you're gonna spend the rest of you nights with the light on
I want to be an artist. I want to live for my art, suffer, weep, and die for my art. I want to sleep in a van, or a little hole in the wall, and wear hand me down clothes and spend my last cent on ramen noodles and eat them dry and crunchy. I want to...but i'm scared. hah. And that last sentence sort of sums up how I feel about EVERYTHING in my life. I'm just so scared that I won't be ok, or that I'll mess something up irrevocably -- either for myself or someone else. I'm scared to let go, lose control, give in to impulses. I'm so flipping afraid of change, and afraid to make mistakes. I don't know how to just BE without worrying about consequences. Maybe I'm too practical to be a starving artist, and maybe, in the end, that's good. I don't think I'd make a good waif. But I'm not sure that I'll ever really get INSIDE myself or understand my own mind until I break some boundaries and do some things really wrong. Not just like, burning dinner wrong. But I don't want to hurt anyone, either, and I'm afraid I'll end up doing that. There's so many expectations...sometimes I don't know which are the things I expect of myself, and which are the things other people want from me.
It's strange that now, at 22, I'm only just finding out things about myself that make me who I am, and loving myself for them. I never thought of myself as a 'sheep' or a nameless face in my crowd of friends, but i'm realizing more and more that when I stayed with them, I just kept being exactly what they wanted me to be. I had impulses in other directions, but no one appreciated those things...I didn't get a big enough reaction, or I got a negative one. So I decided not to pursue them. I'm an attention-whore, but I covered disappointment well, for the most part, and even hid it from myself. I pretended like I didn't care that no one thought what I said was cool, or thought I was interesting for liking something different. I stifled myself, and I all but choked off my creativity completely by only allowing myself a very narrow window of thoughts and experiences. I'm ready, now, to expand, but I'm scared of not letting myself, scared that something in me will jump up and run a cord around my throat, and pull me back to 'safe' and 'grounded.' I know I've talked about this before, and I know that I'm getting closer to working up the courage. But i'm still holding myself back, thinking I'm not ready.
I've spent so much time hiding from myself...I'm not sure if I really know who I am. There are things that I just assumed were true, because everyone else assumed them, too. I don't know how true they are, and I'm scared of what it means to my life and to other people's if I try and find out. Blah. This is cryptic and probably making less than no sense. I think I'm done rambling right now. I wonder where I put the power cord for my other computer when I moved...
It's strange that now, at 22, I'm only just finding out things about myself that make me who I am, and loving myself for them. I never thought of myself as a 'sheep' or a nameless face in my crowd of friends, but i'm realizing more and more that when I stayed with them, I just kept being exactly what they wanted me to be. I had impulses in other directions, but no one appreciated those things...I didn't get a big enough reaction, or I got a negative one. So I decided not to pursue them. I'm an attention-whore, but I covered disappointment well, for the most part, and even hid it from myself. I pretended like I didn't care that no one thought what I said was cool, or thought I was interesting for liking something different. I stifled myself, and I all but choked off my creativity completely by only allowing myself a very narrow window of thoughts and experiences. I'm ready, now, to expand, but I'm scared of not letting myself, scared that something in me will jump up and run a cord around my throat, and pull me back to 'safe' and 'grounded.' I know I've talked about this before, and I know that I'm getting closer to working up the courage. But i'm still holding myself back, thinking I'm not ready.
I've spent so much time hiding from myself...I'm not sure if I really know who I am. There are things that I just assumed were true, because everyone else assumed them, too. I don't know how true they are, and I'm scared of what it means to my life and to other people's if I try and find out. Blah. This is cryptic and probably making less than no sense. I think I'm done rambling right now. I wonder where I put the power cord for my other computer when I moved...