Operation Achieve Anything: Day Three-Hundred-Four, Dateline 10-31-2018

Problems are not stop signs, they are guidelines.
— Robert Schuller

Good morning crickets. Welcome to day number three-hundred-four of Operation Achieve Anything. Over the past couple weeks, I've been feeling a lot of self-hate for sharing anything political. Not because I have any guilt in what I believe, but because I know that nobody is listening to anything outside of their established belief, making me a Third Party Atheist who’s just preaching to a small choir. Besides, I’m not trying to change anyone’s views anyway, most of my post stem from the anger over people actively pushing for me to not stick to my belief, or at least that used to be the case when I had more friends who would chime in on the comments.

These political outbursts I speak of are more in reference to my random drunken post furies on social media and not really anything on this site. Here, I get a little political during my SNL reviews when referring to the political content that I’m watching, or may try to further explain my Twitter activity here in a Daily Breaker post. I’m not all that concerned about these instances because I’m more thought out over reactionary, plus if someone were to read anything here, there’s five year’s worth of evidence as to who I really am.

I need to remember that my beliefs are well documented throughout this entire blog, whether it’s this type of journal-style entry or one of my quirky reviews. That’s not to say that any of these beliefs aren’t flawed, but they’re readily available. I need to get over this fear of being judged and stop living a life where I’m actively trying to stay under the radar. Granted, I don’t really want to go mainstream, but I can’t keep pussyfooting around in order to find my potential audience.

This is sort of an addendum to yesterday’s post where I was sharing the excuses that I need to take out and bury in the yard. It also leads into the actual assignment from yesterday where I was supposed to explore the benefits of failure, based on a quote that highlighted how if you don’t fail from time to time, it’s because you’re not doing anything innovative. I think I have to remember this line of thinking whenever I feel like an outcast.

Being raised the only boy in a house full of girls, I was left on my own to figure things out. Not that I feel intentionally neglected, but my mom seemed to have been better at providing guidance to my sisters while writing off any of my issues as a “boy being a boy,” who will figure it out on my own. Then I’d go to my dad’s where he was so busy trying to make everything great, I was then stuck with my stepmom, stepsister, and full sister, so there was no escape from the all-girls club and did actually feel left out.

While on my own, I seemed to harvest opposite beliefs to everyone in the family. When I was a preteen and religion started to creep into the family, I was the only one to hold on to my non-belief. Later, I found that both my parents were religious the entire time, it was just an unspoken topic after my dad turned his back on organized religion for personal reasons that took place before I was born. I wasn’t told of this, I was just caught off guard when all of the sudden there was an increase in talk of God. Not to the point where it because obnoxious because my family’s too passive for that, but it was enough to confuse me and highlights how I was left on my own to figure it all out.

This is probably why I’m so offended by people trying to pressure me into going against what makes sense to me. I’m by no means a contrarian, choosing the opposite of anything said just to piss people off. Being an outsider just comes naturally to me. In junior high, I was one of the few white kids in my collection of friends, which got me listening to rap that only further alienated me from my conservative family. My high school was much whiter than my junior high, and I became the only one of my hesher/punk friends who listen to rap, once again keeping me from feeling like I entirely fit in.

Meanwhile, I spent most of my time alone in my room developing a love of stand-up comedy, where an outsider’s eye is actually beneficial. Being that, before I discovered my crippling stage fright and love of writing, telling jokes on stage was my childhood dream. This led me to embrace my outsiderness, which makes it extremely hard for me to see any choice when dealing with a system where there are only two teams. It also led to my fascination with creating content that may not be groundbreaking or top selling but is always, at least attempting, to break the mold, and is why I’m not surprised it’s taking me so long in my continued efforts to figure things out.

Keep in mind, I’m mainly talking about my fictional work, but this page is pretty experimental itself as I try to sneak an entire autobiography into my many reviews. I’ve always figured that my approach would make for a much tougher life, but the potential payout from finally figuring it out keeps me going more than if I were to go an easier route creating cookie-cutter content. Not that I think I could easily knock out content that appeals to the masses, but I do believe life would be a lot easier if that were my actual goal.

I could ramble on about this forever, but I need to move on to today’s task at hand where I’m now supposed to determine if I’m a problem seeker, a problem solver, or a problem see-ya-later. This is another one that’s sort of dumb, but I dig into my issues when I check in with tomorrow’s update. Until then, it’s now that time for me to say, good day and good luck to you and all of your projects.

Talk to you soon.

Sincerely,

The Wicker Breaker

P.S. Below are links to my novel, which I plan to promote as part of Operation Achieve Anything, as well as a link to where you can buy the book that is providing the structure to this project in case you would like to purchase it in order to play along.