Do you ever feel like you're burning out? Like you're worn super thin? It's like your soul is just sputtering, pushing along with only fumes from actual fuel that's now absent in your tank. Sometimes, I get this way. And when I do, I just need to take a step back, and go on a mental vacation.
Let's say I've been writing this book for days, weeks, whatever... I just feel like, I'm overtaken with responsibility or expectation. I start to feel like I'm a puppet dancing on strings to an audience of eye-rollers or apathetic rhinos. Scary creatures, by the way. Very underappreciated for their killing potential.
I know, I actually have amazing people reading this... I get comments from people in my life and I'm like "How did you know that?" and they're like "I read your book" or "I watched your video". Shocks me every time. I'm always like "But... I'm a loser... so... why?" but I try to keep actually saying that to a minimum.
Now, unlike the other chapters... I'm not going to proofread this one (edit: I proofread it). If there is a spelling error or something doesn't make sense, I leave that for you, like an awesome little puzzle toward what I think might be the end of this book (nope, I proofread it anyway, no puzzle for you). This chapter is my day off. My time to let it go, and just chill (nope, I still proofread, just didn't feel right not proofreading). To be real with you, and not worry about the polishing or ironing (I did worry, so I proofread).
Irony will be if I don't proofread this, and it winds up being better than the ones I do proofread. Ha. (yet it won't be, because I proofread it anyway)
But really, what I want this chapter to be about is this feeling in my chest right now. It's not a feeling of defeat, but then again, maybe it is. Why was "defeat" the first thing that came to mind when I wanted to talk about what it wasn't?
You know when someone outs themselves for being a piece of trash? Like, before you even argue? Like let's say your boyfriend comes home late, and he says "What!?" pauses, left eye rolls in the back of his head then he continues "What Shauna!? I wasn't fucking anybody!"
People do that all the time.
They say what they did as if they didn't do it before anyone even accuses them. It's like if I were to walk in a room and say "What!?" pauses, left eye stays in place because I have genetically superior eyes "I wasn't out there doing exactly what you told me to do like a good boy!" Haha, yes I was. I was out there being a good boy. A good ass boy.
Big sigh man. I've been listening to audiobooks a lot lately. It kind of makes me excited to make my own for this book, but I also worry it won't be good enough. Who cares right? Just do your shit, sink or float, what does it matter?
I want you to think of it all this way. Let's say you have a goal, and you wonder if it will be worth your time. What is worth your time? I mean, what makes it all worthwhile?
Well... I'll tell you. For some, it seems to be money. Right? Or maybe, praise from fans? Ok. Cool. But what do you care about when you are about to die? Money? Praise? Nah.
What you care about right before you die is the adventure you took. Did you live your life? Did you stay true to yourself and leave your mark where it mattered to you?
Think about it. You got this feeling in your chest, of things you want to do with your life. Maybe that's eat ice cream, or chill and play video games. Maybe that's sleep with the hot guy from work or win a high stakes game of poker. That's a desire, something you want to do to fulfill you. You probably don't think money or fame or even becoming a CEO will be the answer, because if the world didn't run on money, you wouldn't care as much about those goals.
So, write your shitty book. Sing your shitty song. Act in that shitty play. Dance your shitty dance. Who cares? Well, you do. You care. That's what matters to you. In the end, you did what was true and real to you. Right? I hope you will be like that. I hope you look back an see a life full of you listening to yourself. Why do you expect everyone else to hear you, if you won't even hear yourself, you know?
My life experiences up to this point, in this book, cover my childhood, and my transition into the military. As I write on in this book, I'm going to dive really deep into the drama of the military, the conflict I had in myself over the politics of the Air Force and even what brought me to fall into a horrible, all-consuming depression.
There's a reason they called me a golden boy recruit for the military. I was that new kind of shiny, I was confident, I was ready to take on the world & I had all my ducks in a row, all the good boxes were checked. A 19 year old American poster boy.
But... I became a damaged, fucked up person by the time the machine spit me out. And this offers a lesson I hope others can grow from... that lesson being this:
When it feels like you're all alone, and no one cares... your feelings are invalid. They're not based on reality, but rather a negative line of thinking that happens only to people who don't have the proper leadership and training.
You owe it to yourself to live out your experience to the fullest. To give yourself the best time you can give yourself, and to listen to your heart/soul when it comes to ways you can heal.
You can grow yourself. You can make your admission of problems all about what others say and do to you, but that doesn't make you grow. That doesn't help you overcome... when you take the defeat and make it the sole focus, you'll find you have, only then, truly lost. If you look at the deeper layers, the fine print of your design and ask yourself what it is that you truly want, what you need... you may find, yourself, with more focus and drive to accomplish wonderful things.
Basically, my mistakes in life, my hardships and attitude could have been avoided with the proper childhood. Not having a reliable father figure? Yeah, I didn't have a mentor or a leader to guide me through the mess I endured. I just had to wing it, and hope things turned out great. Unfortunately, things, for some time, didn't turn out great at all.
I could blame myself, I could blame my mom or my dad, but really? It was everyone. Everyone, including myself, is to blame. The only person I can benefit from blaming, however, is me. Because I control me, I can fix me. I can do better. Blaming the others? With the way human egos work? That will only make things worse. For some reason, most humans, despite all their evolution-sourced abilities, haven't grown enough to accept external criticism, and take the best from it. So, you just gotta fix yourself, and expect others to fail you.
But yeah... I started this chapter just wanting to free some of my thoughts up. And I have done that to a great extent. I don't know what makes me such a talker. I was doing a live stream the other day and a guest on the show said something like, "Man, you can really talk." They were referencing the fact that when I was on someone else's live stream, it became 80% my voice. I was happy to have others talk, but when I started talking, I told stories, long stories, and it kept people watching, views dipped slightly after I left.
But yes... I can talk, I have a lot on my mind when I'm in talking mode. My ex-wife (who I will cover a little in this book... she was a nice lady most the time I knew her, just, very different) used to describe her thoughts as all jumbled up and hard to communicate. She would try to connect with me by describing how her mind worked, and I just didn't understand it because it sounded so crazy. Not that she was crazy, but the way her thoughts were organized, was crazy to me.
It's like someone was a hoarder right? Only their thoughts were all the stuff they had, and they packed it in their skull randomly. Everything disorganized and piled on each other. You need to categorize that stuff with labels in drawers and on shelves or you'll drive yourself nuts.
See, the way I think is how a lot of stereotypical men think. I have a character from my videos named "Dale" and I connect most with him because he is a very literal guy. He thinks "God this is stupid." and then says "God this is stupid." There isn't a lot of mystery to Dale, he says what he feels and wonders why everyone around him seems to be so overly emotional all the time. Why does everyone play games when they could just communicate their thoughts?
I do cry, on a rare occasion. I do feel sad, on a near-constant basis (it seems). I also feel happy sometimes, and the other range of emotions, but what I don't feel as much, that many other folks feel all the time, is outraged by things that are illogical to be outraged by.
I'll give an example. In the TV show friends, Ross & Rachel got in a fight, and people kept screaming "We were on a break!" in reference to their relationship.
Reality is, when people are not dating, they can do whatever they want, as they are essentially "free". If you want to "control" or "own" people as TV show characters seem to imply, then you should not break up with them... or go on a "break".
This simplistic way of seeing things is how my mind regularly operates.
If you're on a break, the rules of a break apply. If you don't want someone fooling around when you're on a break, you need to communicate that. If you do not communicate that, you cannot be mad at them for not reading your mind.
You can see my line of thinking from earlier stories of mine. I had a girlfriend who I broke up with, and she went and slept with another guy while we were broken up. I wasn't too mad about it, because if I wanted to have an exclusive relationship, I shouldn't have dumped her.
It's like selling your car, then getting mad when someone drives off with it. Dude. It's not your car anymore.
It's stuff like this that I just don't subscribe to. These illogical moments of outrage that so many people like to partake in. Another example is politics. People go on rants about gun control every time there is a shooting, then they shut up. Then they go on more rants about gun control the next shooting, then they shut up. Never really doing anything about it.
How often do you see people, in mass groups, ranting about the leading causes of death? Cancer? Heart disease? Medical error?
I have yet to see a single hashtag trending about what kills most people. It's always people freaking out about what kills far fewer people than even diarrhea and accidental falls.
In fact I didn't even find mass shootings on the top 50 leading causes of death in the country... and yet it's more talked about than most anything on the list.
Illogical.
This implies people don't care about lives lost, at all.
No, what they care about is the VIOLENCE and DRAMA of it. That's all.
The pretend compassion people show reminds me of people who say they're never going to drink again, complaining about the morning after, only to go drink again, and repeat the same cycle. Or people who say they're finally going to leave their abusive lover, only to return again. We complain about gun violence, but we rarely ever do anything about it. Almost as if we're just talking about it for attention.
I don't relate with people on many things The closest I can get to finding common ground is when I say "I'm going to start doing this more" like a New Year's resolution, only the new goal doesn't fit into my existing patterns, so I forget them. This is very common, and I am a part of this sad human trend. I, like many, have a lack of conviction to follow through on some, but not all, new ideas.
But that is where I want to leave this chapter. I offered up some advice. I told you more about my personality. I expressed some flaws I have as well as some strengths. I also failed to use commas for this paragraph. I used periods instead. Pretty cool stuff my friend.
But before I leave this chapter, I want to say... for a guy I barely knew, I think about my grandpa a lot. My family member told me he had an alcohol problem the other day. The same person also informed me that alcoholism runs in my family. Yet, drinking, to me, is dumb. Druge use for the purpose of "fun" in general, seems so very dumb.
The family member in question even said something along the lines of "It's painful to watch people you love, throw their lives away to alcoholism. It hurts to see their eyes turn yellow."
I needed some clarification, and then I was told that when your system starts to fail due to alcoholism, your eyes can turn yellow. Just more illogical things humans do. I tried alcohol quite a few times and I just, never really understood it.
If I had to guess, I would say it was because I didn't hang around people constantly asking me if I "want a beer?" Like they were a drug dealer trying to get me hooked.
Stuff is nasty. And that's coming from a guy who used to think Kombucha was the bees knees.