Tom Petty once said that, “the waiting is the hardest part.” And don’t I know it. It seems that’s all I’ve been doing for a while now. And I guess in certain ways, you’ve been doing a lot of waiting too. You’ve been waiting for me to post my next poem or my next essay. Sorry to say, I haven’t really felt up for the task. I still don’t really feel up for it if I’m being honest, even though I’m writing this now. Unfortunately, it seems like I’ve just run out of words to say. I’ll get into all of that later, but first let’s start with a flashback—one that we’ve visited before. 

Let’s rewind to spring/summer 2023, when I was feeling like I was on top of the world. My confidence was through the roof. I was making a lot of tangible progress in my writing journey, improving day by day. Back then, I had a number of valued critique partners that I could bounce ideas off of. Reading their work, getting their feedback, and interacting with them helped keep me motivated and hungry to perfect my craft. I was able to keep my head down and chug along on my manuscript. Posting poetry and other writing content on the regular. I was setting goals for myself and reaching them. Everything was laid out in front of me, and I felt like I was getting closer to where I needed to go. The gap between my skill level as a writer, and where I needed to be was getting narrower. And as that happened, my confidence continued to grow. Things were finally looking up for me, after a decade of misery, followed by another half decade of turbulence.

If you’ve been following along for a while, you probably know my story by now. Depression and anxiety have been lifelong struggles of mine. I’ve made a lot of progress over the years, but it’s something that I believe will stick with me until the end of time. Even if I’m feeling good in the moment, it’s still a constant battle trying to banish the darker thoughts from my mind. If you’ve never struggled with it before, it’s hard for you to fully grasp how difficult it is (especially for people like us) to stay focused on the positive. It’s so easy to fall back into old ways and habits. Giving up almost always feels like the easier option. It’s obviously not the better option, but we don’t always do what’s best for ourselves. If we always did what was best, we’d all be thriving. And adversity, hardship, and mental illness (amongst other things) would cease to exist. But alas.

When I first started this blog, it was a bit of an experiment. I had meant to use it as a way to practice how to write, solely for my own benefit. It wasn’t supposed to be anything serious, and so eventually I forgot about it for a number of years. For the first six years of its existence, I used this page whenever I had creative inspiration, which was few and far between. All that changed when I decided to commit to my writing. Like many things, that commitment came about due to some hardships I had experienced in both my personal and professional lives. I don’t really wanna get into it too much in this post, otherwise we’d be here for a while. Long story short, I was looking for satisfaction and fulfillment in my life, but was feeling rather lost. My therapist encouraged me to find a hobby. 

And the obvious option was going back to something I had enjoyed doing as a youth: writing stories. As I’ve said many times before, I had the premise for a novel swirling around in my head for years, but up until 2020, I was always making excuses for why I didn’t write it, starting with, “I don’t know how.” Uhh, yeah. No shit… No one knows how to do anything until they actually try it out. You either learn from experience, you teach yourself, and/or you ask for help/advice/guidance. And above all, you practice. That’s the only way you get better at anything. In order to get better at writing, I needed to actually write. It was time to stop talking about wanting to write a book, and actually sit down and start writing a book. Obviously I knew that it would take time, so it would be months if not years before I had anything to show the world. That’s how this here blog found a new identity. 

It was a way to showcase what I’ve been working on, how much I’m improving, and what matters to me the most. It became clear pretty early on that the thing that mattered most to me was mental health, both mine and yours. This platform is as much a therapeutic exercise for myself as it is an attempt at helping people who are going through what I’ve gone through. That being said, I’ve had my fair share of ups & downs. I’ve had good times and bad times. Good moments and bad moments. The rollercoaster that makes up my psychological state has been an interesting journey, to say the least. Some people might ask you if you ever get tired of it. But how can you, if it’s such an important part of your life? You can’t have the good without the bad. Healing without the pain. Comfort without the anguish. All of this makes you who you are. 

That being said, this blog goes as I go. The emotions run high when I’m on an upturn, and they run low when I’m on a downturn. I’m sure you can probably guess which stage I’m at right now. Obviously, I wish things had played out differently. But things won’t always go your way, so it’s important to be adaptable to what life throws at you. Unfortunately for me, 2024 seemed like a never-ending run of disappointments. And I had a hard time accepting that, and didn’t really know how to adjust. The things I had done before that helped keep me focused were no longer working, so I needed to try some new things. To my chagrin, the things that I tried did not end up working. None of them. Hindsight being what it is, I’m maybe not as surprised as I was before that things didn’t work out.

The truth is, I hadn’t been setting the right goals. Not to say that they were inherently wrong or bad things to chase, but they were not realistic or attainable in the short-term. I’m a big believer in tiered goal setting—you set short-term, medium-term, and long-term goals; and as you check off the boxes you set and re-set new goals to keep your ambition in constant progress. Normally, the long-term goal does not change—it’s the answer to the infamous question, “where do you see yourself in ______ years.” While it’s the thing you’re ultimately working towards, it’s so far in the future that it’s not the thing you focus on, so thus should remain in the back of your mind. What’s at the forefront are tangible steps to get you closer to that goal. That being said, the shorter goals should always be within reach. Only a few baby steps away. Therefore it’s important that you try to refrain from setting the bar too high (or moving it prematurely).

If only I had listened to my own advice. At some point between then and now I lost sight of all this. Now, I’ve always been a bit of a dreamer. When I was young, I would fantasize about things that weren’t likely to happen. And sometimes I had a hard time distinguishing between fact and fiction. We can probably chalk it up to me having an active imagination, not being the most rational psychologically, and not being the most sociable kid. Regardless, growing up I had a tendency to dream big, but never took the proper steps to make these dreams a reality. I remember in seventh grade one of the classrooms had a banner that said, “shoot for the moon. Even if you miss, you’ll still land among the stars.” Good words to live by, but I must’ve applied them to my life incorrectly, because I worked hard in some areas but not in others. Trying to accomplish the difficult before I’d learned the basics. Picking and choosing when I would apply this lesson and when I wouldn’t—a serious error in judgment that wouldn’t become evident until far later. I was too hyper-focused on the things I cared about; and did not pay enough attention to some of the things that mattered, such as my schoolwork, making and (more importantly) keeping friends, becoming a better version of myself, etc.

That hyper-focus did not serve me well in the long run, and has left me with a number of regrets that I still have regarding my high school years (and the near decade that followed). Of course, there’s nothing I can do to change any of that—the past is the past—but I can’t help but think about some things that I did or didn’t do that still don’t sit right with me. All of that stemmed from lacking self-awareness. For a long time I was lost in my own world, unaware of or ignorant of the consequences of my actions. This lack of self-awareness led me down a line of irrational or misguided thinking that bordered on delusion, which lasted until I started going to therapy. As a result, I didn’t learn how to set appropriate goals, I didn’t have an objective perception of who I was or what I could do, I didn’t know what I wanted with life, and was so results oriented that I didn’t even consider what the process might’ve looked like and would consequently skip steps. All of this was a detriment to me at the end of the day. 

Much of my post-therapy life has felt like playing catch up as a result. At age thirty-four (I’m rounding up here), I’m still trying to find the right balance for certain things. And unfortunately for me, sometimes I end up overcorrecting. Lately it’s felt like my expectations have come closer and closer to realistic, but I still haven’t quite gotten there yet. Which has become a point of frustration for me. It almost feels like I’m inadvertently making the same mistake over and over, but encountering it in different ways. The process might be different, but the result seems to always end up the same. Over time, however, I became good at learning from experience and adapting (or at least I thought I did). So you have no idea how much it pains me to see myself repeating the same mistakes. The worst part is that I never seem to recognize the repetition until after the fact. I learned all of that the hard way, which isn’t always a bad thing, but I’m getting quite tired of it.

The nagging thought in my mind has been, “will this finally be the time that I set a realistic goal?” Which isn’t a healthy mindset, to say the least, as it diminishes my self-worth right away. It’s like I’m telling myself, “you really think this will work? Yeah right.” Not helpful in the slightest, but I can’t help myself sometimes. This is what people mean by, “I’m my own worst critic.” Sometimes we’re too hard on ourselves, not showing ourselves enough leniency or grace. Of course, there’s also the other side of the coin—some people aren’t tough enough on themselves. Like all things in life, it’s all about finding the right balance. I think it’s safe to say that throughout 2024 and beyond I struggled to find that balance. The tough year opened the way for this pervasive train of thought to get a foothold. It started out with disappointment due to something that didn’t quite play out the way I had hoped. Which grew into an inkling of doubt. Then started tainting my mindset, and eventually resulted in me losing confidence. 

Which was something I couldn’t afford to do. The meter ticked away incrementally at first, decreasing in such small amounts that I didn’t even notice it for a while. By the time I did notice, much of my confidence had already eroded, and would continue to do so with each subsequent setback or disappointment. This led me down a dark path that I had previously vowed never to go down again. But as the saying goes, “never say never.” It’s become clear to me now that depression and anxiety aren’t things that you just get over and move past. It’s a daily struggle trying to drown out the voices, and to face your demons. It’s not a one-time or a two-time thing, it’s an everyday, for your entire life thing. Which is a bit of a sobering thought. But it doesn’t mean that you can’t overcome your mental illness(es). You have to work through it and with it. You can triumph over it and control it. But you need to fight it every single day.

That’s another thing that I lost sight of. Naively, I thought I had beaten it for good, that I had won the war rather than merely the battle, and let down my guard as a result. That proved to be a big mistake. It allowed for the dark thoughts that had once clouded my mind to creep back in. At first, I didn’t realize the voices for what they were, as they came in disguised as confidence. But this “confidence” bordered on arrogance—I thought I was invincible, that my mental issues would never get the best of me again. I couldn’t have been more wrong, and boy did I find that out the hard way. I have enough self-awareness to admit that I’d allowed my ego to become inflated and I had started puffing out my chest a little bit. I should’ve known better, as that’s never served me well before in the past. It certainly didn’t serve me well this time around either. 

Regardless, that led to me looking too far ahead, and I think that’s what caused me to move the goalposts farther and farther away from realism. I’d promised myself that I wouldn’t return to old ways—I wasn’t going to wallow in self-pity anymore, wasn’t going to be so pessimistic and self-deprecatory that I couldn’t see all the good I was capable of. I successfully avoided that, but I went too far the other way. I built myself up precariously. Rather than letting my confidence build up naturally through experience and ability alone, I supplemented it with bravado. I became too overly optimistic, too rigid in my idealism, which only set me up for more failure and disappointment. By pushing my goals farther away from me, the gap eventually became too wide for me to cross. 

So I’ve had to reset and readjust yet again. Which, as I said before, is a normal part of life. But my life of late has felt too much like trial & error. I try something, it doesn’t work, and I have to alter my experiment, rinse & repeat. As you can tell, it’s getting pretty tiresome. It feels like each time I’m getting incrementally closer to achieving a successful outcome, but until that actually happens it doesn’t feel like I’m any closer to where I want to go. And each time things fail to play out the way I had hoped, a small part of me dies. It’s gotten harder and harder for me to pick up the pieces after each subsequent disappointment. I’ve been patient so far, tried to roll with the punches. But I dunno how much more of it I can take. My ego is fragile, and feels like it could shatter at any moment. And so, it seems like all I’m doing is waiting. 

Waiting for my writing career to pick up off the ground. Waiting for someone, anyone to take a chance on me so that I can go back to a day job in the meantime. Waiting for something in my life to go right for the first time in a while. Waiting for a lucky break so that I can get my life back in order. I don’t think I’m asking for much. I’m not asking for a handout. I’m not asking for someone to work a miracle on me or to come rescue me. I’m not asking for someone to live my life for me. I’m not looking for the easy way out. I’m not looking for a substitute for hard work. I’m not wanting or expecting everything to go my way. Lord knows that life is just one big, windy, rollercoastery adventure with many twists and turns. I get that and I accept it. But just once, just once could something please swing my way? Even the smallest of things to help me restore my faith. 

The waiting. The waiting is what kills me. I already spent more than enough time doing that in my youth. And it didn’t do shit for me. I lacked self-confidence and mental fortitude back then. So much so that I believed that I had to play the cards I was dealt and there was nothing I could do to change them. In the decade plus since, I’ve learned how wrong I was to believe that. If you want more from life, if you want to change your circumstances, if you want to be better, you need to do something about it. Sitting there moping and crying and complaining won’t change anything. If you want change in your life you have to be proactive about it. You have to set the right goals and seek it out. If you work hard enough you will get to where you want to go. 

I still want to believe that, but it’s hard. I know that waiting around for the world to change ain’t it. I know that the drive needs to come from within. I know that if I want things to change I need to put in my best effort. But what if my best effort doesn’t seem to be good enough? What if try as I may, things just don’t work out? I’ve tried and I’ve adjusted, I’ve tried and I’ve adjusted, and I don’t feel any closer to where I wanna be. It almost feels like there’s an invisible force working against me. Every time I try to dust my shoulders off and pick myself up, something kicks me right back down. It’s getting old. I’m tired of this shit… So what next? I wish I knew.