aaronleigh

So I've decided that sometime in the near future I need to stop working from home as much and start seeking out gigs that put me with a crew of people for several days at a time. I don't want to work 18 hour days per se but I do want to work WITH people. As freeing as it is to be able to put down my work and go do whatever it is that I feel is more important, it has not been good for my psyche. I've found myself needy, starved for human interaction and less confident because my school, work and home are all in the same apartment. I thought that combining all of these things would simplify my life. It did. It let the obsessive, self-doubting and depressive part of me take hold. I find myself day after day wondering where the people in my life are and what they are doing. I answer text messages within seconds of receiving them and then let my mind run wild with everything that could be going wrong on the other end when mine aren't returned as quickly.

I am not someone that needs constant reassurance... or I wasn't. I know who I am. I know how intelligent, charming, attractive and talented I am. I've been told these things by multiple people in the past few weeks. I've had someone tear up while saying these things to me. For the moment it works. Then I end up back here, at this damned desk, questioning where all of the confidence has gone.

Last week and over the course of the weekend I got to work on a feature film. I met the crew on day one and we instantly connected. We were artists. We were making something worthwhile, albeit in some very unsavory locations. I felt like I was at peace the entire time, even when I was in the beginning stages of heat exhaustion.

As a writer I've always said that torture is what makes us better. In those times that we cannot help but miss every single person in our life we find some of the most succinct and beautiful ways to say what it is that is on our minds. Truthfully it is bullshit. It is because sadness or loneliness or self loathing are the easiest of emotions for us to experience as we get older. Happiness and joy and just plane contentment are a choice. One that I have seldom made in recent months but instead relied on other people to help me experience it.

It has been my distinct pleasure to meet someone recently that lives for the day, every day... unless she's hung over. I try to learn from how she acts and reacts to life. Not because I do not know the lessons but because I have seem to have forgotten them. After being told several times to stop worrying or quit trying to argue I realized that this is not who I was a few months ago, before I pulled myself out of the world and locked myself in the stronghold of my house every day all day.

I am fun. I am clever. I am someone that people want to be around. Excluding myself from society is not who I am. Feeling sorry for myself is not who I am. No one has left me.
It stops today.

Being a philosophical Taoist I will close with this:

Be Content with what you have; rejoice in the way things are. When you realize there is nothing lacking, the whole world belongs to you.