strange. there might not be a more accurate word to describe the way i have always felt about myself, and my life for the last twenty-two years. in feeling strange, i have also been able to redefine and morph that word into what feels like home. strange is a feeling i reside in, (quite comfortably, i might add). i suppose that the way i view this idiosyncratic aspect of myself is how i started this year telling myself “it can only get better from here, 2015”, and how i have ended up here, six months later, saying “it can only get stranger from here, for the rest of my life.” so naturally, i am here to blog about it.
to be or feel strange extends beyond weirdness, or the simple off kilter-ness of it all. strangeness is the unexpected, and a slight or sometimes dramatic stray from the normal. i mean this in much less of the societal norm, and more of someone’s personal sense of normality. i have always felt a deviating force in my patterns of thinking. whenever there is a desire to feel and think and act a certain way, my subconscious takes over and i end up somewhere entirely new. this has terrified me for the majority of my life, but i have somehow found a near sereneness to this unpredictable habit of mine.
i do not feel fit in a category of any sort. this asymmetrical sense of self exists in all corners of my life. i have been battling within myself about identity since before i could ever spell that word. almost everyday, i question whether i want to be, or already exist as: an artist, a writer, a thinker, a creator, a really good guesser or a person who makes things arbitrarily. am i an extrovert with introverted tendencies on a bad day? am i an introvert by day but an ambivert by night? does the constant thought of these things make me any less or more of anything, or does it just make me stranger? somedays i believe that i never make conscious decisions, and that things just sort of, happen.
haphazardly, this blog is just happening. i can’t tell you everything now, or probably ever, but what i can tell you is how today happened. my dad and i were driving to the farmer’s market and we had a conversation about the dreaded “future plans” and my “short term and long term goals.” while these words and phrases come off as terrifying to a recent art school graduate, fear and excitement end up being a lot more synonymous than one might initially think. but i had already disposed of the five or ten year plans when i was fourteen years old. my crafty plan for the next decade of my life began to crumble when i failed algebra and was told by my writing teacher that my style was “just not good.” i stopped planning but i never stopped worrying. i never stopped thinking about each grain of sand thought in my head, and that made me feel strange.
my dad and i talked about the strangeness of this point in life that most people go through. we talked about the embarrassment of having a degree title in which we no longer identify with, and why that’s okay. we talked about the future, and why the future is commonly and mistakenly viewed as “the rest of your life”. the future can be a plan for tomorrow. the future can be a week to week thought process. and to me, the future is finding my passions and taking my time to care for and attend to each and every one of them because i unfortunately have more than my hands can count. my dad agrees with that pseudo-plan of mine, so i’m starting off again with trying to rediscover and sort out my many passions. they’ve just gotten a little messy lately, that’s all.
the first passion i can vividly recall having was for the written word. i have veered from it, obsessed over it, craved it and then spit it back out. but writing is in my roots. actually… no. that isn’t quite right. writing is my roots. even through all of my visual artwork, that becomes very apparent. however, i was never really sure of where those words would take me. well…it’s brought me here. and as i said, it’s been haphazardly, but i ended up somewhere.
i can’t tell you for sure what this blog is going to be about, because, well, look at where this started and where this is ending. when i started writing an hour ago, i had a much different closing paragraph in mind. what i can tell you, is that this won’t be a “this is how i see it” blog, but a “this is how i think, feel, and live it” blog. i’ll tell you undoubtedly there will be more strangeness coming, and with that, more paragraphs. today, this is enough for me.