But none of the go inbetweens.

(So if you do not give a fuck about any non-work, non-project related things you can just go ahead and stop reading this one.)

I still feel lost. I don't know where I went wrong, I don't know what I did that I drove my life off of a cliff and just prayed that I would grow wings. I am afraid of success. I am happy in the process, and I am even okay with failure, but the thought that I do something right is terrifying to me. When I do things right, I have nothing left to gain, nothing left to learn and grow from. And so I do whatever it takes to ruin everything for myself, to keep me happy in this perpetual cycle of losing and trying again. I thought about naming this "I Have Come Curiously Close To The End", but since there is no real end to a cycle it doesn't fit. Maybe I'll save that for when I am at the end of something.

Cycles don't end, but they do break. I am so sick of the stagnation in my life that has permeated every single crevice of my life. It seems like every single day, some small part of me is just turning into some hard, stale shell of what it was. The things I like and the things I want are becoming brittle and just doing nothing but weighing me down. Even the city that I love seems to be dragging me. Sometimes I wish I had the guts to just pick up everything that I have, or at least everything I care about, and just go. I have enough friends in enough places that I could manage it, and maybe even be happy with it. Columbus, Ohio. Seattle, Washington. Phoenix, Arizona. Denver, Colorado. I wish I was brave enough to truly give up everything I know and am familiar with, to lose everything so that I can re-learn anything. The worst of it, the stale that has taken over my life, has been my creativity, the thing about me that is so dear and so important and so defining as my ability to make. I have lost my ability to create.

I have tried so hard to surround myself with creative things, the things I love and the things I want and enjoy. I have tried so hard to find my muse and find something to create, but I don't know what I have been doing wrong until very recently. I don't know when I lost it, I don't know where or why. Speaking to someone recently, they suggested that it might be me losing the person that was most important in my life that might have caused it, and as much as it pains me to think about, I think they might be right. I feel like it isn't until I have learned from a mistake I have made, rather than simply having made the mistake, that I truly learn from it and can move on. Someone once told me that, in her five marriages throughout her life, the one consistent thing she had learned about people is that nobody really changes who they are. I had always believed in that since she told it to me, but it wasn't until I was in that position that I learned for myself how unwilling the people around you are to change for the better unless they really want to. Very rarely does anyone want to change.

I have accomplished so much for myself in the past 11 months, all of it in spite of my fear of success. I have changed my life in the most drastic way that I think anyone can and I did it without flinching. But as powerful as this accomplishment is, I can't shake the feeling that for every mile I have come, ten more still remain. I still feel like I am lieing to my friends every day, and that I am clutching onto a vestigial part of my life only for the comfort of familiarity. I rarely set deadlines for myself and the last time that I did was earlier in the year. Maybe it was shortly before it. But the important thing is that I stuck to it and set about these changes which mean so much to me now.

So now I have set another deadline for myself and I feel even more strongly about this than the last. In two months it's make or break. I am retaking everything that I once felt I needed, my creativity and my happiness and, most of all, my life. If I can change who I am, then changing everything else should be easy.

I think.

I wish you good luck for that.
I wish I could offer you advice, but I can't, you will have had more experience than me anyway.
So, once again, I wish you good luck.