I think part of my initial shock of discovering this old blog was that it reminded me of how often I start things over once they get complicated or I lose interest. I’m not sure how much of this is normal for everyone and if I’m being hard on myself, OR if I really have a problem that I need to address.
I did not want to start a blog and have random, unrelated posts. I certainly didn’t intend to talk about my feelings. I didn’t want a sappy, self-absorbed blog that flagrantly displayed my neurosis and emotional instability.
This blog, Beer, Bach, Brawn and Banter (I’m surprised I didn’t use the Oxford comma, I’m pretty strict about that) was supposed to be about my journey discovering beer, becoming a better pianist, getting “swole” or “snatched” (I can’t remember which one), and there was a catch-all for everything else. And as I look back on B-tesseract I kind of did that. But I don’t remember why I stopped.
I started another blog – BPM365 – maybe two months ago. “Bruce’s Project Management”. The idea was that I would apply project management principles to everyday life, allowing one to practice project management 365 days a year. But in my last post I talked about emotions.
My first podcast initially had a theme, and I’d done all this work to choose topics specifically other than emotions. I had all this equipment but ultimately put on my headphones and sat down and just recorded what I felt after a bad day. Again, emotions won out over my more cerebral intentions.
As I’ve grown, I’ve learned that managing emotions is something that literally everyone struggles with at some point. Sometimes I still have shame around being “emotional”, but now I’m slightly less likely to care.
I have an idea though.
When I see my Facebook “on this day” posts from a decade ago, I seemed really optimistic and upbeat. This came after a period of deep (undiagnosed) depression and general mental turmoil. It feels like I’m back in a period of depression and mental turmoil, with heavy emphasis on turmoil. And I wonder what happened. I look at the 2011 Bruce and I don’t know him. I think I might try to trace things back and see where things shifted.
I recently talked to a friend and I shared with him that I don’t feel like I have a compass. I had clear goals in my 20s – finishing school, finding a place, and getting a job I wanted. I also started a relationship. Things were moving along fine, until they weren’t. At one point, I looked around and realized I was really uncomfortable with myself. I had the worst spontaneous anxiety. (I later learned this to be unresolved trauma but that’s for a later post). I was unhappy with everything. Beneath a pretty veneer, I felt like something was missing.
But now I think it’s not that anything was missing. “IT” – what I was looking for – just IS. Like, this is it. Life is whatever you make it I guess.
The Common Blog 