism

Part of what's hard about being a creator is the pressure to not stop once you've started. The pressure to constantly keep up with it and to constantly follow some sort of daily quota once you've established yourself as a creator.

Creating content for yourself or for an audience is incredibly stressful if you don't allow yourself to do it because you enjoy it but do it out of obligation.

Don't get me wrong. I enjoy creating content, I love to enjoy what I create and enjoy the vibe of my own artistic ability and work process.

But sometimes, you need to ask yourself if you really enjoy what you do. You need to ask yourself if you enjoy working on projects that mean something to you.

Not only does it become incredibly stressful to work on projects if you do them out of obligation and don't take a second to appreciate why you do it to begin with, but to stress about whether you're doing the project right or not. If you're approaching it the right way or not.

Something that I've sort of taught myself, something I've learned alongside my friends, and something that I saw that the creator of Invader Zim, Jhonen Vasquez, also came to the same conclusions about, is that there's no right way to approach something. Not just that there is no right way to approach a creative project, but there is no way to try if you don't allow for the possibility of failing. As long as you're confident that you can reach that end goal, it doesn't matter how many times that you fail as long as you made an effort to get there. You get to see something you created, and maybe it's not exactly what you imagined it would be but as long as you put in great effort and took it seriously while having fun with it, it could be an absolutely incredible end result even if it's different than you expected it to be.

The journey of being a creator and slowly doing things over and over again over time to kind of grow and blossom through trial and error is truly an incredible experience and something that shouldn't be resisted out of fear that you won't end up with the exact end result that you wanted. If you worry that the thing that you create won't be how you idealized it in your head, you'll be hesitating forever. You just have to go, and keep going, and have fun with it.

Now that being said, over the course of the past several years, since I would like to say 2014, I have not allowed myself to work on things when I want to for the fun of it. I've been doing it out of obligation. For the sake of my old fanbase. That's not fun, it's not ideal for someone that just wants to have fun with their life. As I mentioned in an earlier post, I finally managed to let go of that obligation from that website so that I could work on things that I'm passionate about in the future. I've been allowing myself to heal.

Again, having the mindset of "I'm just gonna work on this, even if I don't know how, and I'm gonna do it even if it doesn't go exactly the right way or how I expect it to go" is about the best way you can approach as a creator.

Starting now, I'm gonna do things that I enjoy to do. Obviously, I'll pay my bills when they're due. But aside from that, I'm gonna focus on doing things that I feel like doing in the moment. Hesitating, usually, is never what I actually want to do. Introspection occasionally can get me to where I want to go, and occasionally meditating can help if I don't want to think, but in general, everything should be done when I actually feel like doing it instead of doing it because of obligation, as if doing anything other than exactly what I want to do in that moment will make me happier than doing what will actually make me happy in that moment.

In other words, I know what will make me happy. It's a vibe. Once I regain my sense of flow after losing it for several years due to school and self-induced responsibility, I think I can actually start to pick myself up and move freely. This will allow me to bloom.

My soul.

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Jhonen Quote

 

Secrets

I've been learning secrets about people lately. I learned the other night that someone I've known for years is actually good at writing music. She's really good at it, almost a mysterious vibe and it seemed based in good fun and rulebreaking. Generally, that's what our friend group seems to be rooted in, good fun and rulebreaking. We understand that the systems that are at play are inherently broken and toxic. People under these systems suffer but we as friends still find a way to survive and not allow the people on the top destroy us. We are vigilant on spreading positivity into the world and make it known that we are creators who will keep trying every day until we drop dead to make the world a better place and not give in to the world around us. These companies want us to give them all of their time until we're drained and no longer have any passion or fuel left to keep going once we get home. But unfortunately for them we find a way anyway. The songwriter herself speaks from a good heart and a good mind.

Another friend last night I learned a fact about them that no one else knew. It doesn't really change how I view them in any way, but I do hope that they are able to figure out their situation so that they can perservere.

Life is interesting. Learning new facts about people can help you understand them better, and it can heal a lot of problems that you were dealing with before. Obviously sometimes it has the opposite effect but at the end of the day I'm grateful for the connections in life. I'm surrounded by very positive people that breathe life. I'm inspired every day.

I want to see my sister and my mom soon. Tomorrow hopefully.