Everything Has It's Own Way of Beginning...

Around the end of last April, I suddenly woke up one morning thinking "It needs to change". From that moment on, I started going on a bit of a health kick. I had just moved into a new apartment and promptly went into the kitchen and had thrown out anything that contained sugar or more than 5 carbs per serving (in fact the only things that survived was a bottle of wing sauce and some frozen chicken). After feeling slightly better and more accomplished, I went out to the local Giant and bought a case of water, more boneless, skinless chicken, some cheese, tomatos, low-fat and lean lunch meat, low carb wheat bread, and some low carb, sugar free ranch dressing. From that day on for a few months I lived off large but healthy sandwiches and salads. I was also drinking anywhere from 1 - 2 gallons of water a day. No soda, no caffeine, no snacks. As suddenly as I awoken to this change, my body seemed to fall into step. 45 days later I was more 30lbs lighter. I slept better, I had more energy, and to be honest, I was a hell of a lot less depressed when I did get down.

I use this situation as an example for how I seemingly come to different points of change in my life. I am not someone that can just slowly ween myself into something. I am not very capable of begging or bribing myself into beginning to take action. Granted, before this day of change, I had been feeling something building in me. I had become more and more frustrated and closed off. I was most certainly waiting for something to happen, and suddenly as if I had woken up inside a new life, a light switch flicked on inside me, and change began to seamlessly occur. This has become a pattern within my life and an almost distinctive quality to my personality. The longer I fixate on things, the more ineffective and unable to act I become. I end up reacting on reflex and from some subconscious shift in the slow but subtle tectonic plates beneath my mind's surface.

This whole diatribe does have a point, I swear.

I've been feeling as if the last few weeks have been slowly starting to blur and my life begin to drift into that ever deepening malaise which leads to me feeling as if I am never going to go beyond the way my life is right now. I keep waking up to the feeling that there has got to be something more than my job serving Jim Beam to men who go home to slap their wives around (and for some reason have the very distinctive ability to suck the innocence out of a trip to Sesame Street so profoundly that if Gordon were still alive he would be found in the corner of Snuffy's alleyway hiding under a blanket shuddering). Not to mention the honor of serving cosmo's to women who go sleep with other men because their husbands are slapping them around or not paying their child support. I find myself praying that maybe one day I'll wind up driving a car that is valued at more than $148 in the Kelly Blue Book. Most of all I wake up fearing that maybe I am just not good enough to find someone willing to accept me as who I am and want to find themselves a deep and prolonged presence in my life. In short I find myself sitting in in a scene from the now infamous Donnie Darko film where Donnie has obviously accepted the fact that he has no choice but to be guided toward the destination designated for him, regardless of whether or he understands it. With fear and anxiousness he looks into the eye of his mentor, his guide, perhaps his subconscious, and asks "When's this going to stop?" Frank simply replies that he should already know this by now.

Perhaps we all enter our own Gardens of Gethsemane at some points in our lives. We know that there are things we need and want to do. We know what is best for us, and we know who we need and want to become. For some reason, the only thing that even seemed to strike fear in the supposed Son of God was that of the future, and all that it meant for him to do and to become. As for each of us, we all wake up knowing we need to find a better job, tell a lover the truth, give up and addiction or a dream which can never be realized. The problem being with all this, is the fact that it means we must accept that who we are now is not good enough for who we want or have to become. It's going to hurt, and it might be lonely or depressing to do. In short its going to be scary. They say that the biggest fear among people is that of public speaking, yet I do beg to differ. I believe that people's biggest fear in this world is trying to live. We can fail, we can lose something, we could put so much in and get nothing out, and it is so much simpler not to take the reigns and believe that we can push through one more day of who we already are.

I admit I am scared, frozen in this momentary portrait of self acceptance. I am who I am and having a life containing a better car, a job without white trash, and a beautiful woman I love will mean taking risks, moving on, and admitting to myself I'm not yet strong enough to be who I want to be. Then the other little voice tells me that as long as I think this way, I'll never have it. I remind myself that without giving something up, and moving on, I'll never leave this spiral. Perhaps when we all hit these moments when its as if there is this sense of direction reforming within ourselves, and our need to find a solid path and change within ourselves, we have a choice to praise who we are, and continue to live the way we do, or offer up our current selves as martyrs to our ever growing faith in the possibility we can find our sense of contentment and stability.

I'm not just there yet. I know this. It's all building up again within me, and I can feels some of the walls of my self assurance collapsing upon pieces of my previous identity. I've been slowly falling asleep each day on this road as my life becomes some new dream I begin to hope will take me to that light at the end of the tunnel. I keep going to sleep hoping tomorrow I will wake up again.

And suddenly, as if a small switch were flicked in my mind, I open my mind all over again, and I think "It's time for a change..."