Living In Shadows...No More...

I got back from Los Angeles on wednesday morning, I can probably go on and on about how awesome it was and what a fab time I had, it's true, it was one of my best ever trips anywhere, but then all of them are, still this one was different, I'll spare everyone the tour of LA haha, it's not free :P! Anyway I had decided not to be so philosphical anymore and try to be the person I was before, the one I remember being before I came to Sydney, the one who didn't think, period, let alone so much. I, who have always been so good at ignoring any thoughts I want to, have been blocking out all the thoughts I shouldn't have and vice versa.
Louis calls me a brooder, before I would half agree, not anymore, from my blog yes totally, but my blog as I said before just raises my concerns to an extent and they all seem to be negative...DUH!
The time I spent in LA was really short, five days to be specific, I still can't beleive how much it taught me about myself, things I couldn't see before, feelings I never felt before, a new view, but then I have to question was it only the city? Ofcourse not, I would probably expand on that when I have the guts to put it here, but for me atleast people make places, anyway what I was trying to say was can anyone outgrow cities? My friend also said that I was the first person he met who outgrows cities, I have always felt Sydney has been a let down, pardon my arrogance. My equation with Sydney has been complicated from the start, somehow I can't be a part of an equation that would be solvable, if that makes any sense, atleast my math degree is finally showing some usefulness, scary haha!
I feel like I have changed, come back a new person, a happy person, I don't feel I carry around baggage anymore, like I threw it all on the way somewhere. There I saw what I had always wanted to see in Sydney but it never showed me, there was a fleeting glance once but it all ended up in smoke.
I don't feel dimnished anymore, I can FEEL again, emotions have never totally governed my grown up life, I have always been half intrested, half in love, half in grief, never fully feeling anything, I have emerged from the past...living in shadows...no more...

16th Sept '04 - 16th Sept '05

This is something I wrote a long time ago, I really don't know why I am putting it here because I still think it should have stayed where I wrote it, anyone reading it should read it with the knowledge that I wrote it thinking only I would ever read it, I guess this shows how far I have come in a year, not far at all it seems...
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16th September '04
Sydney
12.24am

I'm lying here a little after midnight wondering why am I not going to bed when i'm so sleepy? It's raining hard outside but does it affect me at all? I don't know, lots of things much more important than the rain don't affect me...
Maybe something's wrong with my perception of the world and how it should be or maybe something's wrong with the world's perception of me. Things happen which I don't understand but now i've given up on trying to understand why they happen, but, that doesn't mean they don't bother me anymore. I know i'm very lucky whether I wanna admit it or not, whether I wanna be thankful for it or not.
There are times when I just wanna run away, don't know where and why, it's not that I feel trapped. Then it would be understandable. But is the running worth it when you know you have to come back to the same place? Somehow I don't think so. I feel like a really complicated person and sometimes I don't even want to think about some of the things i've done cause it's so much easier not to. To run from what? Unhappiness? Loneliness? What?
It's just very difficult for me to understand and the harder I try to understand, the more complicated it becomes. My thinking just feels warped. I have everything in life I can ask for but still i'm unhappy. Why? I've asked myself that question a million times, Why? Why? Why?
What is in my life that makes me so unhappy? or what is not there?
The thought that is more scary is that I don't know what will happen that can make me happy. By happy here I don't mean temporary, I mean permanent or is there any such thing at all? Am I living in my own naive world? Where did I go wrong? I haven't had a choice of paths, just left with one, so either I follow it or stay where I was and it was impossible for me stay because any path would lead to a better place and it has. Then why be unhappy? What do I want from life? Nothing to hard too get or impossible to find, then what is it?
There are too many emotions running wild in the world, atleast in mine, but, resentment is not one of those. During the last couple of years there are a few people who have treated me badly, I know i didn't give them any reason to treat me like they did. Why the hell don't I bear a grudge against them? Why don't I want to hurt them back? I know if they meet me in the future, I will meet them grinning like a fool pretending nothing happened and we are all friends. I don't resent anything that anybody has done purposely to me in the past. Don't know why. I don't want to see those people again and I don't care about them but I sure as hell don't hate them. I don't hate any single person but I don't love a lot of people either, marked indifference seems the key word. It's difficult to hate but even more difficult to love. If you don't know how to hate, can you ever love...?
At other times I think do I just care about myself? I know that can't be true because selfish people are happy. Why? Another thing in life I don't understand. Makes quite a few of them. But I am young and there's lot's ahead to look forward to and ofcourse there's always the hope of permanent hapiness even though temporary is just fine...
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Well, anyone who has made it this far can probably see i'm still writing about the same things, kind of dissapointing actually to discover that in a year you still haven't quite moved on, quite come to peace with yourself or quite overcome your personal demons. Rewriting those moments again has been very helpful in the sense of showing me what to do, there was nothing or no one stopping me from being happy except myself, I can see that quite clearly now and I had absolutely no right to whine and complain about life and unhapiness when it seems I was my own worst enemy. Despite seeing clearly what was wrong, I still can't help myself dangerously indulging in it all over again...

Living in Shadows...

Have you ever felt invisible? You can’t seem to walk down a street without people bumping into you and then just walking past like they hadn’t noticed anything at all let alone actually knocking into a person. Everyone seems to be in such a hurry these days, to and from, one place to another, they seem to know where they're going and what they're doing. Is everyone like that? Do we all know what we are doing and where we are headed? Our future...?
I don't know, i'm scared of not knowing what lies ahead but also, in a way, scared of knowing, I do not even have a vague notion of things to come but i'm not sure if I want to see, that makes it a confusing way to look at life right? Not knowing what life has in store for you, taking each day as it comes, it's a good way to lead life I guess, it's a protective life to lead, always in the shadows, writing your life and thoughts in the elusive hope that someone can finally understand you...
There are many times when I feel like giving up, I can see the creeping paralysis of my dream, is this the build up to my future? Then why do I keep giving the illusion of a man at peace with himself and secure at the still centre of his being? Strangely enough all my life, things have just seemed to work out for me in the end, whether I do anything about it or not, maybe this will as well, I think I know the reason why it's so...
There are sometimes I just go and sit alone, be it a lonely park or a bench in full street paranoia, I can never get used to being so close to people yet being so far away, I can see them, hear them, be surrounded by them but still feel like I could as well be a hundred miles away, I admit I speak wistfully but without resentment.
Love, anger, joy, grief, hatred...all seem to be emotions too powerful for my dimnished personality, I can merely entertain their pale shadows, this is what living in shadows is like...