Midnight thought: an actually useful dream where it came up that style should serve as a tone setter in writing not a template. For years I’ve been trying to run a variety of devices in my work to illustrate a breadth of knowledge, skill, and talent when I should just be getting outworks and not being so worried about stressing them up or nipping towards producing something. The words should just be, the experiences should be relayed ahead of the way in paint a scene or describe some abstract concept. That is to say you should prioritize variety of experience over all else. Otherwise rough days like yesterday, stuck on some past regrets and falling back into old habits that speed up time in day blurring and week ending fashion just makes me feel icky and sometimes even physically ill. 

Yesterday flew by in mostly a blur because I returned to the comfort of familiar territory with certain YouTube creators and revisited a lot of familiar territory, although I thought of someone I hadn’t considered closely for almost two decades. But rather than fully appreciate why I was having this uncomfortable wave of regrets I let it consume huge swaths of my day, rather than simply break routine and explore these feelings in depth by allowing myself to feel them. I did come to the conclusion that I am probably better off for how things actually played out, as they most certainly were of massive benefit to Emily. I should have seen my regret as a reflection of what I could have done for someone actually worthy of my time and energy rather than beating myself up for directing my attention elsewhere in ways that led to hard rejection and consistent disappointment. I was trying to force people to like me. I wanted to bend the universe towards my own sense of justice. I wanted to help those who either weren’t interested in accepting my affections or simply didn’t know how to at the time, if ever. 

Yes, sometimes we miss what’s right in front of us because we lacked the wisdom to recognize a perfect opportunity when it comes around. And that wisdom I did eventually gain, as I mentioned yesterday, because when Emily came along, as unbelievable and queer (pun intended) as her story appeared, I had just enough evidence to make me think that it had a strong chance of being true. Hers is the only time that following my gut actually worked in my favor in the long run. Even when I made seemingly poor judgments, long as I’ve been with her, somehow things work out in both of our favors. For most of my life, I simply benefited others at great expense to myself. Same as what happened to Emily. Doing the right thing and constantly being punished for it. 

I keep thinking back to what Picard told data in peak performance, you can do everything correctly and still lose. That is just life. And apparently even though I did derive some useful lessons from not choosing the best possible potential mate to pursue at a pivotal moment in my development as a human being, I chose to instead focus on the decade plus of suffering I endured trying to force outcomes that seemed the most likely to fly under the radar. I wanted to save those falling through the cracks, and ironically, I fell almost as far down into the abyss you can get without being entirely a lost cause. And the one I missed, in fact, never panned out as they could because I was too chicken shit to approach a girl out of my league with the truth. We had only the most surface level understanding. We could’ve had so much more. Maybe not, but the effort would’ve forced me to face my own issues of self worth and self respect that still linger as time pushes me towards forty and I’m refusing to recognize the milestone for what it is, a wake up call to stop wasting my time on finding ways to waste my time. 

Yesterday wasn’t entirely lost, but it could’ve been a chance to truly make a breakthrough. It took me letting my brain process how empty so much of yesterday felt to recognize my fault. Not only was I the best thing to ever happen to Emily, and her coinciding with my lowest point of life the best opportunity to ever come my way, my journey has led me to meet a version of myself that finally said enough bullshit. It’s time to release the regrets and allow myself to flourish. I apparently inspired Emily to new heights the way I always wanted for others, as I intended but to a degree I never saw coming. I had to fail doing everything right for all those years for Emily to flourish and by extension allow myself to somehow finally do the same. 

To say passages like this are what open journals are made for would be an understatement. I now have to try to lean on my sleep mask and accompanying train to infinity in an endless rainstorm to get back to sleep after such an epiphany… for the first time in my life, I finally am being recognized for my worth. And I don’t know how to deal with that. And just as I hoped, Emily and I are finally able to pay it forward. And this time, after so many failed attempts at making a difference, we finally succeeded, all because all these failures eventually turned into a success. You only need one big success after all, to make your life worth living. It’s time I recognize my victory and share what I’ve learned, because honestly, the failures are actually a lot more interesting in hindsight. I’ve written about a few, and going forward, I am going to need to relate them. 

The best advice my mother ever gave me is that no one can write your story the way that you can. While I’ve never forgotten that advice I didn’t truly understand what it meant until now. You can only ever fully trust yourself, and once you stop doing that, who can you trust? Time to start trusting my gut again, even when it’s backed up, because had I listened twenty years ago, I could’ve saved myself a lot of misery. At least a decade of it, and yet… ironically, the beneficiary of my unique talents and skill set would’ve been someone entirely different and honestly, I don’t know that would’ve been for the better. Life is full of some wonderfully obtuse contradictions and I must take the time to unravel them, like unfolding a complex protein, and see what cures lie within the process of gaining this arcane knowledge. 

I used to mistake blind ambition for passion, and true passion for aimless performativity. And I mistook performative for a cry for help that only I seemed to hear. Well, I’ve looked at life from at least four sides now. And it’s all coming to a lot of points that are so sharp and pointy that I’m getting pricked a lot. The breakthroughs have been coming hard and fast. I noted a few days ago how so many solutions exist for the worst problems in the world that are incredibly straightforward. Simple to say, but overwhelmingly complex to realize. And I know I’m right that AI is as much the solution for all the crises our world faces as it is for protein folding, fusion, and baffling and elusive mathematical proofs. But as I also said to Emily a couple days ago, we just all have to learn to stop hurting each other, prioritize each other’s health and happiness, and learn how to properly reciprocate kindness when it comes, and learn to walk away from what no longer aligns with us. Again, sounds simple, but AI can’t help us become better humans. That’s up to us here in the real world. Far easier said than ever done.