I hate this feeling. It’s always there, and however slight it’s presence is, it’s always still a presence and I’m always acutely aware of it. Normally I can shrug it off or distract myself with my favorite semi-boring pastimes, like going to the coffeehouse, reading, going for a drive, meeting up with friends—but there are also times, like right now, when it’s just flailing around violently under my skin, and I feel like the only way to release it is to do something. But not anything. It’s hard to explain. I don’t think going to a party would satisfy it. Sex wouldn’t satisfy it. I don’t think anything short of a life changing experience would satisfy it.
It will pass. It will diminish overnight while I’m sleeping, but it will still be there, unsatisfied, in the morning, and I will still feel it’s weight. It will still be cumbersome—slightly, just enough to put an anxiety-ridden air on all of the day’s activities. And I want it to stop, but I don’t want it to disappear. I feel like making it disappear forcefully, through ignoring it (though I question whether this mode of attack would even be remotely successful) wouldn’t do it justice or something. And why it commands respect, or justice, from me, I haven’t the slightest clue.
I feel like I have to find something. I feel like I have to seek something that cannot be sought. But I feel like I could find it. I just don’t know where to look, and I don’t know what it is. This is the problem. All of the things I’ve set out to do in life for myself—playing shows, getting the balls to ask a girl out, writing poetry, sharing my beliefs with others, driving across the country, running away from home, deliberately putting myself into “important” situations for me to experience—I’ve thought were sure to quell this internal restlessness. But they didn’t. For a short period, sure, they made me pay less attention to this strange calling, but they didn’t even pretend to disappear it. And that, in and of itself, makes me feel like all of my endeavors have just been acts of self-trickery or something. Or escapism. Or whatever.
I don’t know. But I feel like they amount to nothing except decent story-telling material. Like the real inner reason I’ve taken these things on is so I can just babble on about them and impress their effect on me to people. I feel like I’ve done them just so that, 40 years from now, in an old rocking chair, my body feeble and nearing its time to go, I can think to myself “well, my life wasn’t a complete farce. I did these interesting things”. And it’s like this restlessness is there to say “WAKE UP YOU ASSHOLE. GO FIND THE THING YOU’RE LOOKING FOR. WHAT THE HELL ARE YOU WAITING FOR?”
I could try not to force all of this. I could wait. But, then, why is this restlessness constantly nagging? Am I just supposed to ignore it and assume that this thing I’m looking for, whatever it is, will find me? I’ve never been one to think that way. I am not one to sit around and wait for things passively. I’ve always been a deliberate person, and I can’t help it. And while I recognize that as a flaw, I think when it comes to this, or anything that requires action (you cannot find something if you don’t look for it, and I have a tremendous belief that this is not something that I will discover through non-action), it requires my persisting, ever-present demeanor of “I’M GOING TO DO THIS!” or “TIME TO GO GET WHAT I WANT/NEED!”
I feel like I’m betraying myself by ignoring it at the level I am currently. Maybe, as arrogant as it sounds, that is why I feel like this restlessness commands respect—it’s my restlessness. This isn’t an outside pressure.
I feel like, whatever I need to do, it involves abandoning everything I take for granted or use as a crutch. It involves abandoning everything I’m comfortable and familiar with. It involves destroying the dispositions I’ve been conditioned to possess by everything I know and am currently around.
As good as I am at convincing myself that the path I’m on is a unique one, I know it’s not. And that’s part of the problem. I don’t feel like I’m trying to play an act or play a role or anything—the tortured, naively romantic musician-poet who plays shows, sells a few CDs, gets his little piece of the pie and then retires to a wife and kids and dies writing—I feel like I’m on the path, partially by choice, and partially because of my dispositions, to become the role. That is what scares the hell out of me. As arrogant as it may be, I feel like I wasn’t created for that purpose, and I feel like nothing in the world I’m currently a part of can let me become what I’m truly meant to become. And the biggest problem of all? I don’t know what I’m supposed to become!
come to new york and start a band! you’ll still be restless, believe me, but it would be a shitload of fun for a while and we could probably conquer the world or, you know, something along those lines.
Fuck yes. Fuck, most of my friends live in NYC anyway.
