“My body tells me no!
But I won’t quit
‘Cuz I want more, ‘cuz I want more”
– My Body, Young The Giant

I don’t think I fully understand what content means. I understand the definition of the word, but I find it really hard to find in my own life. When I get something I want, it’s good for a while. Exquisitely good.

And then time goes on, and I want more. I get used to the goodness that I have. I don’t forget what it was like before, but I do start thinking to the next step. Now that I have this, what else do I want?

Some people like to ask, “why can’t you just be happy?”

I am happy. I just…want more. I want to keep going. I want to see what’s next. I want to know what lies ahead if I push further. I refuse to accept that my current present is my only future. I challenge myself to question where I’m going and why I want to go there.

So yes, about 2 years ago I enrolled at Turing and totally changed my career path. It was amazing. Spending seven months learning new things and being totally overwhelmed reminded me why I love learning. And the journey since then has been incredible. Right now at work I’m anchoring a project using a language and technologies I don’t really know, and that’s half of the fun of it!

And yet...I want more.

Solving engineering problems with code is challenging. It’s interesting, it’s difficult, it’s constantly changing out from under you. There’s always more to learn.

But I still miss solving mathematical equations. I miss the thing that got me hooked on quantum physics in college. That feeling of barely being able to [sort of] grasp the concept you were trying to understand. That feeling of being so out of your depth that when you finally got something you said AH HA! even if it was only after spending 4 hours on a single homework problem. I get that feeling sometimes with my current job, and yet it’s not quite the same.

So now, in addition to anchoring a project and trying to further my current web development career, I’m enrolled in Udacity’s Deep Learning Nanodegree. New language and new technologies? Let’s do it. All that multivariable calculus I’ve forgotten since college? Why not! Hours of learning and programming work after I get home from work where I spent nine hours learning new languages and programming? You bet.

I guess there’s something to be said for making a plan, achieving it, and then being happy with it. It sounds like a great idea, after all.

The problem is, I clearly just never know what I ultimately want. I just know what I want next. I have no idea what I want after that…until I get there.

So until I get to that next place, my future, whatever it happens to be, I’ll focus on what I think I want now. And when I achieve it, when I can say “yes, I’ve done it!” I’ll give myself a solid six months or a year to feel accomplished.

And then I’ll want more.

“You only need willpower to get what you don’t want or  you only want to want. By want to want, I mean, something you wish you wanted. But you don’t really.”
-Augusten Burroughs, This Is How: Surviving When You Think You Can’t 

So this is how I write.
It’s how my diaries look, when I look back on them. Spurts of writing almost every day, then suddenly a year or two of silence until I get that itch again. That itch where suddenly writing seems like the only thing I can do to express a feeling. Some nagging feeling I keep coming back to, multiple times a day for weeks, until I finally give in and it feels like coming home.

(welcome home?)

A friend, a very good friend, sent me a package a month ago with an unexpected gift. This gift was the book This Is How: Surviving When You Think You Can’t, by Augusten Burroughs. I’ve read about 90% of the book today, and I would highly recommend it to anyone who may still happen to read this blog when you see my Facebook or Twitter post pop up this afternoon.

Why? Well because I’ve only ever heard myself and my husband happen upon the idea of wanting to want until I read this book. So many ideas I’ve had, or truths I think I’ve stumbled upon, have been thought of before. And that’s a fucking wonderful thing.

Read it.

But really, what I wanted to write about is friends. It’s about how my husband once asked me why I couldn’t just tell a little lie to a friend instead of telling him to the truth so as to not hurt his feelings. It’s about how your friends tell you what you want to hear, or what they think you want to hear, or what they think they’re supposed to tell you. Or what they think is the right thing to tell you. So as not to hurt your feelings, or force some change in your life, you know?

I didn’t really need this book to reinforce it to me, and it’s not even directly what this book touches on, but I think it’s total fucking bullshit.

Friends have, in numerous occasion, come to me specifically because they know I’ll give them my true feelings on something without sugarcoating it. I hate sugarcoating. You could say I loathe it and you wouldn’t be wrong. I think we lie to each other so often it’s normal. Natural. Not even a thought that registers in your day-to-day life. Just another part of society [UGH].

Small little lies, based on how we think we ought to feel about something. Based on the idea that not rocking the boat is better than throwing your best friend overboard and telling them to fucking learn how to swim to shore because they NEED to learn how to swim to shore.

But lying to a friend

(that shirt looks amazing on you, [it doesn’t] your boyfriend is awesome [i think he’s not right for you, please stop pretending to be someone you’re not], you should keep trying at this [but don’t because at this point you should realize you’re not very good at it],  I’d love to but I can’t [actually I just want to stay home because what you’re inviting me to sounds boring], you should wait two days and then call him [why the fuck are you playing games, do you like him or not?])

is really just a disservice to them. You’re not being a good friend. You’re telling them an untruth. Every time you open your mouth to say something when you know you actually feel something different, and you have to go talk to another person to unload how you REALLY feel about it, you’re failing them as a friend.

Friends should want honesty. Friends should demand honesty. Because true honesty, with yourself and with others, is the only way to figure out what you really want in life and be able to relentlessly follow that thing.

You can’t move forward with any part of your life until you face the real (deep, buried, underlying, hard to look at) truth about who you are. Sometimes it takes someone else shining a light on the corner of that truth to really see it. To start the uncovering process. By telling a half-truth or some version of the truth to a friend, you’re just adding another layer to their own self protection. You’re throwing another sheet onto of the light of the truth that they know lives deep down but don’t want to actually see.

Or so I believe.

It’s difficult to be honest. It’s difficult to know that the words you say you might cause emotional pain in a friend, or in someone else they might affect in their actions.

But is it really better to allow them to mislead themselves?

Cool eyes,
and calm face
watching the world
in the perfect mask
of another woman
waiting to see.

Nothing to see here,
nothing to notice.

You’re just watching,
just looking
at anything that might come past.

A quiet,
uninteresting,
yet cautious painted expression
of
“everything is fine.”

Yet beneath the surface,
below where anyone can see
(or so you think)
there’s a rage of
EVERYTHING
happening so quickly you can’t keep track of it.

It’s possible your mind
is running through the same thought
for the ninetieth time today
but truly
who’s counting?

Your stare,
ever the calm, cool, collected
thoughtless
stained glass mirror

hides something so dark
and ravenous
you worry you might melt the glass
in front of you.

Is it possible for
frustration to burn hot enough
to cause the volcanic activity
inside of you
to erupt?

You hope not.

You’ve tried,
obviously,
to quell this.

To move on.

To ignore it as if it didn’t exist.

…worthless.

So here you sit,
pondering,
(sort of)
but mostly thinking that
if you open your mouth
even
a little,
something vile may come out.

No, cascade out,
in the kind of way that can only described as
word vomit

And suddenly everything will change.

“I grew up with a lot of dreams
Plans who to be
None of them, none were mine” – Tove Lo

Everything seems easier from the outside looking in. People my age spend a lot of time on Facebook looking at the lives of our friends wondering how they have it so easy. We see couples that we look up to and we wonder how they make it seem so effortless.

But it’s not.

We each have our inside lives and our outside lives, and the outside lives are so much shinier and happier. It’s the face you put on around parents, at school, at work, to your friends who you haven’t seen in a while. Or friends you just aren’t that close to.

And while it’s you, it’s also not you. Other people don’t see the internal struggles you face. They don’t know how many hours you’ve spend preoccupied by something someone said to you. They don’t know about fights with your significant other or the fact that you put on 4 different outfits before choosing one you finally didn’t hate.

As a disclaimer, I’m not saying all of these things are me. In the last few years, my outside self has become much, much closer to my inside self than it used to be. But it was a struggle to get there. It’s a struggle because there’s so many things you’re told you’re supposed to want. You’re told how you “should” be by people who are just repeating what they’ve been told. And there’s shame when you don’t feel like that, or when you don’t want to feel like that. A lot of shame.

So you put on your outside face. You step into a persona that is you-but-not-you and you hide away the things that don’t fit in with other people’s idea of how you should be. You generally let a few people in on your inside life, sometimes. But somehow you think that you’re the only person living this inside life. Like if you tell someone about it, if you really, truly open up, and it might be shocking to them. Too much to handle. Too much you so that they will turn away.

It’s all a big fucking lie.

There is no way you’re supposed to be. There is no right path for someone your age, with your background, and your gender. Feeling shame over something you know you feel is a pointless exercise in frustration. You will never be entirely happy until you simply allow yourself to be who you are, all the time. I feel the pressure to have an ‘inside’ life sometimes but I don’t want one. 

It’s not because I want nothing to be private; it’s because by splitting your life in two you’re saying that some of it is wrong. That it’s unacceptable and needs to be hidden. But it’s not. And it’s ok to let people see you struggle. It’s ok to ask for help, it’s ok to be broken, and it’s ok to be different. It’s ok to not want something that most of society thinks that you should want.

So ask yourself sometimes, are you living two lives? Are you putting on a person suit for people in your life and denying something you know to be true about yourself? If so…maybe try just being yourself instead. You’re real self. It’s often not as scary as you think.

“The real problem in speech is not precise language. The problem is clear language. The desire is to have the idea clearly communicated to the other person. It is only necessary to be precise when there is some doubt as to the meaning of a phrase, and then the precision should be put in the place where the doubt exists. It is really quite impossible to say anything with absolute precision, unless that thing is so abstracted from the real world as to not represent any real thing.”
– Richard Feynman

As I start a new phase in my life again where I’m constantly meeting new people and these new people are forced to get used to my particular brand of personality, I’m reminded of something that comes up over and over again in my life: I’m not likable. Or, more precisely, I’m not very likable when you first meet me, and after spending some time with me, you’re either going to really like me or definitely not like me.

I have a very polarizing personality. I’m opinionated, I think I’m right a lot, I’m brutally honest, I have almost zero filter, and I’m vocal about all of these things. My personal experiences have taught me that many people are afraid of being wrong in front of others, but I don’t have this fear. I’m that annoying person that answers questions in class all the time because even though I’m right more times than not, I’m not always right, and that’s okay with me. If I’m wrong, I’ll just learn from it.

Sometimes I don’t like writing about myself because I’m afraid it will sound conceited or narcissistic. I’m afraid you will judge me and talk about me in an unpleasant light behind my back. So, because I’m afraid of it, I’m going to keep on facing it and write about it anyway.

I find that simply by being myself, and being honest, I alienate people. I learn quickly, which means that right now in my new school, I’m not having a lot of trouble. I’m not stressed and I’m rarely confused. And if you were a student in that class having a tough time almost every day and feeling overwhelmed, I imagine that you’d want to get together with the other students who feel like you do so you could commiserate together. Why would you want to hang out with me when I can’t complain with you? Why would you want to hang out with me at all? You’d probably (secretly) hate me just a little because you’re comparing your work to mine. And I’m not surprised about this at all, because it’s how I’ve felt towards other people at times in my life also.

I also have a tendency to want to help others understand things, and to correct people if they are wrong, and to answer questions. If someone asks me if I’ve completed something and I have, I will say yes. If they ask if it was difficult for me and it wasn’t, I’ll say that too. If they ask me for help so they can understand it also, I’ll be delighted, and I’m pretty much always say yes.

But I recognize the fact that I would have an easier time making friends if I wasn’t honest. If I pretended things were difficult, if I wasn’t so open about my knowledge, would people like me more? If I kept my mouth shut, would it be helpful to me or would I simply be denying who I really am?

If you’ve ever watched “Mean Girls” then you’ll get the dilemma. If I’m really good at math, but the cute boy in front of me totally doesn’t understand it, then I should just pretend I don’t understand it so he’ll like me more, right? Except the moral in the end is be yourself, even if that self is a super math nerd (yes, I was co-captain of my high school math team) who doesn’t make a lot of friends.

But knowing this, and knowing that being myself is the best option, doesn’t mean it doesn’t hurt when I get the impression that people are out planning things and doing things that I’m not invited to. When I feel like I can’t bond with people in the same way even though I want to bond with them. Unfortunately, knowing something doesn’t usually make it easier to accept or deal with.

Furthering the issue is the inability to express this accurately. How do you get someone to understand who you are and why you act the way you do? How do you choose the right words – the most precise words – to convey your meaning to someone who has only known you for a few weeks?

How do you be yourself, while not hurting others by being yourself? 

“I feel so much lighter today
(Now that there’s time)
Can’t remember my name
But you can tell me who I am”
– Big Data, Automatic

There’s a commercial on TV right now where a dad looks at his son’s participation trophy and starts thinking, “Why did we get this? We won every game? Why did we get the same trophy as all of them?” So he tears off the ‘participation’ plaque and writes CHAMPS on it.

I know that in a competitive game if there’s a winner (a nice, good thing to tell a kid) that there is also a loser (a bad thing you shouldn’t tell a kid). But being so sensitive about calling someone a loser (or a failure, cheater, etc.) doesn’t mean we should coddle everyone.

It means we should teach better. We should teach the right lesson. It means we should be honest, and teach kids how to be honest with themselves.

Losing a game doesn’t make you a loser. Failing doesn’t make you a failure, cheating doesn’t make you a cheater, and lying doesn’t make you a liar. You can do any of these things, and you will do these things, and it’s okay to do these things…you just don’t need to define yourself by them.

So maybe someone calls you a loser. Fine. Maybe you did lose. You shouldn’t ignore losing, you should ignore being called a loser. 

An event doesn’t make you who you are. People make mistakes. Good people who try really hard will still fail. People who strive to tell the truth will still lie once in a while. The only person who can really decide what you are is you.

You should never let someone else, or especially what someone else says, define who you are to yourself.