Confessions of an Optimist

Evolving thoughts are a trip

You know when you’re in a not-so-nice headspace that keeps bringing you down, making you think about a bunch of stuff that’s out of your control and things that haven’t yet happened, and this mood just overwhelms what usually works against it so it literally forces you to evolve your thinking in order to even begin combating this darker self that keeps drilling and digging and burrowing deeper into your sadness?

Man, that son of a bitch knows how to get to me.
Hits the heart hard.

I wonder what gives this darkness the confidence it needs to take what it wants, if it wants anything at all. Maybe if I can uncover what it needs I can stop giving in and falling into its trap. I can stop experiencing the doubt and unsureness and anxiety that crushes me through the floorboards and keeps me in a hopeless cellar.

Eventually, piss and vinegar begin to smell the same.

When I get stuck like this it’s usually because I’m looking around and comparing my life to others. I try to wrap my head around the schedule a typical life tends to follow and I can’t help but see all the places I’m running late. The queen will have my head for this.

Then I shout Better late than never or Time is a social construct, but these phrases do nothing to comfort the turmoil. I wish it did. I wish I could read a phrase, feel a click within, and begin moving into all of the successes waiting on the other side. Maybe if I devote more hours to reading I’ll discover the secret arrangement of letters and sentences to crack the code and see the path home, but ink blurs and my eyelids get heavy.

So I sleep.
In my sleep I dream.
And my dream offers actions and emotions.

So I wake.
In my wake I see attempts.
And my attempts offer a pattern.

Sometimes I think that an optimist is just someone who knows how to properly disregard intrusive thoughts or has avoidance strategies that allow for the continued evasion of the murky hands waiting to feel the brush of something new; waiting to wrest the lost fawn. Could it be as simple as dancing between the raindrops of terror, focused and following the refracted ray that colors our lives?

Maybe I’m a recovering optimist. Someone who never truly lived in reality — head in the clouds and a heart full of intrigue — but age has a way of forcing you to sit down and watch all that has passed you by.

So I start freaking out and thinking dumb shit like my body should look better, and I’ve spent so many years practicing something that I should be applying but I just keep practicing, or that eventually I’ll have to resign from thinking of possibilities and surrender to the labor that awaits me.

Hobble the wanderer.
A warm bed is nothing to balk at.

Stories that write stories that tell stories that write stories, and the churning pool rumbles with rage. The dark waters bash and burst against the steadfast stone foundation, it’s not so willing to be moved. Each tear does it’s part though. Every drip to drop steals a grain away, steals a grain away, steals a grain away.
Small eternities to change the landscape.

Patience is more than just waiting…

…there is motion involved.

When everything around me buzzes but I lie puzzled and listless, a little action forces a signal through the noise, sent to a receiver unknown and unknowing, and in the silence of reply there is a speck of satisfaction. Salivate for the dissolving crumb of inspiration and swallow the shrieking banshee searching the fields of thought. Consume her. Consumer. Consume her.

Keep moving.
Don’t stop to breathe, enough breath has been wasted.
Keep up.
Be sure of your footing because a single fall is frustrating is fatal is failure.
Stay tuned.
The schedule the recipe the list is up, be the thief and steal your own heart.

Then I meet the wall again.
Now I know a change is going to come. It must.
I’ve walked through the crumbling forest enough to know the paved road isn’t far and away. It runs alongside the wooded mess I follow. It runs along.

Look around but still can’t see. Search for bits of clarity.
Its me. Its me. It’s me. It’s me.

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The worst part about all of this is that there is nothing to wake up from, there is only the choice of change in the moves being made. Thoughtful and thoughtless must evolve or else I may end up thinking this is someone else’s fault. Gotta take control, gotta make it happen, gotta do something, gotta gotta gotta gotta.

This time the optimist evolves.

I write this disorienting, confused piece because I need it to leave my body. I needed the words and the walls and all the wonder to come to a head and remind me that the world will not adjust for me, it will just eat me alive, and I’ve been doing that job for it as well. The silent struggle is not stoicism, it’s just a struggle without the screaming. Maybe that’s what made it feel so welcome, then familiar, then it wouldn’t leave. Know what I mean?

I write this to shout and listen back for the echo. Sounds like me. One more yell because it felt good to let it go and feel safe and and and and and and and. Listen to that voice carry on. Between the boulders and buildings it rides the winds to drift with glee, and no matter how far it goes I can still feel its pulse.

I started this Substack to try and share some stuff I find useful in day-to-day living, whether it be music or management or meditating, but what I forgot about is why I write in the first place:

…with words.

I also somehow forgot that everyone and their goddamn cousin is trying to give advice, and that shit gets boring, fast, so it’s time to pivot. Huberman and Jake Paul have all the advice you need.

I once went to a diner in North Carolina and took on their eating challenge. The plate amounted to somewhere around 3 or 4 lbs of food and the reward for taking it all down was a T-shirt with the diner’s logo. Simple enough, so I ordered it. I get through most of the meal and ask my server to get my shirt ready: size large please. He answers back, We don’t have any large shirts and we’re closing in 10 minutes. That’s fine, I’ll take an XL, medium, small, whatever you wanna give me. Toss me the display shirt you’ve got hanging up in the restaurant, I just want my win. Sorry, we don’t have any shirts, I can get you a gift card for your next visit. It would have been great to know all of this before I ordered the meal, especially since I’m from out-of-town, but that’s my problem. Now I’m typically not a reactive person, but leave me hanging like that and all of a sudden it’s like you slapped my mother. As the door to the restaurant closed and locked behind my back my hand took on a life of its own and reached for my tonsils. I gaged once or twice, then proceeded to repaint the entrance.

That’s kind of what this piece is, a repainting of my entrance.

I’m gonna get back to playing with words and if it doesn’t make sense, then maybe it’ll make sense. A fever dream with touches of reality. Hallucinations that sound terrifying but when you’re ready to burn the fires don’t feel so hateful. I mean what sucks more than being scared to do what you want to do?

Write to please just one person. If you open a window and make love to the world, so to speak, your story will get pneumonia.

Kurt Vonnegut

Here’s my last piece of advice.
When you’re getting down on yourself, people around you suck, and the world seems to have hit a point of surreal shit show, remember….
It’s only castles burning.

Castles can always be rebuilt.
What was will never be what is and what is will never not become what it is meant to be.

It’s all just a bunch of movement.
And you gotta move too, buddy.

So….