I haven’t had one in quite some time, and I wouldn’t say it’s a particularly welcome feeling. I’ve been feeling a bit sick since yesterday. Nothing huge, so I’m hoping it will pass fairly quickly. However, with feeling tired and a bit ill comes the desire to feel cozy, and with that the urge to cuddle. My eyes lids feel heavy and I just want to lay down and feel secure for a bit. Hands, hand holding, and touch are crossing my mind time and time again. 

I feel like I need to be more active in finding someone, but really I wish I lived in a world where things like that could fall into my lap. I wish I had someone in my life that was more forward to pull me out of myself. I’ve never had much of a nurturing character in my life. It’s difficult to balance that feeling of urgency and need, and my utter lack of willpower to do anything. Especially when, if I’m sick, I really shouldn’t be doing anything.

I need a circle of friends too, people closer to my age than the people I work with. That, and history has already born out that attempting to make friends with the people I work with is not the best of ideas.

There’s little of anything good on television today, which leaves me with an idle mind, and thinking too much. Which is never a good thing.

I used to have a pretty good camera. It wasn’t new by any means, fancy, or even special, but it was a good camera. It was a camera my father had acquired around the time my sister and I were born, he had been bitten by the photography bug and bought what was a particularly fancy camera for the time.

It didn’t get around to me until about 16 or 17 years later when I had a photography class in high school. He hadn’t used it in quite a few years, and I needed a camera for class. I held onto it for a few years after that though, because it would have otherwise gone unused and I was enjoying myself.

Around the time I started taking what I thought were some pretty reasonable pictures, he saw what I was achieving and was bitten by the bug again. He took the camera back, and substituted it with a pitiful little digital subcompact. I had gone from a full size 35mm SLR camera with a decent set of interchangeable lenses to a 1.3 megapixel sub-compact digital camera with 16mb of internal storage, no card support, and only digital “zoom”.

That’s when photography sort of died for me. I couldn’t get it to take any good pictures. They were framed right, but the sensor didn’t deal with low light well, it didn’t have any external flash capabilities, and the built in flash sucked pretty hard. There were no manual focus or exposure options. Even in perfect light with a reasonable subject to auto focus on, the sensor was noisy and the jpeg compression massively overdone to support the minimal internal storage.

There was also a sort of legitimacy that comes with carrying around a full size camera. When you have anxiety about how you come across to others, there’s serious power in that. Carrying around an awful camera, well, there was no novelty in it for me. It felt touristy; childish. I had gone from a novice photographer to a child playing with childrens toys. 

I’ve had slightly better digital cameras since then, but it’s always been something designed to be quick and dirty, not a real photography tool. There’s value in those moments, I don’t mean to minimize that, but there’s value to me in being able to meticulously setup a shot how you want and it just never feels quite the same in these little point and shoots. I miss interchangeable lenses, tripods and manual focus and exposure times. I actually miss the inconveniences.

My father never did take any pictures with that camera again after that. It still sits in his closet unused. I’ve asked a few times in the past for another go of it, but he always says he’s going to get back into it at some point. So it sits, collecting dust. 

I’m tired. That’s the closest I can come to a term that defines who I am right now. Not how I feel mind you, it’s deeper than that. I’ve been watching Avatar: The Last Airbender, which always used to make me feel motivated to be and do better, and I just want to go back to bed. I’m lonely, and I haven’t the motivation to do anything but wallow in it. I want to cuddle, but don’t even have the drive for anything more than that right now. I keep coming back to old thoughts that no one could even want that from me, and that having any sort of interest in anyone just makes me a creep because they couldn’t return the feelings. I’m disappointed in myself for falling backwards, and not taking my own advice. I’m disappointed in myself for my lack of frugality lately. I’ve missed quite a few of the support group meetings at this point, and I’ve been shirking practically any responsibility I’m capable of. I’m having difficulty finding the patience I used to have too. My birthday is coming up, and I find myself coming back to thoughts I’ve had about being another year older, having spent another year alone, and the perpetual nature of that state. 

I just want to sleep.

I used to think that I was being objective when I was critical of myself for anything I failed to do perfectly. I thought that the thoughts I was having were constructive, because I didn’t see how someone could progress as a person without finding their failings and working on improving them. I still see merit in the latter, but I recognize that I was being overly critical, and not in a progressive way.

Being objective is about seeing something for what it is, without bias. That does mean seeing the negatives in things, but it also means seeing the positives in things. Only seeing the negatives isn’t helpful to improving something, as it typically leads to shutting down instead of moving forward.

Improving means continuing to do something even when you don’t feel like you’re making progress, because if you don’t continue to do it, you’re not getting the practice you need to further those skills. It’s true that sometimes you have to be patient, and it can be difficult to see any point in continuing when you feel like you’re standing still, but it was important for me to recognize that I wasn’t the best at seeing the progress I made. I didn’t want to recognize my success, so it always felt like I wasn’t making any.

Being objective about who you are, and where you are, instead of simply being some cocky douche is important but it’s also important to realize that only seeing the negatives in things isn’t being objective, and it’s a hindrance to progress.

It’s also important to realize that you can’t jump into something you’ve never done before and be immediately good at it. Whether it’s something like math or science, or something like socializing. The people that are good at it weren’t necessarily born that way, it’s a skill they developed. Some people, like me, had difficulties establishing a skill like that in the first place because of things like moving around a lot, not having a safe and reassuring family to come back to when things didn’t work out right, or any number of other things. So we get stuck working on them later in life, late in the process, which is more difficult because there aren’t as many resources available for people like us. So we get stuck going to psychologists for a better perspective on who and where we are, because can’t see our positives as well, or to psychiatrists for medication that makes it easier for us to go out and practice so we can develop these skills (and in doing so reduce the anxiety we feel in doing so).

My point is, jumping straight to the negative when things don’t play out perfectly isn’t the right way to go about things. You’ve got to reinforce your positive thinking, which is a skill in its own right, and like all skills you haven’t really done before you have to practice at it. That means mantras “You are worthy. You are wanted. You can succeed”, and working to see the positives in things instead of jumping straight to a negative place. So when you make a mistake or something doesn’t go your way, sit down and stop thinking negatively for a minute. Step up and try to pick out something, anything, positive about it. Even if it’s infinitesimally small. You have to work towards seeing the positive in things, and its a skill that has to be learned. It isn’t easy, and things like mantras can feel really dumb sometimes, but it’s something you have to do, and continue to do even if it doesn’t feel right. It’s not about being blind to the negative, but reinforcing your ability to see the positive until you can find that balance that isn’t self-destructive. 

Just because you’re not perfect at something, it doesn’t mean you’re worthless, it just means that you have to practice at it. Just because you don’t have friends, doesn’t mean you’re incapable of it, or incapable of being wanted. It just means that it’s something you have to work on, and acknowledging that you’re going to have failures along the way, and that it’s not going to happen overnight is important. Accept that you’re going to have failures, but that doesn’t make you a failure, and ensure that those failures aren’t going to get in the way of continuing to practice the things that are important to you so that you don’t make those failures in the future.

Acknowledge where you are, but don’t get so caught up in negative thinking that you get stuck there.