Bring on the New Year

The last week has been quite tiring. I expected to hit the ground running this year and find myself at a soft almost ragged trot. The ideal first step to this year is to appraise myself and my situation. So here it is.

Spiritually I have made significant improvements but I am not yet to the levels I have been before. Emotionally I am alot more hardy and ready to accept the punishment my new ambitions have to offer me. Physically I'm not doing so well, (mostly) poor diet and exercise have plagued me for some time and perhaps worst of all I don't feel I am performing mentally to the levels I should be. It's time to retrain and revist some of the old basics.

However the time I have for that is limited. Budget constraints and timetables prevent me from having unlimited resources to retrain and relearn. For the first time in a long time I face the problem of having to prioritize my time. Time with friends and being social is important. But so is self cultivation and enlightenment. I have to keep track of advances in my areas of study (of which there are many) and persue new ones to keep my perspective fresh. How I face problems of this size is important, small problems and adversities can bring down someone faster then one large problem. I find most often that it is not 1 problem that destroys an agenda or a person or an organization. It is the constant nibble of a dozen minor problems that bleeds the attention and the resources. Being able to deal effectively with small problems is an important skill.

One of the projects I want to finish before I move on to my larger projects is the dreaded reordering. Everything I have is in disarry. My saved games are not organized. My Digital media files are not organized. Pictures, Books, Writing, Research and even things as trivial as clothes. I've been disorganized and it irks me every day. My personal desire is for things to be clean and organized. Yet my family is dirty, messy and disorganized to the extreme. It would be easy to keep things organized if I put them away when I was done with them. If I filed them instead of put them on my desk to be buried. If I lived on my own I honestly feel I would overcome this problem alot easier. Seeing the disorder in the house somehow justifies it to me and brings it out. Now I think about it that irks me too.

Over time I have been shaping and reordering who I am. To some the change is apparent and even startling. To others it has been so gradual that they haven't noticed. It comes in a sudden epiphany. To others still I am the same or close to the same. I talk a good talk. I play a good game and I respect and honor my rivals even as I pwn and trashtalk them. The outside hasn't changed alot because people are comfortable with it. Yes I can be obnoxious sometimes, yes I can be egomanical, and yes I can even be confrontational. Yet for these traits I have been told that I am more positive, more fun, less cynical (Shocking side effect of being positive), more tolerant and all around better. People like me more now then they did a few months ago. And more then a few months before that. Personality can improve like anything else. I hope with age I can cut away that excess of obnoxiousness and that thick film of ego that prevades my social life. But then again I need alot of that ego. A comfortable sense of self and ego are vital if you are to work in a field as crowded and bloodthirsty as publishing. (people who refute this are naive.)
The ego is important if it is not excessive. Much as I hate to keep using that word over and over again.

Other small problems surface and each is sharp enough to scuttle my entire agenda. But most pressing perhaps is the current nature of who I am. From one perspective I am more complete as a person then I was in the past. I know who I am and what I want to do. But the nuts and bolts aren't all together yet. I have advanced more in the past month then the past 3 months before that. I am capable of loving once again. Something I thought I had lost forever or at least had been diminished. The strength of my spirit is strong and ready to fight and struggle. The failures, betryals and losses of my past have hurt me immensely and at the same time given fire to the core of my being. In a way I am tempered from that and many other kinds of hurt. I have the strength of my convictions to bring to bear and the passion in my heart is not abated by fear of failure or isolation. Yet... I do miss one thing. The infastructure for my new life isn't there yet. And my persona is trapped in the past. I still present myself as who I was. I still use the same systems, arguements and logic I did before. A large part of me has shifted forward and the rest is still stuck in the past. A large part of how I think, reason and decide. It creates a vague unease and uncomfortable feeling. One of the symptoms of this I will talk about now.

I've begun to have extremely strange dreams and nightmares recently. On a nap earlier I was convinced my truck had been stolen. The dream was so compelling that when I awoke it took me almost 10 minutes to realize I owned a car and it was sitting in my driveway. The images and situations within my dreams are so compelling that I believe them even after I awaken. Sometimes I forget who I am and believe myself to be my sleeping persona. I awaken to find myself alive or uninjured. I have even awoken to find that I did not have a beautiful fey lover beside me. As much as I love these brief escapes into unreality I know that this surge of intense dream activity is my mind sorting itself out. The images in my dreams are sharp and intense after a period of emotional and mental examination. I change who I am. And like the re-boot and defrag of a computer my mind has to make sense of it's new surroundings. The dreams are not all violent. Or all sexual, or all peaceful. Like the different and scattered aspects of a person they are all important in some regard or fashion. The fey lover is not an ideal mate. It's a fling for pleasure. The pleasure of an all out passionate love without consquences, the allure of their primal nature overwhelming to a human. Humans that are drawn taut by conflicting emotions and feelings. A deep relationship carries a different kind of feeling then a fling. How we choose to resolve these conflicts within ourselves is what truly defines who we are. My dreams are brutal and violent because in my past it was important for me to brutal and violent to survive. They are filled with images taken from my past, future, present and a world that is not seen: imagination. The eerie prophetic nature of my dreams is because my sub-conscious does not filter the content of my mind. I know what is coming, what is around by my mind filters it because it is inconvienant or even harmful. Of course sometimes a cigar is just a cigar.

I am ready for this new year, ready to embrace a new persona and a new style to life. I am eager to prove myself to my peers, to my rivals and to everyone in the various facets of my expanding life. I'm finding new friends to replace old ones, new rivals to test myself against, new ideas to replace the misguided and perhaps most importantly I am ready to embrace myself. If you have read my blog beginning to end you must realize the self-loathing that came with my isolation and pain. The issues of trust I still struggle with aren't so easily defeated by they are starting to crumble. Perhaps many years from now I will be successful and famous enough to rewrite and publish this blog as a memoir. Someone who knows the pain of abuse, betryal, guilt, isolation, heartbreak and self-doubt will read this and realize that with effort and courage there is nothing you cannot change. First within yourself and then within the world.