Morning Pages and Night Flight
There has never been a time in my life where falling in love with a photograph and a profile has ever worked out in my favor. And sometimes I even get rejected.
I’ve always judged people more than I should have.
I used to put it down to my creative side. I was simply making wry observations about my fellow man. I always felt I had a right to do it. Take a snippet of a person’s life that I accidentally walked in the middle of and imagine what happens when they get home. And when they lay next to each other at night. And when they wake up in the morning.
If you’ve also had a tendency to do these things, you are likely an inherently creative person. You don’t spend an inordinate amount of time on Twitter bemoaning your writer’s block or your “WIP.” Instead, you get up everyday and work. You likely know all the rules from all the great writers and break all of them just as much as I do.
Lately, I have found myself beaten down–collateral damage from the bomb of my own poor decisions. There has never been a time in my life where falling in love with a photograph and a profile has ever worked out in my favor. And sometimes I even get rejected.
(Take a moment and laugh at that witty turn of phrase. I know I’m going to.)
It’s true, though. If you’ve kept up with me through the years, I need not even list any of the details. You know. You’ve seen them come. You’ve seen them go. But, at the very least, I can say with pride that therapy has given me the strength and the insight to rethink my decisions before they get completely out of hand. This last situation I can’t even talk about. It’s too new. Suffice it to say, I was heading down a very dangerous path.
None of the obvious signs ever seem to work for me. The ones that really caught my attention were not having anything to write. This was happening morning after morning. Lately, I have been just giving up and doing something else. Take “morning pages,” for instance. Those are journal pages we write when we first wake up. I know there are people who do these every day, but I am not one of them. I am, however, okay with doing them if I can’t figure out what’s going on in my heart. It really helped this time.
I have never been a disseminator of toxic positivity and I know everything is not always rainbows and unicorns, but if I get on the phone with someone and it’s nothing but negative shit every single time, I have to protect myself and move along. I am far too influenced by other people’s vibes and I think in this last case that’s what was happening. I felt as though I kept trying to come up with solutions and every time I spoke to this person, they kept throwing new problems at me. After a couple of months and five or six hundred dollars, I thankfully threw in the towel.
I would not be a good match for someone with no resourcefulness. There’d be far too much resentment and then before I realized what was happening, I’d be on the next episode of “Dateline.” Whether I’d be eulogized or sitting there in an orange jumpsuit would really only be a minor detail. More a function of “how” the cookie crumbled–not if.
Truthfully, I am sure this person is seething right now. I blocked them on all platforms. Calling someone seventeen times in a single day is excessive. And at this late stage in my development, nothing I need to be a part of.
So is it wrong to judge people? I don’t know. If you listen to the new episode of Jonathan Goldstein’s podcast “Heavyweight,” you might think the humane thing would be to make oneself available to miserable people because they’ve experienced trauma and it’s the least we could do.
At least that’s the way I felt having listened to it yesterday when I was getting ready to bail on this person. I can only say that I don’t make any decisions regarding other humans without really suffering over it.
I concluded that what makes great podcasting and what makes a healthy life are sometimes diametrically opposed. So I will live with the fact that Jonathan Goldstein is neither right nor wrong—he’s just looking for a different end result.
Good ratings.
Myself, on the other hand, I’m looking for serenity and happiness and lately I’m really embracing the fact that it’s only going to come from inside of myself.
...”but if I get on the phone with someone and it’s nothing but negative shit every single time, I have to protect myself and move along. I am far too influenced by other people’s vibes and I think in this last case that’s what was happening.” That’s it. Exactly why I had to decide after 5 years; this far and no further.
That last line .