Stuck in a loop. Stuck in a loop. Stuck in a loop.

Stuck in a goddamn unceasing loop.

It is how it feels. Is this Purgatory? This is what I imagine purgatory to be.

Two years now as a security guard, which makes two years with the clockwork routine of my everyday.
No wonder I dissociate so much. Things feel like they are on auto-pilot. Or are they on auto-pilot because I dissociate so much?

Does it matter? I suppose it does in informing which part of my life I need to change. Or maybe any change will change everything. I have no idea how life works.

I do know there is a constant debate, a forever whirring and buzzing, in my head. Always about what we are going to do tomorrow, what we need to do, what will really and truly activate some real and lasting change.

But we never do anything new do we? (we here meaning me, I am not accusing you, dear reader of anything.)

There are the voices between my ears insisting that what needs to happen in my life is a new job, or to better buckle down at creative craft, or a new romance, or a good yoga routine, or whatever. All with a variety of potential strategies (and accompanying pratfalls) of how to accomplish all of this while working 50 hour a week and dealing with chronic pain and illness.

But there are also voices in my head that say, whoa, hold on.
What is "better"? Why do we need to be that? Why the shame for not striving and stressing and killing yourself to reach someone else's definition of success?
Why not be content? Laze around in the cool grass and warm sun? Consume the beauty and pleasure of the world like its your birthright?
Why not, as Mary Oliver said in my favorite poem of hers, "let the soft animal of your body love what it loves"?

But even that approach feels like there is something lacking within me. I have trouble these days focusing on anything for long. I do not feel present. I do not feel content. I am not often mindful at all.
(Though this seems like an easier fix than suddenly making myself useful to society).

The thing of it is that I am stuck in a loop.

Not all of it bad. My job allows me to watch the cycles of the moon go round and round. Breathing in darkness, breathing out light.
There is certain pleasures in repeating cycles.

But I don't like this endless loop of thought. The time traveling of traumatic flashbacks, the intrusive thoughts about the worst possible things, the feeling frozen with every decision.

In their recent entry, my friend Jo (u2october) said:
"I am afflicted with constant wanderlust combined with the nagging fear that I will find that the grass is in fact not greener on the other side of every fence that I peer over."

They blame it on being a Pisces. However, I think it is something to do with the specific kinds of childhoods that we had. But that could just be my Aquarian sense of skepticism.

I think that growing up believing it is the end of the world makes time feel so limited and our choices far too important.
When every action is weighted for eternity, it makes you a bit more careful in your steps.

I imagine sometimes that the world and all its possibilities is infinite. That if I wanted to go to circus school and become a juggler, I could and that'd be fine. That anything is fine. Do whatever you want, there are not rules,
find the life you love and live.

And rationally, I think that's true actually.
But emotionally, psychologically, I cannot escape being a fatalist.

I feel pressure, internally and externally, to "do something with my life."
I have desires and hopes of a life I want to live, a life that is not unobtainable, one that is fairly close to the one I already have.
But I remain frozen, stuck in a loop of thought and doubt and doubts of those doubts and thoughts about the thoughts.

Maybe If I could just get all the voices in my head to stop for a minute. Let the ripples on the water cease long enough to see to the bottom, I could have some clarity.

Time to get back into Buddhism, meditation, hiking, yoga, haiku writing,
you think
and agree resolutely
before you realize
this is still just
the same loop
that you've been on

You put your face in your hands.

You let out a deep sigh.

12:37 a.m. - 2024-09-27