Roger: You know, it's very interesting, but a lot of times you think people are looking at you but they're not. Their mind's elsewhere.I'll be honest, I've had more of these moments than I'd like to admit in the last couple of years, so I empathized strongly with Roger for this particular episode. The thing is, even if I, or Roger, are late to the party on some important ideas concerning basic human interaction, those moments where you realize the story you've built up about who you are and how the world works is malleable and open to revision are genuinely amazing. And while some drug use (like pot for instance, he said randomly) can lead the user to believe they have descended a bit deeper philosophically than the sober observer would agree, it can also lead the user to question life assumptions, that are, in all likelihood, long over due for re-assessment. So, fresh off my own and ongoing series of mini-epiphanies, while I still feel late to the party on some basic realizations about human interaction ("Oh, I DON'T have be the person other random people want me to be."), I continue to be excited about the process.
Don: Lots of people who haven't taken LSD already know that Roger.
I think I thought after I came out to my parents, that that was more or less the end of massive changes in my life, which now makes me laugh. Because it has of course dawned on me that personal growth is a life-long process, and also because that was only one of the big messes I'd been ignoring in my life for over a decade. And while I'm glad it's more or less sorted, I have reluctantly recognized I still have a few messes to clean up before I can march forward with confidence and ease. One is work, which is just this whole other thing. Another is the stuff I have accreted in my time here.
I spent the weekend, paring down my comic book collection from 13 boxes or so to 4.5, and it was kind of a relief. I had terrible taste in many things in my 20s, and it was good to recognize that, identify books that no longer reflected my tastes and just trash them. No, they were not worth anything. It was interesting to note, as I assessed stack after stack of comics for basic quality and goodness of fit, just how many old memories were tied up in those things. So in a completely bizarre and unexpected way, I ended up letting go of some personal baggage along with the physical junk. I'm just not that guy anymore, I want different things, and I don't need to fill every second of my conscious hours escaping into nostalgic minutia, even if I still find some of it fun, beautiful and worthwhile. I am surprised at how often I relearn the idea that getting rid of unwanted stuff also gets rid of unwanted psychic baggage.
It takes a surprising amount of energy to try to change from the person I have been, to the person I want to be, and I struggle with that quite a bit. I brim, I froth, I overflow with music and writing ideas that I almost salivate at the thought of pursuing, but I'm still too dysfunctional to let myself proceed on those fronts except in fits and starts. I still can't quite imagine who I am if I'm not who I was, but my impatience with myself has been growing steadily and it's becoming clear I need to prioritize cleaning up the stuff in my way now so I can take care of it in a more thoughtful way, rather than just waiting for my impatience to turn into impulsive, reckless decisions. I am trying to create an environment that fits who i want to be, rather than who I have been. And I'm still kind of embarrassed how long it's taken me to figure some of this stuff out.
I am, in some ways, late to the party. I am getting there as fast as I can.
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