It's weird to be home, as it is always weird to be home after leaving adventism. My reaction is usually just to shut down and get through it and this extra medical stuff with my mom (she's recovering well so far) provokes a baseline anxiety level which also shuts me down, so I guess the net effect is I am doing the necessary to help my mom and stay positive and otherwise my mind is just anxiety static white noise.
Which is unfortunate, because living in neutral with a smooth brain broadcasting static has been the solution to my problems, a tactic that has not worked out well for me. To fully mix the metaphor, I left Adventism's orbit and shot out into space, apparently hoping I'd fall within the gravitational pull of another belief system or identity in another million years or so, without doing a quick double-check on the average human lifespan.
So here i am, dealing with very real shit, completely unprepared, having made a point of not preparing myself for anything the last couple decades realizing that maybe this is why people end up finding communities and partners so that they have someone's hand to squeeze when things get scarier.
The adventist community is and is not my community. I will always understand it, it will always be a part of me, but I don't share the belief system and feel an active urge to run when the convo turns religious (for a wide variety of very good reasons), so even here I am mostly facilitating my mom's community as they reach out to help or support her, but I am not directly participating myself. I am skimming the top of the adventist bubble, helping where i can.
And the only person really appropriate to talk to about a lot of this would be a partner, which I don't have and have not even tried to have for the greater part of a decade, and i have slowly withdrawn from a lot of my social circles, catastrophically so during covid, and as it turns out I need my space but I don't need or like to be in another solar system.*
Anyway, I need to change if I don't want it to be this way any time shit gets real. I don't like this society much but I need to find some kind of identity and purpose regardless, and hopefully a community, and hopefully a partner (or, less likely but still within the realm of possibility) partners.
When I was younger and on the smart kid track I thought I was destined for great things, but frankly I'm not sure great things are something I'm ever going to be interested in doing. As I get older, the simple life seems more than fine and I realize, very much to my surprise, that really what I care about is being part of a community where I feel comfortable and where I belong, and the real issue here is I just haven't found that yet. And while I do have good friends whom I love dearly, modern day life has scattered us to the four winds and I don't think my "hey, let's all live on a commune" pitch is going to go over too well.
Meanwhile, I am sitting here thinking while my mother naps and recovers from her surgery and I realize I need to do more but all I hear is this anxiety static. So I tell myself I can't really do anything about it at the moment, (I am not really going out too much to reduce potential disease vectoring for a post-op patient), but hasn't that been what I've been telling myself for 8 years? I give myself too many excuses for doing a lot more nothing.
Anyway, my brain is static, but what I AM doing is getting on the exercise bike in the garage and some basic exercises (it's far too hot to go outside much) and slowly cranking back the sleep schedule. I have come to the truly regrettable conclusion that if I start exercising I will probably think and feel better. Although, I am still prone to staying up late as a way of avoiding adventism I am finding, so that's a work in progress.
Anyway, something's stirring. This sucks, and I don't like what I made of my life or myself, but it's nothing anyone else can change. I keep hoping I'll have some kind of epiphany that clears away the static, but I don't think it works like that. the culmination of a series of choices is only going to be corrected by a series of different choices.
I think I'm just going to try and keep writing until either there's less static or the ideas get more coherent. So, you know, business as usual for this blog.** I'm sorry and you're welcome.
*I think we're up to four half-assed metaphors.
** should all this be done in an offline journal? Probably!
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