Just start

They say you've got to just start writing. Writers write. I'm not a writer, but I'd like to be. I'm a talkative person but without things to say. That's mostly the problem. My life is, bitchy as it sounds, too easy. I play video games and get older. It's not just me though. The whole world is getting older. My friends are, too. But I'm not maturing. I have no career set out before me. This is only one of the many things that bugs me, and it's certainly not the most pressing. The biggest problem is that there is nothing pressing. I have no sense of urgency about me and I desperately wish it was there. Good writers write shitty first drafts and love that they write shit the first time around. Everyone tells you to "shoot from the hip" and just write like you don't care. I always double-think everything. I think twice and act once, if at all. I have a lot of goals and none of them are getting closer to done. Fortunately, none of my goals are written down, so nobody can say I haven't accomplished them. I can simply say that my goal this year was to mature or get to know myself better, some bullshit like that. At the very least, at the end of the year, I've accomplished my goal of not dying, and nobody can take that away from me (except murderers). Something inside me wants to be somebody badly, and it wants to be somebody that does things. I want to think less. I want to act more. I'm also a mental basket case. Sometimes, when I'm not withering away on my bed, I just watch television. It's a digital age, so I watch it on my computer, but it gets me thinking; most of the things I watch are light-hearted. I enjoy comedies and thrillers, well-developed characters and happy endings. I enjoy dramas when I'm watching them, but when I'm deciding whether to watch a drama or not, I usually think, "I'd rather watch something more upbeat." My parents never got along. I was always expected to be something great, but I was never pushed. I exceeded everyone's expectations on my own terms and became known in my stupid family as a smart kid. But, I'm not here to talk about the past. I may have been smart, but that's not what distinguishes me now. Now, I'm a loser. I pause when I say that, but it's how I'm coming to see myself. I know I have potential to be somebody great, and maybe that separates me, but people should be defined by what they do, not what they could become. I think writing could help me bridge the gap from being a nobody into being a somebody that people respect. Respect is important to me. I'm a quiet person, but I'm also talkative, silly and ill-tempered. I'm random out of a silent-desperation that spurts out of me, shouting to be unique and depressed by the realization that I'm one of the uncountable multitudes. A lot of people get by by having a circle of friends that they talk to. Acquaintances, girlfriends, family--these are the tools people use to feel good about themselves in a world that's too big for a single person to survive. I don't have those things. I live off of dreams and memories, and I'm too damn young to have many of the latter. Living a redundant lifestyle has gotten me out of shape and ill-groomed. I clean up whenever I go out--shower, shave, clean clothes and teeth--but those moments are as rare as I can make them. Fact is, I'm embarrassed by myself. Some people turn a new leaf for the better, but the other side of my leaf was decay and uncertainty. I should be ahead of the curve by most people's reckoning: I'm supposedly smart, hard-working and good with people, but the reality is I'm a loner crushed with self-doubt, a desire to be happy and a cynical mind that foresees unhappiness in every situation. Facing the choice between going outside in the blizzard and staying warm in the dark cave, I stay warm and bored. But, something tells me there's only so much boredom a twenty-something can handle before he does something incredibly stupid. I yearn for that stupidity, and if I was a kid, I'd take that nice man's candy and hop in the stranger's van, because you only live once. My other demon, besides my boredom, is an over-abundance of emotion. Nobody really knows it's there. Indeed, between the ages of perhaps 17 and 22, I didn't cry at all. Not once. And that was despite some intense feelings for a girl that immediately spun me down a well of self-despair, self-analysis, and the desire to shed a tear just to feel human. Feelings were out of reach for me. I think they're coming back though. Last month, I cried to a movie I was watching alone involving the relations between a father and his son. Honing in on that strikes a chord in me, apparently, because I wish I had better relations with my dad. Either of my parents, really. But my mom and I are opposites in literally everything, and my dad, despite his infinite good-intentions for me, lacks the ability to listen or ask questions about me. I consider my greatest asset to be my understanding of people. I know exactly how they like to be treated and I can get even the shyest person to open up to me. People I hate I could get to like me, if it were ever my goal. I care, and always have, about what people think of me, and so I've shrunk away into my little mouse-hole to be forgotten about rather than face the questions that have answers I don't like to reveal. The worst part is, whenever I realize something about me, I wish it weren't so. I wish I were more ambitious, talkative, interesting, good-looking, or intelligent, but I have to deal with what I have. These weren't gifts given to every child. At best, they're skills I can work on. This over self-analyzation, combined with my ability to manipulate people, has landed me in a position where nothing needs to change. All my bills are paid and I could go and get a job anytime I wanted. Depression runs in my family. Maybe that's it. I'm not depressed, at least not more than it's sane to be for someone in my position, but it feels like there's some chemical that keeps me back. I have to fight a war just to go outside, and oddly enough, despite my complete lack of real-world, non-internet related socialization, people think I'm just quiet, content. I have a nasty habit of making people think what I want them to think about me. As far as I can tell, nobody can put the pieces together, because I keep them in a box nobody knows about but me. People think what they like to think, and since my family prefers to think that I'm okay, they don't question it. I would never say this out-loud, but I'm not okay. I know the truth, that the only person responsible for my life is me, so the change has to start from within. I keep waiting for some self-help book to change my life, but it's never going to come. Maybe someday I'll have a dream, wake up from it and just know I've got to make a change. But I dream every single night and it hasn't happened yet. Last night, I dreamed I was a father to a two-year old kid that sat on my shoulders annoying me as I went grocery shopping. Rather than be blissful I had a kid, I was just annoyed that I'd gotten myself into this situation at such a young age, before I had my shit in order and how I would have to deal with this huge responsibility for the rest of my life. I ran into a high school buddy who asked, "is that your kid?" intent on starting a conversation. I muttered a "yeah," hiding my embarrassment, and quickly moved on. The kid's mother and I were broken up, of course, and she and her new boyfriend were out on a date. My old feelings were there for the mother and I later took the boyfriend aside to have a heart to heart with him about treating her like she needs to be treated, in case his head was in the wrong place. Then, I wake up and reflect inside my covers about what something like that could mean about myself. At the heart of it, I think, is the fact that my last girlfriend said I wasn't ready to be a father (and even sex with a condom was too risky) and it bothered me. She had a kid and was a Christian good-girl (it makes sense when you learn the circumstances she had the baby under), and I accepted her because they were things in a person completely opposite to me. Her incredibly gorgeous appearance also helped. She was not obviously dumb, getting by with a simple wisdom that surprised me on occasion, but neither was she clever, spunky, emotional or funny. The fact that we had a relationship at all was more a testament to the fact that I can mold myself into anybody's dream than out of any similarities we shared. Anyway, immoral as it sounds, the point of that relationship, at first, was to get over my last relationship. In that, I was successful. I justified my actions by the fact that I made her happy and want to be with me. That's more important than the real reason you're with someone, and even when I called her the wrong name (the girl I was trying to get over) one time, I quickly sweet-talked my way out of it, made her laugh, and had sex with her despite her vow never to have sex before marriage again. I'm a bad person, but I'm a bad person trying his best to be good. I want make people feel good, welcomed, enjoyed, but my motives are selfish, because I really only care about myself, even though I fancy the idea of being a caring person. My last girlfriend said I was incredibly thoughtful, and that counts for something, even though I was being thoughtful for the sake of appearing thoughtful to someone else. My good qualities are like that: I'm nice because I think being nice will make me happier. Since I have to think, to shove aside my tendency to not care before I act, I don't feel I'm inherently a nice person. A truly nice person does nice things because he knows they make other people happy. I do nice things because I want to be happy, and inconveniently, I can only approach it by being nice to someone else. So, I've got that whole emotionally detached, nihilistic view on life combating my selfish ego going for me. If I were smart, I could put that to use for me. A writer doesn't care what other people think. He just writes the truth, as he sees it. I don't care what other people think. Not strangers, anyway (no offense). I'm too much of a nobody. They say, "You've got to let it all out to let them feel who you really are." If I'm a nobody, maybe you won't feel a thing. But, maybe, and I hope this is the case, you can relate just a little bit to who I am. If not, rot in hell. Writers write. There will be more from me in the future. For now, I'm going to bed.
From me to you,
good night.