We make judgments about people all of the time. We make them instinctively. But how do we make sure they are informed? If I see you standing on a street corner how do I decide if you’re a friendly face or Jack the Ripper? It’s even more difficult online – not because the Internet is, as is sometimes suggested by the media, a breeding ground for the latter – because you often don’t have access to factors like body language, vocal intonation and emphasis and eye contact (or lackthereof).

But even in face-to-face communications what often isn’t immediately obvious is what lurks beneath the surface, the emotional turmoil that exists underneath a particular facade. Somebody blew up at me earlier this week and while it was disconcerting in the moment the more I thought about it the more apparent it became to me that it probably didn’t have anything to do with me. Though it was directed firmly at me. The language used seemed to imply that I was somehow the problem. It hardly seemed to matter that this person had got the wrong end of a very long stick.

Understanding this helped me. But the whole situation has made me reticent to interact with people I don’t already have a relationship with. I mean, potentially any combination of words, emoticons, even an arched eyebrow can be misconstrued. They might think I hate them – or that I like them. [And perversely it was the latter that proved problematic this week. lol]

I used to think there was something scary or risky about being misunderstood in the process of creating art, but actually that seems like a walk in the park by comparison. Well I mean that’s not always the case. I am no doubt helped by the fact that the world at large is mostly indifferent to the things I create so the whole issue is moot. [As an aside I used to think people were being unduly critical and intolerant of Cat Stevens once he became a devout Muslim and changed his name to Yusuf Islam. But there's one thing I cannot resolve - and that is his role as one of the major proponents of the case for a fatwa against Salman Rushdie for penning The Satanic Verses. Where was Stevens' Peace Train then?] Clearly being misunderstood in art is a problem for many, and sometimes the consequences are quite serious. As Julia Cameron notes people often shoot the messenger.

So… how do you do it? How do you decide who to befriend and when and why and how?

Just feeling bogged down and squished. Actually ‘squished’ is not a word I would use normally, but it seems apt. Like the few specks of possibility on the landscape are disappearing and I’m being pressed down, slowly crushed by the weight of harsh realities. I never know who to talk to. I never know who I can talk to. I get depressed a lot and I am sure certain people avoid me because of this, because they don’t know what to say or how I’ll react. But I’m just disillusioned.

Somebody left a comment on this video. The timing seems quite fitting. I actually forget this video exists sometimes, that I made it. But I did. I am proud of it, actually. I like the editing. I think it explains something I needed to articulate.

The title of the video is actually an allusion to a Tori Amos song, ‘Silent All These Years.’

Years go by will I still be waiting for somebody else to understand?

I don’t have anything particularly interesting or profound to say right now. I just felt bad that I haven’t blogged in such a long time. I hope you’re all doing okay…

It makes sense to avoid conflicts that you aren’t certain you can win. But what if your confidence takes a beating and you can lack the perspective and clarity to know which battles you have a chance to win? Well, everything looks terrifying. You avoid everything. You run like hell whenever something different shows up. It might be something delicious, something deeply rewarding – but why take the chance? You practice a rather foolish level of containment and there’s no joy to be had there. But it feels safe. The keyword there is feel. The state is as illusory as the feeling.

Of course it’s one thing to understand this intellectually… another entirely when you are in the moment gripped with a sense of impending potential horrors. Meh.

As I scribbled down this mantra a funny thing happened. It seemed to work. I started admitting things to myself that I hadn’t before.

I don’t know how to make my life work. I don’t know how to pursue the kind of career I want to pursue. I don’t know how to make people care about me or the things I do. I don’t know if I have value. I try to assure myself that I do, but I wonder… I don’t know what to do. I don’t think I can do it myself. I don’t even know who to ask for help. So mostly I just fantasize over someone saving me from my wretched life. A lover.

Only… on some level I am pretty sure that won’t work. I can’t really compartmentalise my existence and start again. Even with the support of a lover, no matter how spectacularly I imagine them to be. There are things I need to do to sort out my life first, things I need to do to make peace with myself and the world around me. Right now I am in many respects a broken individual. Taking all that stuff into a relationship will only damage the relationship.

But… instead of acknowledging this stuff and start working on it, I look for reasons – excuses – to feel bad and disempowered. I throw myself at people’s feet and if they don’t respond to me in the way I desire I decide that there is no point, that I’ll never be happy, that there’s no point in trying anything at all. [Admittedly I have a chequered relationship history so it's not difficult to find evidence to support a "nobody has ever loved you or ever will" type scenario.] Because… I know how to feel bad and while I do not enjoy it, I can do it. The things I have to do to move on with my life terrify me. It feels familiar, stable, to stay trapped.

But there are ways in which I do feel genuinely victimised. This world is an inhospitable place for many people for many reasons, and for one particular reason that I do not intend to disclose here it seems particularly brutal to me. I don’t see why I should suffer because of the intolerance of those around me. It doesn’t seem fair that I should be so fearful. There’s a lot of uncertainty and a lot of things I realise I cannot control. And as much as I would like to operate with cold mechanical detachment, I can’t do that either. The love and support of family and friends is important to me. And the idea that I might lose either seems heartbreaking beyond words. I worry I would not survive such an outcome.

But where I live now emotionally makes me so unhappy. The facade that creates a superficial sense of stability also breeds such inner turmoil.

I just want someone to tell me everything will be alright. Although, if I’m being completely honest, I’m not entirely sure I’d believe them even if they did.

So what should you do when you experience rejection and some of the feelings that accompany it? Well, you should do something to reaffirm your sense of self. This might seem curious but I was amazed at how effective it was for me recently. Go revisit that thing you created, or that thing that you’re passionate about. It is wonderful how this will bring you away from the (at times quite nebular) criticisms you receive and deliver you back to a sense of your own self and your own worth.

And if that fails consider injecting some Annie Lennox-esque flippancy into your day.

(The plate smashing is optional.)

When I think back to shopping expeditions as a kid I remember feeling really constrained by the fashion trends and the stock available in local shops. It seemed each year one or two notable trends was in vogue and that basically dictated what you could and could not purchase. (This was particularly aggravating the year Hawaiian floral patterns made a comeback.) I remember wanting plain clothes, solid colours – black and blue predominantly. I didn’t want to wear brand names. It didn’t matter if they were prestigious ones or not, I always felt like if I wasn’t being paid I didn’t want to be some corporation’s walking talking billboard.

In an odd way I didn’t want to fit in or stand out, rather I wanted to fade into the background of everything. I’m not sure what it was about solid black and blue tshirts (for example) that made me think they were suitable camouflage for suburbia, but I am pretty sure I did think that.

I started putting away my new purchases. I don’t give my wardrobe a lot of consideration, but in that moment I was struck by how different times in my life could be characterised by the clothes within that wardrobe. There was the ‘black and blue’ moments of my teenage years. There were the ‘winter at my former workplace’ clothes – long heavy garments, as if I was going on vacation to the snow (it never snowed there, but somehow it often felt like it could have).

There was that time when my social circle extended to include people younger than myself. They had a fun almost flippant attitude to fashion and they did much at the time to help me take myself less seriously. A studded belt made it’s way into my wardrobe (though it never did actually fit me) and those pair of Dunlop Volleys with the checkered patten. My “emo” shoes. At one point I made a silly video to Kate Bush’s Hounds Of Love and as she sung “Take my shoes off and throw them in the lake and I’ll be two steps on the water” I threw the shoes out of the video frame.

There was the thick heavy faux leather jacket I bought in Canberra the first time I saw my idol Sophie B. Hawkins tour Australia. It was so cold that I put it on as soon as I got out of the shop. When I returned to my friend’s accommodation on the university campus and she saw I was wearing it with the tags still on it, she wondered if I had actually paid for it. (I had.) And there was another jacket, this one real leather, ridiculously expensive, but somehow I knew I had to have it. I was amazed that it fit to be honest. And you loved that jacket, and I loved you, and – unfortunately – you did not love me. And it’s strange how just looking at that article of clothing can bring all that back in a moment.

So… clothing is still a strange thing. Even now.

I’m a little embarassed to admit the reason. I just don’t think the world needs or wants another podcast from John Lacey. Infact I hear so little about my other podcast that I begin to wonder if anybody needs, wants or enjoys it either. And in some ways this shouldn’t matter, but it does… I should believe in my ideas enough to give them the expression they deserve but no of course I’m much too needy for that.

I don’t want to get all existential. But I do feel doomed. I feel superfluorous. I don’t think I’ll ever be able to have any of the things I want. I can’t seem to get excited about having any of the things other people and society at large seems to think I should want and have.

Even as I type I’m searching the iTunes podcast directory for the word “Encouragement” and you get the kinds of results one would expect too. Lots of fast talking people espousing excited cliches… Meh. [Actually as an aside the thing that really strikes me about the iTunes podcast directory is that regardless of what term you put into their search facility you will always get at least half a dozen Christianity themed podcasts. For any term whatsoever. The mind boggles...]

At any rate I’m going to go for a walk and listen to my iPod and hopefully something good will come of that.

I decided recently that I would post four blog posts a week at JohnLacey.com. The thing about that this week is that I didn’t want to do it. I felt such amazing resistance to doing it. I couldn’t think of anything I didn’t want to do more than that. But here’s the really curious thing – the blog posts were all but done. I added a line to each of the two posts remaining, added some tags and hit the publish button and they were done. And I think they were great blog entries. I can’t for the life of me understand why I procrastinated over doing them for four days. It makes no sense.

Today I made a video and it was amazing – the process of creating it, I mean. I felt really good while I was creating it. I got caught up in the process and lost all track of time. It was a lovely sensation. But once it was finished and uploaded, I sat around anxiously, reluctant to start anything else. I had produced this thing and it seemed I was waiting for some feedback. I wasn’t taking a break or resting on my laurels, I was actively protesting against the part of me that wanted to create something more, something else. And the point I would like to make here is that it feels horrible because you feel torn. There is a part of you that wants to make something else but it is fighting with another part of you that is scared, and you’re very conscious of this inner conflict and it fuels its own extra source of anxiety.

It seems as though I spend half my time creating stuff and half my time resisting creating things, feeling awful about not creating things. I think it has finally dawned on me what it means when writers talking about needing to write every day. I think I finally understand the benefits of having a new project lined up before you finish your existing one. It is just too easy to get bogged down in rationalising things when you’re not creating things, it just becomes so easy to get lost in all those unarticulated fears and existential angst.

And when you’re really in the flow of creating something that means something to you, it’s truly magical. Because when it happens you really have to take a deep breath and think, “I put this off for four days? What the hell was I thinking? THIS is amazing!”

The trick of course is taking all these understandings and boiling them down into a set of practices, really working them into my life so that I follow up on things even when I don’t feel like it. That’s the next step, I suppose.

I’m not talking about big fights or burning bridges either. It can be such a gradual thing that you might not even notice it. You’re both growing as individuals, and, perhaps, you’re also growing apart.

I’ve had this gnawing feeling for some time about one person in particular that I don’t really understand them, that I can’t get excited about what they’re excited about – and I sort of suspect the reverse is also probably true. I can go back to the beginning of the friendship and identify one thing we had in common, and I wonder is that the thread everything hinges upon?

I see some of their interactions with other people, what we might call their ‘actual’ friends. Those people get it! They really do understand. They’re as excited as the individual in question and that excitement nudges each of them on to bigger and better things. All the while I’m sitting on the sidelines wondering what happened, and why it happened.

I feel a certain amount of wistfulness about this. But I’m not sure what I can do about it. The older I get – and man, I feel old – the more I realise it is better to accept things as they are, rather than to hold on to visions of how you wish they were. There’s integrity in accepting truth. Is this settling? Perhaps…

I studied Robert Frost in high school English. ‘The Road Not Taken’ is always cited as an inspirational poem about doing something unique, about being an individual. On some level that might be true. But you have to remember that the poem is called ‘The Road Not Taken’ not ‘I Took The Road Nobody Goes On; I’m So Badass.’ For me there is something so wistful about this poem. It’s about regret. It’s about acknowledging that you can’t do it all and have it all, that you have to make decisions and by definition those decisions choose certain things to the exclusion of others.

I shall be telling this with a sigh
Somewhere ages and ages hence:
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I—
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference.

We ignore the sigh and go straight to ‘the difference.’ We read ‘the difference’ as ‘a vast improvement.’ But I don’t think that’s what Frost is getting at. It’s just different. He hasn’t traveled on that other road, he’ll never be in a position to compare and contrast them and decide which is better. And there will always be a part of him left wondering…

Essentially this man had lost his one chance at true love. Perhaps he didn’t realise that’s what it was in the moment that it happened, but in the hindsight of old age it seemed manifestly obvious. His lover was his only experience of love. Removed from his parents as a child and brought up by others, strangers, in a clinical unaffectionate way, he maintained he’d never been taught how to love another person or indeed himself.

I find it interesting that so many fishing analogies lend themselves to the language with which we address ideas relating to romantic love. We talk in terms of “the one that got away” (perhaps exaggerating the traits of the lover in the same way we might the traits of the fish), while reassuring ourselves that there are “plenty of fish in the sea.” And I think in some ways that is true – there are certainly a lot of people in the world. But that metaphor doesn’t really speak to the quality of the ‘fish’ and I wonder on some level if you can have many encounters with other people without finding a sincere connection.

And if that is true… what do we take from it? I know people who look upon dating as just another process. They might liken it to getting a job. You cast your net wide (erm, more fishing?) and see what happens. There’s a part of me that really thinks this is a terrible, deeply cynical idea, but other people swear by it. To them it’s a practical reality. And frankly how do you meet anyone without putting yourself out there in social situations?

I’m sure my thinking has been conditioned by a slew of romantic ballads, movies and television shows. Those romances that seem to surpass everything. It doesn’t seem to matter that those ballads are often sung by singers whose personal life is one grandiose (and highly publicised) trainwreck after another. It doesn’t seem to matter that the writers of many of those ballads were motivated more by their potential royalty cheque than adoration for any existing human being. Romeo and Juliet might be the greatest love story ever told for no better reason than the romance didn’t last long enough to meet the inevitable conflicts that occur in any relationship.