Just feeling my feels... : ( :

A brief break from the LOLs.

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Over the past week, I’ve found it difficult to tell whether I’m excited about the possibility of being promoted to a director-level position in advertising or just kind of bored without a job to occupy my time. I have found other ways to pass the hours—I can’t say enough good things about Dune: Part Two which I finally watched last Thursday—but also it hasn’t been easy. I get used to the rhythm of spending way too much money attending dozens of concerts a year, which is a constant fixture in my schedule, and then suddenly it’s regular-season baseball, trying to figure out which Nazi Germany docuseries to watch on Netflix, and failing to keep pace with all the foodie spots in my city.

We all get by as best we can in these troubling times, but I’m becoming more acutely aware of my ups and downs. Even in the low-intensity crisis of wackness on the part of masking your emotions behind the facade of white-collar professionalism, I understand that a human is mostly juice. As I white-knuckle through the daily grind, the juices move and my body runs through sensations; sometimes it feels good and sometimes it feels like shit. Once I dispense with obsessing over the peculiarities of any given situation and accept that the juice level is beyond my control, I understand that most of us have an inability to describe a rotten feeling, so we try to name it after something familiar. Sometimes these scuzzy emotions are not immediately resolvable, so we fixate on ways to alleviate them. This ongoing obsession encompasses our lives, pulling us away from the present and poisoning our relationship with everything around us.

Through my signature unwillingness to go to sleep at a normal hour, I’ve spent an inadvisable amount of time rolling in my bed and meandering through my roundabout existential spirals, trying to move past a bifurcated sense of spiritual progress and discover a new purpose. Or, at the very least, I’ve been grasping at a narrative or framework that will allow the shitty feelings to flow through me so I can keep a residue of basic happiness and sense of gratitude connected to a memory of what life can be like. I want to be the wind in the keyhole.

In a way, experiencing pain is a form of exposure therapy. Pain management is the ability to move past denial, panic, or a low-grade psychosis; it is also a refusal to hallucinate these feelings or narrativize these bad sensations into an impending sense of dread of permanent extinguishment. The pain and the fear surrounding it are by definition limited. Like everything in life, this feeling has an endpoint. The condition of total knowledge lies on the other side of this experience, which leaves us with the last flip of the ecstasy coin.

Personal growth is the process of working through all the contradictions of a mind that has been defined by the traumas that knock it away from its understanding of the world. This is a journey that can be painful, but if that pain can be understood as a temporary condition, this negation will leave us with the residue of grace. This knowledge keeps me relatively chill in many circumstances and has certainly made me much happier than I ever was in my 20s. Every experience in which I am living my truth validates this faith because it places me in a zone of contentment, free from any want. But knowing that every feeling is temporary can also rob me of the ability to enjoy happiness in the moment. When I accept the idea that this flip side is also temporary and that all fear and anxiety are also temporary, I can live with this reality in a zen-like state.

Existence contains terrifying elements, but it is also rare and beautiful and challenging. You either see life as a terrible coincidence or as an opportunity that will never happen again. It’s up to you to make that determination.

“Hey, corporate needs that quarterly earnings projections by tomorrow morning. Looks like we’ll have to be here all night ‘till it’s done.”

Another Thirsty Thursday vaporized. My iPhone flashes a breaking news banner, “The planet is on a ‘catastrophic’ global warming path, UN report shows.” Well, things will work out just fine if I believe hard enough.

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