Catalyze 22/24

Two weeks ago, I turned twenty-two years old. A lot has happened in my life over the last two years, over the last five years, over the last seven years, and over the last twenty-two years - at least enough to write about here. I'd like for this piece of writing to serve as both a reflection on my twenty-two years of lived experiences as well as a turning point of sorts. Not any significant dramatic heel-turn, but a signpost marking a slow sea change that's become significant enough to label and will hopefully continue far into the future.

Throughout my twenty-two years of life, I have felt and believed a few things almost universally. I want, more than anything else, to make things. I enjoy making things the most. I am neither a man nor a woman, and I am perhaps both a boy and a girl. I value odd experiences and shared time in good company more than material wealth and status, and I find the qualia and minutiae of everyday life to be rich with vivid detail and spirit and emotion. I'm good at making connections and terrible at letting them go. I have a very strong memory and I'm extremely sentimental. As far as reflections go, though, I can do better than listing my personal constants.

An immense amount of things have happened to me over the last five years. It would be completely unfair of me to go on believing, as I did prior, that “things don't happen to me” after the events of the last five years of my life. I met a very large number of close associates and people I consider to be important and dear friends in that time. I went to college, dropped out, and started going again. I've had at least 3 partners and broke up with all of them. I released a game and at least a dozen short stories and created plans and wrote out documentation for dozens of projects, a majority of which languished. I got to go to Japan twice. All of this happened to me in a way I could narrativize, in a way that made sense and fit within the grand spanning picture of my life up until that point. These have easily been the most fulfilling five years of my life and I am endlessly glad and appreciative for these years to have turned out the way they did.

Over the last two years, not much in the way of concrete events have happened to me. Of the aforementioned deeds, I just went to Japan again. Instead I've been languishing. I've made barely anything at all - nothing I've been proud enough of to really show off, at least. I've become extremely socially avoidant over these two years to the point where I can barely manage to reach out to my closest friends one-on-one to begin with, much less consistently. I don't talk in almost any of the social circles to which I belong and I definitely don't put myself out there online anymore. I hate it and I hate myself for it. What's more is that over these two years I've also continued slipping in and out of the worst depression I've encountered to date. If anything, though, the last two years are in this way an extension of the last five - a long, protracted series of mental health crises.

But these things have origins, and concrete ones at that. My avoidance came about as a result of longtime social neglect by my immediate friend group from second to twelfth grade. My depression and anxiety and lack of self-worth/self-confidence have come about from a number of factors, including a misguided long-term commitment to trying pipe dreams first and putting in grounded, consistent effort last. Perhaps most importantly to my mental health, I've been dealing with these exact same internal problems over the last five years that I had been going into them. That much time spent being frustrated by the same issues and yet failing to tackle them over and over really builds up a well-founded hatred for yourself, you know? And that self-hatred manifests by enabling all the other unhealthy and debilitating behaviors you might have engrained in yourself. I understand at least this much. I stopped myself from talking to people and putting in effort and making things out of that self-hatred. I have sat around preventing myself from getting what I want out of my life for so long that my pain and frustration have finally reached a threshold. I've been reluctant to say that I'm struggling, but I definitely am now - a struggle can only occur when desperation is present, and I am desperate.

Despite my stagnation, these past two years have brought with them a pivotal shift to my being. I've reached a point where, simply having lived for long enough, I can no longer narrativize the entirety of my life as something singular and cohesive. I suspect this sort of thing happens to everyone around this age (perhaps at the latest), but it made a very important difference for me. For the last few years prior, I had had these periods where I would think to myself, “I can't imagine it lasting much longer than this... My life has to end soon, it's at a good point for that... I have reached my conclusion...” The passage of time has finally granted me the mercy of shattering that illusion. I am no longer bound to believing in (or at least entertaining the notion of) a singular, narrativize-able self. I can't hardly narrativize any part of my life anymore - not without it feeling like a demeaning parody of my past and former selves.

I'll say it clearly: to believe in one's own life as though a narrative is a deadly poison. It has poisoned me and led me to this stagnation I've spent two years staring down and trying half-assedly to crawl out of. If you view your life as one single grand narrative unfolding into smaller ones, a narrative you yourself can parse, please stop before you hurt yourself.

In recent times, I've found myself improving. I finally found a means and the willpower to use my struggles as fuel to push past the root causes. I've been at the very least trying to approach people one-on-one more often again and I've been thinking more positively about putting myself out there into public and private spaces alike online. I no longer compare myself to others constantly or really at all anymore. I started therapy about a month ago and got medication for my anxiety and depression about a week and a half ago. I've been largely on top of chores and hygiene. I'm aware now of just how extreme an impact diet and exercise have on immediate health and mood and ability to do more stuff in a day. I'd like to start cooking for myself more and eating out less and exercising and going for walks more as well. I suspect in a month or two, when my health has continued improving and I'm feeling consistent and level-headed from the medication and my habits, that I may (finally) start HRT. I have a number of flexible plans for career paths and skills I want to build and jobs I know I can do - concrete ones, not pipe dreams or banking on chance; things that could actually see me making a living - and I know when and how I should put in the work to capitalize on all that.

I view myself as “almost complete” right now. It's the closest I'll allow myself to get to a narrative for myself. I'll be well on my way soon, and at that point (to me right now at least) I'll be complete, but until then I just have to work until I get my foot in the door somehow. I figure I may feel this way about myself indefinitely, but I'd like to at least feel it from now on in such a way where I can look back from my past selves’ perspectives and see that to them, I am complete now. It's nowhere near my eleventh hour, but I do only feel I'm eleven-twelfths the person I know I can be. I just have to let myself work myself out.

I say all that because I want this piece of writing to serve as a sort of memento to my past and my situation, and I also want it to serve as a reminder of what I intend to do and where I'm headed. I've felt a need to do these things many times in the past, but never have I managed to get them down consistently. I write all this now with more conviction than I ever have before. I can do all this, and I have never desired it more in my life. I can feel the weight of my life thus far and my struggles and my ideals and my desires and how great it is to exist so completely, and I can access it all readily enough again to utilize it. I can use it healthily as fuel and not get wrapped up in hating myself for how long it's taken me. Peoples’ early twenties pretty much always seem to be a mess unless they railroaded themselves (or, more likely, were railroaded) into an extremely obvious, cut-and-dry life path from far, far younger. I can take solace in that. Hardly anyone my age is complete, I think, and even if they are, it's humbling to still be learning.

So I'd like for this to be something I can bear reading over and over if I must. I want it to be something I can point to as a simple, blunt catalyzation of my feelings and my ruminations and my pasts into something I can use, something I can move past from. It's like getting something out of my system or expunging a curse. I'd like, if nothing else, for these words to free me from myself just a little bit more. If I could be selfish and ask for even more than that, I'd like for these words to resonate with you or help you on your way, too.