So, I'm a writer. I am one who writes. Here I am, writing. I'm going to try and make a habit out of this. Coding garish little webpages and regurgitating my neuroses onto them—I think it'll be good for my soul. This is my first post ever! Let's get into it.
I'm a teenage boy—a teenager, a teenage boy, only 20 years old—and I think I'm in the midst of a crisis. The type of crisis, I haven't yet identified; identity, existential, quarter-life; I don't know! This particular crisis lifts a few aspects from each. That said, let me make it clear that I'm not, like, suffering. No, I'm not in great emotional pain, nor am I at the mercy of the sharpest vicissitude, or whatever. I'm just kind of tired, tired of all the shit, the balancing act of being alive. Being an adult is as difficult as they say. "Adulting is hard," the millennials quipped, and I scoffed at them (because, what a corny thing to say), but they were right. This is hard.
Before you ask, I'm in therapy. It's through the school, and we meet online once a month. I'm also a psychology major, so, you know, maybe that should help my mental state. I think it's definitely made me more objective. Objectivity is very important to me. In our last session, my therapist asked me why that is, and I couldn't give her an answer. Revisiting her question, there may be a few reasons:
All of my self-crit comes from an objective perspective. Or so I think, you know. No one person is truly objective. I know that, which is why I started therapy—I needed a perspective even more objective than my own.
From an objective perspective, I feel like my social skills, not to mention my social life, are fucked up. I have this little gnawing voice in my head (my thoughts) that often tells me I don't know what I'm doing, that there isn't much use in trying to be sociable, that people probably don't like me and every effort to remedy that fact is futile, that kind of stupid bullshit. And I know it's bullshit, but I don't always know that, you know? In my brain, there is this half-assed tug-of-war match between my two senses of rationality: the rational and the irrational. My irrational rationality tries to rationalize my irrational thoughts, and, uh, vice versa. Neither of them seems to give a shit about winning, so they just tug and tug forever, kind of like what I do most weekends.
Please forgive the disgusting joke.
Basically, I have social anxiety or something, and my therapist tells me I have the anxious attachment style, which, as a psych major, I can readily corroborate!
Please forgive the smarmy psych student flaunting.
Honestly, it probably comes through in my writing. It rules a lot of my life, from what I do to where I go to who I talk to. I have to build up courage before I dare to speak to someone I don't know. I have to build up even more courage to speak to someone I do know. For some reason, I'm deathly afraid of talking to my friends (and yes, I do have friendships, though they are brittle at best). I mean, I like my friends. I like being around them, I like talking to them, I want to get closer to them, and I want more of them, but I fear them, I fear the prospect of trying to pull them beyond arm's length. I'm afraid of not being liked.
That's my biggest fear, actually. Not just not being liked in general, but being entertained as if I'm liked, getting invited to tag along to the parties and the house shows and shit, taken on little excursions around the mid-sized Midwestern city, spending time, good times, fun times with people, and all the while, my company is not actually valued. I'm not wanted there, I'm just there. I already know how stupidly improbable this is, but irrational rationality continues to remind me it's possible.
My name is Gabe. I'm a psychology major at UMN. I enjoy music, going out, playing Sims, and writing. I have a good life and a lot of wonderful friends. I am a dog person and an optimist. :)