Wallflower Journey

Recently, I've been learning all about enneagrams. The enneagram is basically a personality assessment that helps determine personality type, strengths, weaknesses, and how to become the best version of ones' self through self-reflection, self-care, and improvement.  If there's one thing I've heard my whole damn life, it's that I'm independent and yet somehow also really needy. This juxtaposition of two extremes has made some question my mental health. While I'm not saying that I am guaranteed mentally healthy (undiagnosed depression and anxiety?), I'm mostly referring to the fact that my personality type is seen as one that does tend to deal in extremes emotionally. Learning about my personality type is the first time that I've felt truly understood, honestly. The following is a description I found on enneagramworldwide.com:       " As feeling types, Fours have an intense emotional life, which can lead to big ups and downs. They altern

   Tonight, while I should have been sleeping, I watched a movie called Beautiful Boy. It chronicles a father and son's journey through the son's meth addiction, recovery, relapse. At the end of the movie, the son is alive by some miracle and it turns out the movie is based on a true story. The real Nic is sober 8 years, taking it day by day. I found myself crying at the end of the film, not because i can relate to that particular addiction,or even out of empathy, but because I realized that I'm an addict, too. I'm addicted to unworthiness. I'm lucky in a lot of ways. I hope that if anyone reads this they won't think I'm equating the severity of drug addiction to my current circumstance. That is to say, I understand how serious that drug addiction is. I guess for me, I see unworthiness as a different sort of serious issue. It can seep through into the soul. I don't know how this all started. I can't remember a time when I didn't feel this

I would like to preface this post with a separate thought entirely. I don't feel like myself at all when I don't write. I feel like everything becomes so jumbled in my head; all the thoughts clamoring for attention waiting to be typed out. It's kind of exhausting in a way. I have too many thoughts and I can't sort it all out. Eventually, I have to fight through this to get somewhere. I can't just sit with all of it inside my brain anymore. This post is that: trying to sort through a years' worth of jumbled-ness. Try and follow along if you can, I'm not even sure I'll be able to. Something that has been weighing on me lately is the sense that everyone I associate myself with is just barely scratching the surface of knowing me. All of the social media and technology creates a false sense of connectedness in a lonely reality. Too often I see expressions of sadness and depression on social media, and I don't reach out. I keep scrolling to see someon

Here's what modern dating is like to me. So you join this site that has an app that lets you know that someone looked at a picture of your body and thought it was decent enough, and they read the half-truths on your profile and thought "I could put up with that, probably..." Doesn't that sound great? All the while knowing that it will probably last one to two dates before one of you lets your crazy show and you have to start the whole vicious cycle over again. It's no wonder most people are just content with the choice to date within their immediate friend pool or a coworker, or just to stay single and hope somehow their soulmate stumbles past them one day on the street. Not that these aren't all valid options, but these days I feel like so much of a person's true character is hidden behind a facade of "fun-loving, happy go-lucky guy" or "down to earth, totally willing to roll with the punches girl". Why do we downplay our strengths an

Before I go too much further on this blogging journey I figured it was a good idea to be perfectly clear about the kind of person I think I am right now. In my last post I wrote about how the only way to change was to start. I fully believe that. However, I myself am guilty more than anyone of not being able to follow through. I think maybe that's why it was such an important thing to write about. I wanted everyone who reads it to realize that I'm not wanting to be that person anymore. I'm twenty-seven years old now. that means I graduated from high school nine years ago. That's nine years of working and procrastinating and making poor choices and hurting myself and other people. That's nine years of planning to do better and somehow not being able to. Nine years of jobs that didn't really advance my "career". Nine years of failed relationships and friendships. I know that a majority of that is my fault for not being willing to grow up and face facts

A lot has happened in my life recently to get me thinking. Sometimes life changes can be a catalyst in forward motion. The thing about a catalyst is that it only gets you in motion, it doesn't guarantee anything. People say that they want to change something about themselves or their situation every day. The hard part is action. Someone recently brought to my attention that saying you want to change and actually wanting to change are two different things altogether. I've seen it time and time again in the relationships with my friends and loved ones.  The problem is sometimes people think they don't have what it takes to enact any sort of change in their life. They think that they have a desire to be different, to be better, but stay in the same patterns and routines. While I know there can be emotional or mental complications, it seems that the only way to change is to start changing. Small steps must be made every day to trigger a change of mind, of pace, of environment.