Operation Achieve Anything: Day Three-Hundred-Twenty-Five, Dateline 11-21-2018
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“Solitude never hurt anyone. Emily Dickinson lived alone, and she wrote some of the most beautiful poetry the world has ever known... then went crazy as a loon.”
Good morning crickets. Welcome to day number three-hundred-twenty-five of Operation Achieve Anything. I am so excited about the next couple of days because I’m going to be taking a few preplanned days off from my SNL review challenge while using a couple of banked reviews to keep up my one-review-a-day average. Though I often build and use back up reviews, I usually use my safety net content when I’m too hung over to focus which happens once or twice a month. Typically, these weekend benders are unplanned, so any time off is more guilt-ridden and not the refreshing break that I actually need.
Yes, I am planning this time off for Thanksgiving, but not for the reasons you might think unless you know me or have read any of my posts around Thanksgiving time any other year. No, I won’t be taking the time off to spend anxiety-inducing time with my family because, for the past seventeen years, Thanksgiving has evolved to become my own celebration of solitude. I’ll dig deeper into the hows and whys when I check in with tomorrow’s Thanksgiving update, but for now, I’m just sharing this to transition into talking about yesterday’s solitude themed assignment where I was supposed to get into the practice learning to be comfortable while left alone with my own mind.
As you can see from this site, I may still need to work on actually liking myself, but I’m beyond comfortable with my alone time. That said, I’d say yesterday’s task to actively put effort into working solitude time into my daily routine has been fulfilled ten times over before I even started this challenge. If anything, as I pointed out yesterday, I need to get back to putting effort into branching out and accepting others into my life before I become a full-blown hermit. It’s not really that I hate human interaction, I’m just finding that at my age, with the life that I live makes it harder and harder to connect whose only dreams are to settle into normalcy.
I never had white picket fence fantasies. I never wanted to be a CEO. I never wanted anything to do with normal. This used to seem more respectable when I was young, but now that I’m old it’s hard not to feel like a loser. Granted, a lot of these feeling of failure comes from within, being that I thought for sure I would have had it figured out by now, but at the same time, every conversation always focuses more how I plan to support myself over what I’m actually doing.
I find it weird how people see no problems with others struggling to put food on their enormous family’s table because they jumped the gun in chasing their dream to breed. They’re too busy faking it in the hopes of making it at dead-end jobs, spending more time at work than at home while everyone struggles with all of the stresses pulling everyone apart. Yet, the struggle of an individual, with intentional plans to struggle on their own while chasing a passion, aware and ready of the risks of never making it, is treated with less respect.
This is why I’ve been bracing myself for the lonely days ever since I realized that I wanted to live a creative existence and not just fall in line. I know this might sound like this is going out to any critics of this type of lifestyle, but really this is actually a reminder to myself. When thinking things out logically, a have no real problem with my approach towards life, I just now have to figure out a way to genuinely not worry about the potential thoughts of anyone else, instead of just conceptually not worrying about said thoughts.
Up until this post, I used to think I needed to become successful on my own terms before I attempting to crawl out of my cave to introduce the new me to the world, but I feel that I need to work through sync up my intellectualized outlook on outsiders potential judgments with how I actually feel inside. With that, I think I’ve fulfilled the assignment from yesterday. With that, it’s now time to introduce the assignment for today where I’m now supposed to flip the script and explore the negative side of solitude. Of course, you’ll have to wait for tomorrow update to hear my thoughts on the subject. Until then, it’s now 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.
