Day One, Ground Zero

It's day one, at ground zero here in a one bedroom apartment in North Raleigh. Ground zero is an interesting term... associated with brokenness and disaster. Well this ground zero is the start of something, the place of origin, but I can only hope it's not something disastrous. I suppose a blog could be disastrous, depending on who you are. (Allow me to make an aside here, so that you can fully immerse yourself in my thoughts during this longer than intended entry. Listen to this playlist while you read, since it's what I was listening to while I wrote.)

The fact of the matter is... I've started to notice that I'm hemorrhaging words at every turn these days and I need a bandage to catch it all. And that's what this blog is going to be, a place to catch all the word vomit and creativity and bloody mess of comic zombies and video game characters that runs through my head. A place to post words that may or may not be read by anyone else about the popcorn diet I fall into sometimes and the random fits of ridiculousness that get vented to no one in particular when I'm alone in apartment 206.

I'm not sure what's going to end up here. All I know is that I need to write it down. I need to catalog it somewhere, if only to know for myself that it's written somewhere, that I didn't dream all the thoughts that I had when I was alone. Alone, there's another word with a negative connotation. Here again, I don't think it has to be a bad thing. I hope it won't be a bad thing.

Being alone, at least for me, is most about the silence that closes in. It took a lot of getting used to the silence. Sure there's music and television and all the blaring loudness of the attention that the internet begs for, but there's something eerie about how quiet it can still be even with all of that going on. It's refreshing to start. You never imagined that you could get so many moments of pure privacy and alone time. It's what you've been craving for so long... right?

Wrong. Oh, well there's phase two. You hate the silence at this point. You want to scream to break it. You reach out to people, you lock yourself in a closet and fall asleep in the middle of a Saturday, or you don't. Did I do that? Hmmm, that may have actually been a weeknight... In any case, you get past all that. You have to, don't you? You can't let that eat away at you for the rest of your life.

Then you make it to where we are right now. Where I am in this moment. You finally enjoy it, and you know that being alone doesn't mean loneliness. You can stop defining yourself by whoever you're with. There's this big moment of life defining realization. You still need other people, and you still thrive on interaction, on social energy, but you can go without it and wind up sane. You enjoy the silence so much that you can't even tell how quiet it is. The rest of your life fills the silence.

It was at that point for me that I could really let my spirituality sink in again. It's been hovering around me for a long time now. It wasn't doubt, it was always just a lingering feeling that something was in the way of accepting faith. Once I found that I didn't need a someone around me twenty four hours a day, I could let other things fill in the spaces that they should have occupied in the first place. It's still a work in progress, but at least it's progressing.

I feel a lot more alive lately, a lot more free. I can tell it in the way I think. I constantly hear short stories forming in my head, settings developing with great detail the way they haven't since I was in high school. I still think I was overall happier in college, but I've only been at this solo thing for a few months, so I'm still giving myself time to get used to it. Maybe sometimes I'll put the shards of stories and pieces of poems into this blog so that I can remember what kind of mood I was in when the visions flooded into my imagination.

I miss writing. I did it almost out of compulsion in high school. I can only do it at the height of emotional awareness. It's only when I understand what's going on in my heart that I can let it trickle out onto paper, and it's been years since I've been in a situation where I had both the emotional stability and the time to listen to my own thoughts that I need to catalog my ideas.

Maybe sometimes I'll post what's going on in my life. I'm not very open with so many people in my life. It's easier to stay closed off. It's easier to let things be about other people. I came to that realization the other day when I was talking to someone and had the thought that there are very large parts of my life that some of my closest friends don't know. I could say that it's because they haven't asked, but the simple fact is that even if they had, I'd have played it all down, pretended it wasn't very interesting. If it isn't interesting to the people who are closest to me, who is going to be interested?

I think part of it is that I'm happy to do what makes others happy. I don't mean that I am a selfless person who will just allow others to do whatever they want. It isn't that. It's just that my interests vary to match those of the person or people that I'm with. Maybe that's average, maybe it's what everyone does. I can't imagine everyone else is like that. I'd wager a lot of money that I get that from my mother. It's by no means a bad thing. It makes me a more diverse, more well rounded person. I'm influenced by so many, but I get to choose how it fits together. I get to pick the best parts and turn them into a person. Me. You can see it in my music collection. It's only been in the last year that I've started choosing almost all my own music without much influence from others. The rest of the four thousand songs in my music library can be attributed to one person or another. Even the music I hate can be tagged on one or more people in my life to this point.

This is getting to be far longer than I intended, but for a first post, I think that it's okay. I want to give myself and this blog some purpose, otherwise it will turn into my emotional whine-fest of a live journal from freshman and sophomore years of college, and I know no one wants that. Not that I actually expect more than one or two people to bother reading this.

I'll stop for now. I like what happened here though, I feel good about the way things are going right now, and I'm going to try to keep this up, so that maybe I can keep up the good progress too.