Good evening crickets. Welcome to day number three-hundred-forty-three of Operation Achieve Anything. It’s been a while since I’ve produced one of these daily ramblings while it’s dark out. This morning, I woke nice and early as usual, and being the I bought a box of wine for last night, I finished up the leftover booze in hopes that I would get back to sleep to wake around noon. I do this often now that I’m just a weekend warrior and not a daily drunk, only typically, I get my blogging obligations out of the way first. This morning, I just couldn’t wait because I was extremely desperate to get back to sleep to hide from the day.

It sucks because I’ve been doing so well for so long. This was the first morning in quite a while that I just gave in to utter depression and just could not face the day. I’m feeling better now that I’ve gotten some sleep but, when I woke up, I just couldn’t escape the fact that, at this time, I feel more lonely than I ever have in my entire life. Yes, a significant part of this comes from the fact that since my midlife meltdown I’ve been pushing people away, so I accept the blame but when days like this hit where I can not suppress the effect that isolation is having on my life, it can be extremely challenging to even function at all.

My middle sister is in town for the month for training, and her friends came to town to visit. When not in town, she seems to be living the life that I used to live up in Seattle, and these friends of hers reminded me of the friends from my old group. They are in their late twenties, in that sweet spot where they are still down for fun with about five years left in them before they will settle into genuine adult lives. They were the first new people that I’ve met in the four years since I’ve moved home.

At first, I wanted to avoid them because I don’t know how to navigate interacting with my closest friends let alone deal with strangers anymore. Since I’m conflicted with my relationship with humor, I no longer know how to handle small talk or how to just be myself. I feared they would only see me as a weirdo while being nice because I am the brother of their friend. Though I didn’t fully open up, I kind of got to joking like old times. It really killed me because I miss the old me who used to thrive off the energy of getting others to laugh.

This hour of interaction wasn’t all that much, and I did keep my guard up, but at the same time it got me rethinking where I am. Though I’ve grown to accept my lot in life, I don’t always like what that means. This interaction was the entire reason I bought the box of wine to attempt to recapture the good old days, but I was alone in my room, so it had quite the opposite effect. I’m sure I’ll be better tomorrow, once I sleep this off but for now, here we are.

As for the actual assignment from yesterday, where I was supposed to avoid taking shortcuts since life is not a get rich quick scheme. I guess what I wrote above relates in that my getting drunk was almost equivalent to the false promise of the get rich quick shortcut, being that I was hoping that the booze would take the place of the company that I really needed. Though I’m sure I’ll be over all of it tomorrow, the lesson was learned that I can no longer use booze as a shortcut to escape my loneliness. Too bad it took trial and error to learn this.

So, that’s what I got for yesterday. Now for today, I’m just supposed to notice and appreciate the movement that’s going on in my life right now. This will probably make much more sense when I dig into it deeper tomorrow when I check in. Until then, it’s now that time for me to sign off by saying, 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.