#cube's ramblings

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anyone got any advice for being actually "there"? as in, i want to actively experience and participate in reality, instead of feeling like i'm just passively observing through the eyes of my meat automaton.

i already meditate 20mins every morning which is supposed to help, and sometimes does, and occasionally i remember to do anchoring exercises (5 things you can see, 4 things you can hear...), which sometimes help, but the vast majority of the time i'm still just not really there

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it's so fucking weird. when i was about 19 years old, i actually thought i had figured life out. i thought i was finally past the confusion and suffering of my teenage years. i had a rough plan of how i wanted my life to proceed, i was making progress. i was happy.

but now, the confusion is back stronger than ever. starting at around 25 i began figuring out that life wasn't as simple as i thought, i began questioning again what i wanted to do with my life. and this time, in addition to being confused about what to do, there is this growing sense of time running out. i'm now 27 years old, and i have no idea at all how the next few years are going to look, no idea what i am going to do. i know that late twenties is still considered relatively young, but it doesn't feel that way. it feels like i just spent the last 8 years getting a master's degree in computer science, so obviously my career is already roughly set. i spent those 8 years together with my girlfriend, so obviously that's who i am going to spend the rest of my life with. it feels like everything has already been decided, that it's too late to change course.

and change course to where? even if i got the chance at a do-over, i don't know if i would do anything different. i am roughly where i expected and wanted myself to be at this point in my life. but it still feels so boxed in, so suffocating.

and it's such a strange feeling. i don't know what i want to do, but i feel like it's already decided what i'm going to do. and even though that roughly aligns with what i wanted to do in the past, it feels wrong.

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i was at a party yesterday and i re-discovered yet again that i do not know how to talk to people.

what do you even talk to people about? how do you initiate a conversation? all the common advice seems to fail me

"just look at what other people do" i cannot stress enough that how other people initiate conversations is absolutely inscrutable to me. other people seem to be able to find strings-of-words that are somehow relevant to both them and me, and that result in both of us revealing information about ourselves to the other person. which, like, yeagh. that's how it's done. sure. but how the hell do you find those words? how do you find the topics?

"just say what you're thinking" i have heard that advice a million times and people are always confused when i answer that i do not think in words. i know most people's thoughts seems to resemble them talking to themselves internally, but my personal thought process is a weird algamation of images, colors, and feelings. and i just do not know how to put that into words. or at least not in real-time, as would be required to have a conversation.

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alright let's brainstorm some goals i could set for myself:

finish my master's degree. this is something i "need" to do anyway and it would be evidently helpful in my life. it's also a huge intimidating undertaking

read more. i used to practically inhale books, getting through like 1 to 3 per week. but over the last few years i read like single digit amounts of books per year. something like "read 20 books this year" seems absolutely attainable. if i just were to spend the time currently spent browsing tumblr reading books instead i would easily exceed that. and spending less time on here and more reading would surely be good for my mental health

develop a game. i've started gamedev often and always quit relatively early. i think a lot of it is just having high standards, even for simple ideas. since it's common writing advice to just write shittily if you're stuck, maybe i should just actively aim to make a shitty game. i'm highly unlikely to make any money with gamedev anyway, and maybe with that attitude i could actually get something done. it wouldn't really help the rest of my life but i think it would be fulfilling

so where do i go from here? just try all three? each of them seems attainable within this year, though i'm not sure if all of them together are. is it better to focus on one goal or to work towards multiple?