The past, people. The past.
I don’t know if anyone else experiences this but when I am in waking consciousness, not quite a dream, my entire brain is mine but the life I am living is not the life I am in. It is an alternate life. Different plans. Different priorities. Different memories. Different clothing. Different job. They are all mine though and feel like my day-to-day until I come back into this world. I don’t believe in parallel universes but I would like to know more about my other life.
I don’t know why I can go there or where it is but it is a bit duller than the life I actually live.
Memories are kind of like that. The older I get the less I can understand who I was as a younger man and how I did the things I did. From college forward, it is very hard for me to wrap my head around my choices and how I committed to the life that got me here. Looking back it feels traumatic. I did it all to myself but if I let my heart sink into what it must have felt like to put myself through the journey that got me here, it is filled with embarrassing heartbreak and profound panic.
I just call it ‘paying my dues.’ Which I guess is what it is. What an awful process. I can remember almost all of my embarrassments and pains even if they were in passing and small. I can’t remember the good things as well because I don’t think I ever framed them like that. They were just the other events that happened that were easier than the hard shit. The breakthroughs and the goals achieved and the highlights were all just ‘not the bad memories.’ I don’t feel them as good times or good memories. Just things I worked for, achieved and moved through.
Maybe the whole ‘you have to enjoy the process’ idea is a bullshit way to protect yourself from acknowledging failure and diminishing success. It’s all been about process for me and even when I attain what I have been working for it passes quickly as a goal that just fades fast in the rear view.
I think I am just reckoning with all the pain and fear that I have put myself through to get here. Where is here? Here is okay. Here is comfortable.
I am also reckoning with the pain and fear I have caused others. Integrating it. Learning from it. Seeing how and if I’ve changed and if I need to change more.
It seems that when I am in the throes of a heavy creative period I tend to beat the shit out of myself. I am doing that now. I am trying to be more accepting of it and trying to understand why it is happening and if there are amends to be made to myself or others. I am thinking about doing that. I am also seeing the events and feelings I am using to hurt myself and trying to understand how I can speak to them, for them, to learn and grow (or not).
Also, I like the life I am actually living better than the one I go to through the half-awake portal. I have better stuff in this one.
Today I talk to record producer Rick Rubin about Rick Rubin. Thursday, I talk to comedian, writer and retiring sex worker Sovereign Syre. Good talks!
Enjoy!
Boomer, Monkey and LaFonda live!
Love,
Maron