eat me henger

i have a full day ahead of me. a new chance to make it right. i have to live with my past mistakes. whether or not i redeem myself in the eyes of others matters less than returning to righteousness for myself. i simply have to take the first step, face the fears i've been forgoing. courage must come from somewhere. perhaps from a desired outcome, perhaps from a foundational capacity for resolve. either way - past or future - they're both inextricably linked to my present.

we only truly experience each other once. yeah sure, we have friends and family, at worst, we have enemies. yeah sure, we know of celebrities and random strangers. yeah sure, people keep an identity, either fixed - such as name and ethnicity - or mutable - such as personality quirks or sartorial expression. but the permutations of who they are and how we regard them changes through time. so who we are years ago is as different as who we are now and will be more so years down the line. we have a reasonable expectation of order - where we foresee regular patterns of the person we know now, their name, the way they present themselves, the history we share with them. somehow, we hold onto personas like they are permanent constructs. but life is hardly predictably linear. there are so many moving parts beyond our control. sometimes we even find it difficult to be disciplined. we can only hope for everyone else to show us a semblance of stability. however, i think it's tenuous to outsour...

i made the mistake of not making mistakes in my 20s. people are more forgiving for when the youth screws up. i was never particularly forgiving of myself, and that made me scared of being bold. i tried to work around it by being reckless, thinking that starting with ill intentions will soften the sting of looking stupid. but a façade of vulnerability isn't as good as an armor as actual courage. i deprived myself of a period of rich learning experiences. lessons don't feel as full when it doesn't come with firsthand failures and concrete consequences. fear is a natural signal for keeping us alert and mindful of life's dangers. survival requires us to mitigate threats, but when tomorrow is an absolute assurance, when modernity affords us comforts of remote and virtual perils, we grow averse to necessary evils. i try to make up for lost time. unfortunately, when done too late, wisdom gets harder to come by.

knowing better outweighs any cons of growing older. back then, i would've thought any form of fascination should always last forever. but time has its way of showing you the same thing over and over again. i seem to be finding myself in more situations where i've seen the set up before. insight on the ending keeps me from making the same stupid moves. it's likely that i will make newer and stupider moves, but at least i'm not in some sort of gordian knot. the good, no matter how permanent you want it to be, is just as transient as the bad you wish to stop. i'm calmer now. i've loosened my grip on both desires and dread. i simply fully feel the momentary jumping or breaking of my heart - they're a reaction to your reality, and to distort it by extending the highs or ending the lows is to deny your present. at times, i'm all for escapism when it all gets overwhelming. i should know better to minimize detachment from the real world. i might've grown old...