Yesterday was my birthday. I am 39 years old now.

Still feel like I am 7 most of the time. Or 15.

I look in the mirror and see a handsome professorial type. Full beard with grey streaks. Glasses showcasing kind, but tired, eyes. Slightly curly hair that always makes me look a little windswept.

I look like I've traveled the world. And I have. I've seen a thing or two. Had a dozen or more life changing adventures.

But I never feel like the guy I see in the mirror.
I always feel like a little kid.

This is surely partially the time travel of trauma. I am always getting pulled back to some other memory.
I wonder if there is something else that arrests my self image to one particular spot.
The gangly underweight homeschooled kid with the homemade haircut. I think that's how I see myself most of the time. And I really don't know why.

But it is why I am always a little surprised when women agree to go out with me.

I've been re-reading Siddhartha by Hermann Hesse and listening to a lot of Alan Watts and thinking about the Tao and looking back on the times in my life when I was the most happy and successful. And it all amounts to the same thing.
Things are best when there is a lack of self-consciousness. When one goes with the flow and reacts spontaneously to whatever happens.

The river of life is ever flowing, ever changing. Alan Watts says that you can try to capture the river in a bucket, but as soon as you do it's no longer the river. It's just water. So it is with the overly examined life.

I get stuck in my head. Worried about outcomes. Trying to game the system and predict the future. And that detaches me from simply experiencing life in real time. It's like when Harry Potter was at the quidditch world cup and was so busy watching instant replays that he missed Ireland scoring a goal.

The night before my birthday, I went to pick up a present of top shelf weed from the woman that I sometimes see naked.
Usually with her, I am always at least a little distracted. I am suspicious that she isn't honest with me and is wanting more of our arrangement than what is. I'm scared of relationships and terrified of hurting people and so always try to be really cautious and detached. Never giving too much of my self in the fear that I somehow won't be able to get it back.

Maybe it was the taoist talk, or the new meds, or some other fluke of the moon and the wind, but when I saw her the other night, something switched.

I was no longer watching my life play out like a movie, but was starring in the movie itself.

For the first time in a very long time, I was able to lose myself in the pure bliss of sensation.
I connected with my hunger, watched it grow, allowed it to consume me.

We broke her bed.
Then moved to the floor.
Then her couch in front of the window overlooking the bus station.
For four hours
we poured ourselves into each other
dizzying
blissful
lustful

The only time I wasn't was those moments when I pulled back and realized that I was really in the moment. But I'd shake myself loose and become willfully lost again.

I've heard it said that with meditation, perhaps some other practices, one can get to where they are living life like that all the time.
Just in it.
Not distracted by all the real time analysis and anxiety and fear of making the wrong step.
Where the image I have myself doesn't matter.
Where I don't have to convince myself I am worthy.

I want to go to there.
Bit by bit, it seems. Step by step.

8:35 a.m. - 2020-01-24