I was listening to a podcast the other day. It’s about making comics (and making a living from comics). There’s your tagline.
So something that got brought up in the opening discussion was inner voices, which they’ve talked about before. Some people think in images, like pictures or videos if you were online. And other people think in actual words. So one of the hosts was talking about an experiment he and his wife did where they took a walk together and said out loud what their inner voices were thinking.
She tended to think about tasks she had ahead of her. Chores coming up. Appointments. That sort of thing. Whereas he thought about things he was looking at, what he saw as they walked around, and reflected on those. It came down to the idea that she thinks about the future, and he thinks very much in the present. The other host, as it turns out, also thinks more about the present.
But this hit me kind of in a bad way. Because I think most often about the past.
Like, it’s always been something I’ve done. I will just go days and nights honed in on some mistake or even just a perceived error that I did one time, sometimes years or now decades ago. And I’ll try to trace back to it, what made me do the wrong thing, what if I’d chosen differently, that kind of deal. A lot of my anxiety over the last nearly 15 years has been the decision we made to buy our house in California when we did. The market crumbled almost directly after we’d gotten our mortgage and moved in, and while we did get some help on it eventually, it just swept over us and put us in a bad place in a way that we still actually haven’t recovered. And that’s with having sold and moved out of the place two years ago. One year’s difference would’ve changed the entire thing. The price would’ve probably been half of what it was when we bought in (we likely wouldn’t have gotten the same place, but a place just as good. Maybe better. Maybe smaller and doubly more affordable).
Every month as the payment would come due and I’d wonder if we could make it, or what we’d have to sacrifice to do so, it would weigh me down so badly. To this day, I still have an aversion to looking at my bank statement because I just feel like we have no money at all, and when bills are due, I let them stack up or fall behind because I’m too freaked out to face up to them. And things are honestly better now that we left. But I can’t get around it.
And that’s one small part of it. Mistakes with friends, mistakes with family, high school and grade school and jobs and even the move to California itself. I am constantly second- third- and quintuple-guessing every decision I’ve made.
It’s worse honestly since moving back to Michigan. Because my brain wanders back so easily to the places I grew up. Even though we’re on the other side of the Mitten from where I grew up, the surrounding environment is enough to put my head into the mode of “this is all very familiar.” So I listen to music and it triggers thoughts of growing up, even if this music didn’t exist then. And every time I listen to the same songs or albums (which I do a lot because I’m very set in my ways at this point), as soon as I hit play it’s like, “Here we go. Same imagined scenario as last time, let’s just go with the replay for the hundredth time.”
I think it’s slowly killing me. Like, not literally causing my death. But giving me less to make me feel like I’m alive.
I was asked to leave my High School (“invited not to reapply” is the technical term they used. Or maybe my brain filled in that blank over the years) in what was to be my last year. I was 17 and wasn’t exactly a great student at all, but I didn’t feel like I was someone that had proven themselves unworthy to come back. Granted, they had no idea how I had pushed myself to get my head on straight to make that last year happen. My mom, the day the school year started, was surprised when I was up and ready to go. My grandmother as well. “Why are you up so early?” they asked. I said it was the first day of school. And they both said the same thing. “You’re going?!?” It wasn’t that they lacked faith in me. I just hadn’t really decided or said that i had until then. Maybe if I’d known that it was more on me to decide, I would’ve chosen not to.
See? I’m doing it again. The “what if?” thing.
Being denied finishing up my classes put me into a strange place. Now I not only had to decide if I wanted to worry about getting a High School diploma, I also had to find the path to do so. High School basically funnels all your learning towards that one thing for you. You show up, do your work, pass the tests, here’s your papers, move along. That’s it. Now it was on me to figure out what I was going to do.
I wound up in Adult Education, even though, again, I wasn’t 18 yet. My credits weren’t enough to do all I needed to in the one year, so I decided to get my GED and apply it to my credits. Passing that test (which I did, easily. I was a lousy student, but it wasn’t that I wasn’t smart enough. I just hated applying my focus to school) knocked me down to just needing a few classes. But it took three semesters instead of two because they kept realizing at the end, “Oh, wait, you also need this other thing.” It was probably for the best. I wasn’t in a rush, and it allowed me the free time to still get those couple of years of having friends and a “life” in without me spending too much time in a classroom. I was a late bloomer when it came to having a social circle and knowing how to talk to other people my age. That’s another reason why I was so bad at school. I spent most of my time terrified.
The point of this is that, even after getting my GED and my eventual diploma, I never felt a closure to high school. I did about a year’s stint in college a while later, after a break when my childhood home got sold out from under me and I had to move hours away from everyone and everything I knew. I was both lucky to have some place to go, and totally unprepared for living as a grown-up, paying bills and rent, working every day. I know, some kids do that well before they’re an adult. But i came at things at a different pace.
The combination of the school thing and the home thing and the feeling abandoned even though I was the one who left thing… It all put me more into a shell. Most of it worked out eventually. But I had a lot of sleepless nights because I’d wake up from anxiety nightmares about things unfinished, things I still had to do to actually show that I was an adult now.
That’s part of why I moved to California when I did. Sure, a big part of it was the opportunity. One of my close friends lived there and offered for me to come stay with her. That helped a lot. But I gave up everything I knew again, this time by my own choice. Some of my closest friends at the time didn’t even bother to see me off. They said, “Oh, it’s just Corey. He’ll be back here in a few months, tops.”
Maybe it was spite that kept me from coming back. I don’t know. But my twenties moved really fast. I spent less time thinking about if I’d made the right move or wrong move, because each day was so many new experiences and people that I didn’t have the time.
When my grandmother passed away, very suddenly, that’s the first time I had a real breakdown after moving away. And that was when I started looking backwards more. Which is realistic. My grandma was one of my parents, as much as my mom or dad were. I lived with her during my entire teen years. She shaped a lot of who I am. When I left, even though we didn’t live together any more, I was still going to see her regularly, helping her with errands. We were still extremely close. But I took off, and she never made me feel like I was letting her down by doing so. But for her to suddenly not be there to come back to… That changed me. In some ways, I think that’s what affected my then relationship with my ex-, although I can clearly see now that we both were better off as friends in the years to come than we were as a couple. My moods got darker. My outlook got more bleak. I still had a lot of good times in my life. But I was way more guarded about things. More closed off.
And I started looking backwards more. Easily as much as I looked forward. Possibly because of having to confront death in the most personal way I ever had. Or maybe it’s just that I was getting older, and making decisions on a whim was no longer something I could afford to do. I had responsibilities to other people. I had a responsibility to myself.
At sixteen I’d reinvented myself. New name, new look, new personality. At twenty-two, I reinvented my life by moving away from everything I knew. At around twenty-six, twenty-seven, I lost some of the most important things to me. It made me more careful. It made me scared.
Looking back at my role with my friends as a teenager, if there’s one thing I think maybe I could say I brought to my little group, it’s that I was a dreamer. I always wanted to make things. Tell stories. Write songs. Play music. But i wanted that for all of us. I wanted to push my friends towards their dreams too. I can’t say I was necessarily good at it, but I tried. My heart was there. It took some doing to focus more of that on me. When certain opportunities would fall into my lap, like the first time someone read some of my writing and offered to publish me, I had no idea how to react to it. So I left it alone. I just contented myself to keep doing what I wanted for no personal gain. I played guitar because I enjoyed the feel of the instrument, the way my hand would make chord shapes. I didn’t play for anyone else. I wrote stories with no care to if they ended or if they mattered. If a couple people read and enjoyed them, it was more than I would’ve expected. My audience was narrow and that suited me.
But at some point, I thought, maybe I should do more. Maybe I should want more. Why did I let stuff go to waste? Why did I squander opportunities that other people would’ve done anything for? Why did I act like none of it mattered?
I still don’t know. Maybe because trying is scary. Not trying, just letting things happen, is fun.
Yet I felt like, okay, enough is enough. I’m ready now. Let’s seriously write. Let’s seriously make something. You’ve run every day of your life (figuratively. I mean, I’ve never run once), let’s see what happens when you try to run an actual marathon.
And in nearly every single instance of my trying to push myself outside of my boundaries, I’ve choked. Like flat-on-my-face failed.
And you know what? That’s fair. If you want something bad enough, it shouldn’t be easy. I mean, sure, it would be nice if it was. But it shouldn’t matter if it is or isn’t. What matters is that you’re working towards that thing. Because you want it. You need it to happen.
My realistic side knows that. Of course.
But my dreamer side, the one that got everything easy, just looks at all the time I wasted, and all the chances I had that I fucked up or danced around and let piss down the drain, and says, “You blew it, buddy. You had it all once. Now it’s gone. Never again.”
Every year I seem to go through a stint, especially as it creeps closer to my birthday, which then inevitably heads us into the year’s end, where I think that I’ve gotten too old. All of this was a younger man’s game. I’m old. My job takes up so much of my time and energy. My wife and my cats and my parents and my couple of things that I do with friends here and there… It’s enough. It should be enough. Why do I have to fight out these couple of pipe dreams anyways. Now, quickly approaching fifty, I absolutely think that I’ve got more life behind me than ahead of me. My hands hurt when I type. I’m not sure i can make those chord shapes any more. My back and posterior scream at me after sitting in a chair all day for work, so adding time at the computer after to write seems like an added cruelty. My eyes are struggling even with a large computer monitor (doesn’t mean I can’t stare at and fuck around on my phone half the day though). I content myself with making the random quip on Facebook and getting Likes and Laughs instead of doing anything of substance. Or, worse, reposting something from my Memories on there, which I had something really witty to say two years ago.
And I just keep thinking backwards.
No one can give me what I want. I am now surrounded by the most amazing people who work hard at the things they love. Podcasting, writing, music, art. My wife is an incredible artist. I see her constantly at her desk drawing or painting, or on her iPad sketching. She’s taking up sewing, and sculpting. She’s younger than me, but not thirty years younger than me, so I know the excuses I make for myself are complete bullshit. I just can’t figure out how I’ve gotten so buried in this mindset for so long.
I don’t know that I have it in me to be that woman who is always thinking ahead. Always looking at what she needs to accomplish, what she has on her ToDo list to keep her successes going (she is a fantastic TV writer by the way. One of my dream jobs). I still associate a lot of my future with dread. What bills do I have due soon? What happens when we have a household emergency and can’t survive it? What happens when my next parental figure passes away? I’ve become a bit too much of a pessimist to look forward to things in the same way. And because my expectations are always so low, there’s not a lot for me to be excited about anyways.
But if I could just shift, even a little, to thinking more in the Now than in the Past. I could get my head out of reruns and into “What’s Featured.” That would be a pretty major step in the right direction for me.
I just need to figure out how.
