Fixed. Immutable. There are certain things that just are. Your eyes are a certain colour. My eyes are brown. They just are. I know some people’s eyes change colour in different lighting situations, mine do not. They are fixed, I suppose. Perhaps you don’t like my eye colour. There’s not a great deal I can do about it. Perhaps I could wear cosmetic contacts. But that doesn’t change the fact that my eyes are brown.

In addition to ‘fixed’ and ‘immutable’ I might also use the term ‘inescapable.’ No amount of wishing for different coloured eyes will help. No chants, no prayers, no invoking of The Secret (TM) will do it. So I guess I am somewhat resigned to the fact that I have brown eyes.

I rather like my eyes, but perhaps you do not. Perhaps, for you, it’s what Dr. Phil might call “a deal breaker.”

Perhaps in an effort to please you I do get cosmetic contact lenses. But it’s not really a change so much as diversion, a special effect… it has no substance, no power.

Now, perhaps, is the time to chime in with the usual spiel about having people ‘like you for who you are’ and mutterings regarding unconditional love. Perhaps for reasons that are hard to justify I want desperately to make you happy, to make you proud, to somehow garner your love, your affection and perhaps even your respect. Perhaps I can’t change myself, perhaps I can’t be the person I suspect you really want, but I’ll bend and distort and use mood lighting to at least give the illusion.

It feels awful, actually. It feels like hell. It makes me profoundly unhappy. But few things terrify me as much as the prospect of this particular veil being lifted. I don’t think I’ll survive what might come out of it. The conflict, the rejection. So here I am in a kind of holding cell, a personal purgatory. I can’t be who you want and I cannot be myself. I fail on all accounts. I don’t think I can make this right, I don’t think I can make this work.

And I am so angry that I find myself in this position. I am so resentful that this is even an issue at all. It just seems so unfair and I look towards people whose support and love I need and feel as though I can’t even begin to trust them. I don’t think anybody should have to go through this. I don’t understand why I should have to go through it. And like I’ve said, I am so angry. But what to do with that anger, where to direct it? At some deity for creating me this way? At the people around me? Somehow it doesn’t feel right to be so angry, so I swallow hard. Besides it’s not their fault I’m not what they wanted. I should be something else. Something better. Something much more impressive. In short, someone else.

I feel so helpless. I feel so overwhelmed. I don’t know what to do, I don’t know what I can do. And I’m hurting…

I’ve been wanting to start a new podcast for some time now. Infact the thing that was hanging me up the most was the technological aspects – or at least that’s what I thought. I’ve since discovered a way of doing what I need to do to make it happen. They would be relatively short episodes. I could probably have one created, edited and uploaded in the space of 15 or 20 minutes. So the question is if I know how to do it, if I have the technology to pull it all together, why haven’t I?

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 often wonder what people’s concept of me is… on the basis of what I post online. I have different mediums, different oulets for different things. It isn’t usually that I’m making deliberate decisions about showing some things and not showing others (except where it seems to make sense thematically, combining all the YouTube related stuff, for example).

This is really quite a long winded way of telling you (the readers of this particular blog) that it has been too long between posts. And I want to go into some detail as to why… Two things have preoccupied my time lately.

Firstly, I’ve been depressed. Much more depressed than I have been in a very long time. It feels like I try to play every game that life throws at me and there’s no hope in hell of winning at any of them. (They are clearly rigged!) My existential angst found a concrete place to land within my psyche. I actually don’t want to write about that much. I want to talk about that, and hopefully an opportunity will present itself sooner or later.

But then there’s been the other woman. I call this activity that because I’ve been kind of secretive about it and well she’s been taking up all my time lately. I decided I wanted to explore the visual arts. Infact I decided this many years ago but stalled. And then last year I said I wanted to paint… but I never did. I bought some sketching pencils, and then some watercolour pencils and some paintbrushes. Eventually I bought some acrylic paints and canvases and accessories. But then I had to work up the nerve to cover those canvases with paint. It was kind of intimidating, and I’m still fumbling my way around with it. I get frustrated at times that I can’t represent on the canvas what I want to represent. And it’s a whole other discipline, even compared to drawing. But I’ve really been enjoying the ride. I’ve been pouring over art books from the library, and watching all these tutorial videos on YouTube and elsewhere. It’s been exciting in a way that creating hasn’t been for me in such a long while. I think in some ways there’s a freedom that comes with dabbling in something you have no experience with. You can’t compare and contrast with other efforts, because there aren’t any! You can’t berate yourself and say, “Gah, you wrote something more convincing than that in the 7th grade!”

There is a certain physicality in the act of painting, something that I don’t find in writing. And I don’t feel like I’m restricted by conventions … because I don’t really know what they are and even if I did I don’t really have the technical capacity to follow them that closely anyway.

Anyway that’s all I have to say right now… Just wanted to say ‘hi.’ What have you been up to?

Farewell NaNoWriMo, though I hardly knew ye. I wrote some 7,356 words in the first week and didn’t touch it again for the rest of the month. And not because ‘real life’ came between me and my lofty writing ambitions. This is an excuse a lot of people will cite and I imagine for most of them that is quite true. For me NaNoWriMo set off some horrible internal battle. It was horrendous.

I can write this.
(Sure you can.)
No, really. Just 2000 words a day. It’ll be fine.
(Then what happened on Wednesday, Thursday and Sunday?)
It doesn’t have to be ‘good.’ It just has to ‘be.’
(Then why aren’t you ‘doing’ it?)
Maybe I can’t do this.
(Of course you can’t do this! You were a fool to think you could.)
But random annoying happy 14 year olds are doing this and ‘winning…’
(Ahem. Yes…)
What the fuck is wrong with me?
I’m not sure I like writing. Infact I think I might hate it. Maybe I’m not cut out for this? Maybe I don’t have the right to refer to myself as a ‘writer’ or even an ‘artist.’ Hmmm.

NaNoWriMo was only the tip of a much larger iceberg. I’m not creating anything. For the most part I don’t want to. I’ve come to hate and resent the world. There’s no joy to be had here. It’s all about “harm minimisation.” I read Julia Cameron’s books (The Artist’s Way, Walking In This World) and think, “Wow! This woman gets it.” I find her words soothing and comforting. Unfortunately at times I am so comforted in those moments that I relax and don’t do anything any more. I don’t do the exercises, I don’t do the art, I don’t do ‘the work.’ I don’t even show up. But one of the things she talks about is having a self to express, about being somebody. Cultivating experiences. Filling the artistic well so you have things to draw upon when you address the page, stage or canvas.

I think I need to do that more. Actually get out and do things, experience some sort of life, develop a self worth expressing. I see myself too much from other people’s vantage points. I need to say what I want more. I need to be more honest with people. I need to dream more and do more. But I hate dreaming. Dreaming is the first stop towards disappointment. But what is life without dreaming? It’s pretty sucky. Perhaps more sucky than this dreaming and failing. I certainly don’t feel like I have much to lose. So, wonderful. Let’s keep the expectations low. That will help. Probably.

I am traveling interstate over New Years Eve. There’s this other world waiting for me somewhere else. I don’t know what exactly. Infact I’m quite wary of it. My inner control freak is alive and well, and wants to endure experiences it can manage carefully. And actually it’s quite foolish because there is so much outside of my control. Sometimes you’ve just got to go along for the ride. But I’ve never done that. I micromanage my environment as an adult because I had to micromanage it as a kid. I feel foolish when I take chances and things don’t work out. I feel foolish when I tell someone how much I care about them and their response is unenthusiastic. I tell myself each and everytime that the chance was worth taking and that the action was noble, but I don’t really ‘feel’ it. That’s the theory of it, but the reality of it is much closer to “Well I’m never doing that again.”

I guess all I’m trying to say is that I don’t know very much… and that’s okay, hopefully.

This video is a moment in time and I was frustrated and disillusioned. Who am I kidding? I’m still frustrated and disillusioned, albeit in completely different ways than when I recorded this video. But in any eventuality I offer it “as is.”

But I guess this is as much as personal identity as anything. I’m sickened by who I’ve become. I want to go back to the teenager who knew everything, needed no one and who was bitter and sarcastic and cynical all of the time. I used to follow my own impulses without caring about what anybody thought. I used to relish the opportunity to do something truly oddball, genuinely thinking there was no finer compliment a person could give me than to label as ‘eccentric.’ I used to live for the weekends because they were the only times I could truly be alone and I relished this ‘alone’ time.

Now I’m so needy and pathetic. Now I need people (despite not knowing how to relate to them or how to please them). Now no matter how much I try to be myself and do my own things I’m always wondering how other people will approach the things I do and how they will think about me as a consequence. I’ve never met a social or cultural cue I haven’t tried taking. I have no personal autonomy at all. I am frustrated and emotional and friends dimiss me as ‘crazy’ or in need of therapy or some combination of the two. I feel like an idiot and yes, frankly, my own perceived intelligence is sort of central to my sense of self and my ego. So I withdraw. But I can’t withdraw entirely. Clearly I need some degree of interconnectedness. But I am feeling dismissed and marginalised by a lot of people, even people who I thought cared for and about me. And that is maddening…

I don’t normally do this here. But here goes nothing…

• I went to Brisbane over the weekend for the Brisbane Writer’s Festival, Brisbane Twestival, Riverfire and just to meet up with friends generally. Overall it was lovely. Infact it was such a vast improvement on my daily life here in Nowra that I am sad and lonely and emo to be back.
• One of the more surreal moments of the Brisbane trip though was being interrogated by a journalist at Twestival. In fairness, he told me that he would just keep asking questions until I started asking him some or told him to ‘fuck off.’ But, yes, anyway, I was telling him about the websites I run… And the part that seemed really comical to me was when he insisted that I must just be being modest. This really made me laugh. Because, to me, nobody cares about any of this crap I do. I don’t know what compells me to do it. Frankly some days even I don’t care and that’s why they don’t get updated. It just seemed funny to me that people want to assume I’m so much more interesting and functional than I am.
• I am looking for some sort of employment. The local options seem really narrow (sadly I’m not a nurse, mehanic, baker, or psychologist) and my qualifications are a bit eclectic. The part where I really fall down here though is that I don’t network. I don’t participate very much in this town. I barely know anybody. I guess I need to do that more. But I’m also going to see if I can do some TAFE short courses in a few things to add to my repetoire. (Tourism is a big thing in this area and it is also where most of my experience exists, I guess.)
• Brisbane was quite liberating, because I could be myself. The flipside of this, however, was that when I got home I felt more constricted than ever. I was prone to bouts of great anxiety and depression. Two of my dearest friends in the world both suggested I talk to someone and I am pretty sure I have alienated both of them by telling them in no uncertain terms that this is something I do not intend to do. And yet, they’re probably right. The more I go through my life the more I realise the things that tear me up inside are the things that are left unsaid. I just don’t want to say them because I fear impending doom… and even that feels slightly disingenuous to my family. It is rooted in a childhood fear where the safest action was always to bite one’s tongue and hope something would change, organically, with the passing of time. But I guess it won’t change by itself. I guess I need to change it. I’m not a kid anymore.
• Somebody who broke my heart into a million pieces is having a birthday shortly. Ironically it is the day after Talk Like A Pirate Day – how could I forget that combination? I was thinking about making a video for them. But I probably shouldn’t. I mean I could easily upload that song I wrote about them breaking my heart, on their birthday… But, as much as I am hurting, I don’t think I want to become that person, you know?
• I don’t know what it is about my brain, that it is somehow hardwired to dwell on the depressing… Some really amazing things happened over the weekend. And while I was there I was frequently sporting a big demented smitten grin, and for the first time in a very long time there was a bounce in my step. And it was wonderful. And if I’m being really very honest with you I am absolutely terrified that I’m going to do something to fuck it up. And that would be the greatest travesty of all. But I need to just relax and be less neurotic, and things will work out. Probably. I have to believe that. That is what I’m working with now.

I bought this book, written by Barbara Sher, I Could Do Anything If Only I Knew What It Was. My life is a bit of a trainwreck. You know it, I know it. I checked out of my life when it refused to play nicely with me. Now I sit on the sidelines of things and talk about lofty ambitions I have that I never really get around to fulfilling.

I started reading it today. The book is about resistance, about resisting things. Things you want to do. In a comical absurdist fashion I found myself resisting my desire to read the book. I set aside today to do nothing but read it. I read about three or four chapters, but I was distracted throughout. I would check Twitter constantly. I would be distracted by the songs in my headphones. I stopped at one point to ‘take a break’ to play a computer game and listen to a podcast and somehow never returned to the book…

The problem I guess is even reading it while distracting myself, I started realising things about myself. I could feel my world shifting. And yes it felt scary. So I went and played that computer game that I’ve finished a thousand times before because I know how to do that. When everything else in my life is turning to crap I still feel like I can exercise some control over that game.

I feel uncomfortable when I see happy people, because I am not happy and I don’t believe I can be happy. But when I express how I feel, people jump in with trite inspirational cliches and assurances that everything will be fine. This grates on me. I find it genuinely vexing. And I guess it’s human nature to want to ‘fix’ things and people. But sometimes I just want someone to acknowledge my pain.

And… frankly, that is the word that keeps coming up for me. Acknowledge. Acknowledgment. I want to be ackowledged, but I also need to acknowledge things myself. It was disappointing when that person didn’t reciprocate my affections for them. But what was truly heart breaking was not being able to be disappointed, not being able to be sad because I wasn’t supposed to have those romantic feelings for that person in the first place. So you pretend to be fine, you pretend to be functional. You wake up in the morning and get ready and go to work and go through all the motions. Each moment felt like dying, but you had to pour all your energy into maintaining the facade. I didn’t ‘snap.’ I just stopped pretending. But I also took it very personally. I said, “I’m done.” And I was. With everything.

But I can’t live there.

All the things I try to tell myself to help myself function feel empty and pointless. I have these moments when I realise I’ll never know why I wasn’t good enough for that person. I used to theorise endlessly until I couldn’t stand to be terrorised by own mind any further. You let it go for a while, but it’s always there. It will always be there, unresolved forever.

In a podcast, Barbara says:

Everybody feels guilty about not being loved. And I don’t think we can tolerate the fact that it probably wasn’t us, it was them. Because then in our hearts we feel there’s no way to change that. If it was us, maybe someday we’ll stop being bad and then everyone will love us.

Expressions like ‘be yourself’ and ‘the real me’ have bounced around in conversations for the last few weeks. Increasingly I am getting clarity on the ‘real me’ and I think I should go as myself because the alternative requires much too much energy. But another part of me thinks that’s such poor marketing. Yes, go as yourself. The neurotic messy awkward guy from a regional town in the middle of nowhere. People will eat that up. And I know so much of this stems from that feeling of not being ‘enough,’ of not fulfilling the roles that are expected of me. I don’t know which elements of my makeup seemed so offensive to all the people who didn’t want anything to do with me, so might as well just try to reign everything in and see how we go.

I started writing a memoir about all this actually. The whole crux of it is basically ‘I must be really horrible.’ But there’s no other clarity than the fear itself. There’s no clarity on what specifically is so abhorrent or unpalatable about myself that I should change it. So you just go around feeling hopeless and broken and eager to change anything, everything, about yourself but not being able to. There’s no self-worth there. You don’t even feel bad when people treat you poorly. I mean, why wouldn’t they? You’re awful, remember?

It’s madness, all of it. Clearly.

But what to do with it?

How to heal a broken heart. But before we get to that, how to preface this blog entry? I’m not devastated. I’m not particularly depressed. There’s just this imprint on the back of my psyche. A lot of time has passed and I am a lot better. So, with an eye toward the future, I wanted to do something symbolic to take these residual feelings and relegate them to the past forever. Here are some ideas from various sources on how that might be achieved.

Vices: Sex, alcohol, (junk) food.

Distraction. [See also: Vices.]

Religious/Metaphysical Practices: Prayer, voodoo, chants, meditation, affirmations.

Creative expression: Songwriting, writing in general, drawing, painting, video.

In the EPK for Boys For Pele, Tori Amos talks about Caught A Lite Sneeze:

Caught A Lite Sneeze specifically has nuns on it. More than nuns. Nuns invoking this myth of the female God energy. It’s really about a relationship and she’s kinda given herself away so she’s trying to get pieces back anyway she can. I mean, whoever works at that point. And if it’s Inanna or whoever. And if it works calling her in the church to evoke a little ass then you go for it.

This sentiment resonates with me because I feel like I gave pieces of myself away, pieces of my identity and certainly my confidence. I made a lot of judgments about my self-worth as a result of not having those feelings reciprocated.

Creative Consumption: Books, music, movies, poetry.

Jeff Buckley’s Grace receives notable mention here.

One of my favourites came courtesy of Twitter user @ambrosemrosie:

I like to read a book. I say to myself, ‘by the time I finish this book, it won’t hurt anymore’. And then it doesn’t!

Treating yourself kindly. Loving yourself. Looking after yourself. Reaffirming your own value.

Time. Distance. Perspective. Philosophy. Humour.

Making room for new things, new people and new feelings. Building towards a future worth having. Living life.

Know any others?

Last night I resisted the urge to write in this blog. I am acutely aware that anyone I encounter in any context can throw ‘John Lacey’ into a search engine, discover this blog and click on the ‘depression’ tag (currently third most frequently used) and discover how crazy I am. But my whole life has been categorised by wearing my heart out on my sleeve and I can’t think of any reason, today, compelling enough to make me stop.

[ad#adsense250]I’ve been really unhappy this last week. It started as a strange blob of indiscriminate feeling, but over time (and with considerable counselling from my friend Mike) the root of these feelings stood out in strong bas relief. A desire for parental love and support and an expectation that I would probably have neither if they knew who I ‘really was.’ But even more than that a feeling that if I didn’t have that that I would probably fall apart, go insane, literally die or some similarly dramatic and unpleasant fate. (Trouble In Mind, a song where the singer considers easing their ‘worried mind’ by laying down on train tracks, has been getting a lot of airplay inside my head lately.) So the plan is basically not to do anything that will lead to that scary confrontation. Only I’m not really doing much of anything at all. It is a holding pattern. It doesn’t go anywhere. And the thing I came to realise this morning is that it doesn’t do anything either. And it is false economy anyway. Putting my life and my happiness on hold isn’t making my parents happy, and it sure as hell isn’t making me happy. I need to rejoin the rhythm and flow of a life, of my life. Maybe they’ll understand. Maybe they won’t. I’m not going to pretend I’m not scared, I am, but it is okay to be scared. But I know I haven’t done anything wrong and that I don’t deserve to feel like this. “My life is waiting for me – can’t you see?!” as Sophie B. Hawkins yelled on Mr. Tugboat Hello. Maybe I’ll have their love and support. Maybe I won’t. But I’m not going to fall apart, I’m not going to die, and I am not going to start visiting train stations to live out Blues lyrics. I’m going to love and support myself. Completely novel, I know. And I’m going to rejoin my life. And frankly I don’t think my life is here, in this place, any more anyway. I need a place of my own, away from here. I need freedom and independence and perspective.

It’s going to be okay. One way or another.

Every weekend I go to a particular cafe, order a coffee, and sit there and watch people walk through the mall. I usually take a book to read or a notebook to scribble in. I go to that cafe not because the coffee is good (it isn’t) but simply because I can linger there for a few hours at a time without really getting in anybody’s way. It is funny too, I spend so much time telling myself I go there “for the atmosphere” but, actually, I feel painfully self-conscious in there. I don’t really fit in here. I don’t really fit in anywhere, particularly. And I wish that didn’t bother me. I wish I could sit at the front of this cafe and not look and feel like the proverbial deer in headlights, shooting apologetic looks to passers-by.

I am lonely. I know it, you know it, the staff at the cafe know it. I just don’t know what to do about it. I am quite pathetic. And it’s not a good place to start from. I just come off as needy and tragic. Anyone who is vaguely nice to me I latch onto and follow them home like a lost puppy looking for love.

I don’t know what I’m doing in any area of my life. I wanted a more meaningful career but I have no idea how to go about that. I feel talented, but what does it mean if nobody knows about my talents? I just need to cultivate some fucking self-esteem already. But again, where, how?! How the fuck is that achieved?! Because I am at my wit’s end.