On Half-Full, In Half-Empty

I have often been labeled as a pessimist and even though that's probably a fair label, it carries unfair connotations about what pessimism really is. The common misconception about pessimists is that they are typically negative people who predict negative outcomes in most situations that they encounter and by doing so, they prevent or inhibit positive things from happening. The last part is important because it is a widely-accepted fallacy that divides people and we need to eliminate it from our social protocol.

For example, any dilligent and responsible worker, regardless of their stance on optimism or pessimism, will take precautions to account for both positive and negative outcomes in the work they are doing. If the individual in question happens to be some guy doing electrical work on power lines, he already knows that there have been enough safety precautions taken that the likelihood of an accident is very low. He may have disconnected and re-connected hundreds of power lines without incident. All signs point to a positive outcome, but because he is responsible, he will still follow every standard safety procedure that he knows to be tried and true.

An optimist and a pessimist in this position will likely do everything in exactly the same way up to this point. However, when he goes to re-connect the line and finds that there is no electricity flowing, then you begin to see who's the pessimist. The problem he has encountered is not a safety issue, it is a technical one related to the repair itself and an optimist who has succeeded in completing this repair hundreds of times before in exactly the same way will not be prepared for this. He will likely review his steps and make sure he did it all correctly, maybe eventually concluding that the problem isn't on his end, but for a period of time, the optimist is confused because he predicted a positive outcome based on experience and received a negative one.

A pessimist in this position who repairs the line and finds that there is still no power reacts differently. Someone who has successfully repaired hundreds of lines but also happens to be a pessimist will always anticipate a negative outcome, regardless of the variables. The optimist dismissed negative outcomes early in the repair, citing the many safety precautions employed and the rational fact that every other identical situation had resulted in a positive outcome. This allows an optimist to maintain a positive outlook and simultaneously be comfortable with the knowledge that he has already accounted for the possibility of failure--when really, he hasn't. When the pessimist repairs the line and finds that it's still broken, there is certainly a moment of confusion, but before questioning himself, he has already snapped to reality and concluded that there is something wrong and that he doesn't yet understand what it is. An optimist who expects the positive outcome unfailingly will spend more time confused about it than a pessimist because the unexpected outcome just doesn't sit right with them. A pessimist expecting a positive outcome who doesn't get it is almost immediately assessing the problem with a clear head. After all, the power line should be working--but it's not, so deal with it. In the end, the problem still needs to be fixed and it will regardless, but I'll betcha that pessimists are more efficient at completing the job and optimists are more likely to electrocute themselves while scratching their head in a state of confusion.

You may not agree and maybe as a pessimist, I'm not qualified to talk about how an optimist behaves--but I'm not totally uninformed either because although we can generalize, nobody is optimistic or pessimistic 100% of the time and we constantly interact with a healthy mixture of both in our day-to-day lives. In my scenario above, the job still gets done and ultimately, optimists and pessimists aren't all that different after all in terms of what they can and cannot achieve in the world.

The trouble is, pessimists piss people off. And some people have money. When people with money get pissed off, they tend to exchange some of their money for power and then use that power to effect a change that will theoretically make them less pissed off. This can be both noble and selfish, but in either case, it is a reality. Pessimism is a product of misfortune and hardship that is frowned upon in today's world because we are in a world controlled by money--people with money like optimistic thinking because they can identify with it. They dislike pessimistic thinking because they worked hard to build and keep their fortune and anyone who is not as successful as they are should just work harder instead of complaining.

At a higher level, it is the people with the money that control our jobs, our government and a significant portion of the media. As a result, "positive thinking" is something that you want to put on your resumé, and "I am a pessimist" is not. As a result, we elect people who promise impossible dreams from the government instead of someone who talks only about the real problems and ways to solve them. As a result, television commercials, public banner advertisements, workshops and exhibits are all blanketed in positivity--everything's about looking on the bright side, filtering out bad thoughts and smiling for no reason. If you still think that these things are actually good for you, that's okay, it's not your fault--like I said, the people with the money control so much that their wishes quite often come true. That's why smiling for no reason actually really does makes a lot of people feel better. That's why thinking positively makes people feel better--we are conditioned to believe that it works. And that's great. But something that makes you feel good isn't always good for you.

Pessimism should not be confused with complaining. More accurately, pessimism is about expecting a negative outcome so as to surrender yourself to the fact that the world is larger than you understand. It is the firm belief that you cannot control everything in your life, but it is not the same as believing that you control nothing at all. It is knowing that you can change some things to find a solution, but also knowing that if it weren't for the elements outside of your control, the solution could not exist in the first place. It is not a defeatist attitude, but a realistic and pro-active one, and that's the hardest part to convince anyone of. It seems like every time I sit down to write anything, I find myself in an ideological war with the world comprised entirely of fighting losing battles and this attempt to clarify that pessimists are just as valuable as optimists is no different. Trying to put together a convincing argument to separate negativity from pessimism is like trying to separate wet from water and I wouldn't even bother thinking about it if I didn't think it was important. Then to come out and say that pessimists are actually better workers, more efficient thinkers and exactly the type of people you want in your life is an even tougher argument but I'd better give it a whirl.

Optimists believe in things like a majority vote. "If the majority of people agree, then it must be right." They are the people who will tell you that you should "make your own luck" or "if you believe in yourself, you can accomplish all your goals." They believe that thinking positively is the best way to think constructively and that their positive thinking is directly related to the positive outcomes that they achieve. What they fail to do is consider attributing a negative outcome to a positive initiative. Usually, the negative outcomes are attributed to the inherent random nature of life itself and most optimists have no problem admitting that nothing's perfect and that "shit happens." This is what I don't like--the selfishness of some optimists. They are keen to take credit for thinking positively when something goes right, but when something goes wrong, they attribute it to chance and then use those incidents to identify with other hard luck people.

It's difficult to prove, but a critical thinker should be able to see that too much optimism can result in poor planning, unrealistic expectations and naive perspectives on the world at large. But still, it's the pessimists who get the shaft in the social world--besides, nobody likes a party pooper, right? It's the pessimists who are the pricks and always end up on the receiving end of sarcastic remarks like "would it kill you smile once in awhile?" or worse, their personality traits are criticized and lambasted behind their backs--always in a negative context. Nobody talks positively about pessimistic traits and that's just not fair.

There are so many variables in the world that it is almost guaranteed that fewer things are going to go your way in life than those that do and thus, pessimism both pre-dates optimism and is the very reason positive thinking exists at all. People had to confront the fact that shit happens and to make themselves feel better, began wishing for the opposite. The luckiest ones had most of their wishes come true, became successful and began to purport that positive thinking is the whole secret of life. The majority of the people who tried positive thinking did not have their wishes come true; the optimists of the bunch chose to cling to the belief that if you just think positively like all the successful people, you too will one day succeed. The pessimists of the bunch become disenfranchised with how little their positive thinking has gotten them and through experience, they learn to expect negative outcomes.

Over time, the division between these two types of people has grown to downright religious levels of misguided belief--the pessimists believe that the optimists are naive for thinking optimistically and the optimists think the pessimists are naive for thinking pessimistically. It becomes a conflict of ideology where people are judged based on their belief without the judge understanding exactly what they believe in. If you were to meet ten people that all had a nametag that said either "Optimist" or "Pessimist", you would be wrong to read them any differently from each other. A pessimist is likely to assume that all the Optimists are naive and out of touch with reality. This is not the case. An optimist is likely to assume that all the Pessimists are cynical people who brings themselves down and others down with them. That is also not the case. Listen, we're all the same here. Optimistic thinking does not make people naive--it makes them "hopeful," I would say, but not necessarily naive. Pessimistic thinking does not make the pessimist unhappy--but it forces them to think harder about solving problems and better prepares them for a crisis. Nobody wants bad things to happen to them and nobody intentionally brings it on themselves--that should never be assumed about someone who is pessimistic and nobody should want bad things to happen to other people anyway. Ironically, pessimists are about the only thing that optimists are pessimistic about!!

I don't know where the hell I'm going with this. But the point is, don't discriminate against pessimists, positive thinking is over-rated and no matter what we do in life, we're all DOOMED!(?)

On Success, In Scruples

One of the biggest challenges I face with advancing my career is the fact that I gave a lot more effort to my early menial jobs than was ever necessary. If you try as hard as you possibly can to be the best damn burger-flipper around, you're still only makin' six bucks an hour. When I was a teenager, I may have delivered those flyers ten times better than the other kid on the block, but we still made the same number of pennies per page. Plus, all my early jobs lasted quite while, too--often in excess of 1 year, which is a lot for someone just breaking into the work force. I was tricked into believing that giving more effort than my employees was actually valuable.

I was fooled by all of my role models into believing that if you stay at a job for a long time, the longevity and loyalty will look good on your resumé for future employers--only to ultimately grow up in a world where employment is so transient that job "diversity" is sought over the more traditional values. Eventually, it became clear that the people who told me to have a good work ethic and strong seniority in trivial work weren't the same people who were writing the cheques. It took longer than I would've liked to figure that out and although I obviously need the money to live, all I seem to have gotten out of my jobs otherwise are the friends that I make there--but even those seem to disappear in transition, no matter how valuable they seemed at the time.

So now, I have a "real job". I guess. Maybe I've had a few "real" jobs, by now and my work ethic has never really changed in spite of how little I've gained from over-exerting myself. I'm tired of it, but it's ingrained into who I am and I really have a hard time giving the bare minimum. I build spreadsheets with pretty pictures and pretty colours that take twice as long as equally-functional bare bones spreadsheets--but I can't make them that simple because I'm just fundamentally programmed to create things the way I think they should be created. I think it's because I happened to believe that colours and pictures and all that decorative formatting jazz are legitimately important to running an administrative office. Soon enough, I may have enough information to prove that--but that's neither here nor there. What's on the plate right now is my own exhaustion with operating this way. How long do I continue giving too much effort without getting anything back before I realize that it's fruitless? Hell, I already know it's fruitless! Snap out of it, Self!

Of course, it's not that easy because in addition to learning what you don't get for your troubles, I've also learned a lot of other things and it's an irrational and insatiable fear that keeps me doing what I do. Throughout all of this "work force" business there is one thing I'm sure has nothing to do with your effort (or even your tangible contribution), and that is your chances of getting fired. I worked pretty damn hard at all of my jobs, subconsciously trying to make an impression in the world, and when I first got fired, I was mortified. It was like...the first thing in my life that didn't make sense--it didn't even compute. I had come to terms with the other mistakes that I'd made and blamed the wrong people for--I thought them out, came to a rational conclusion, saw the other person's point of view, took the lesson and moved on. But when I got fired, it was a clash of ideas and behaviours that I didn't know existed in the world at the time. Kinda like being told there's no Santa Claus for the first time when you're old enough to know it's true, but way too young to be happy about it.

Since then, I've been fired from more jobs than I care to count and for more reasons than I care to think about anymore. Some of my notices of dismissal had some truth in them, some made offensive bold-faced lies about me, some were deadpan thirty-second phone calls and some were issued by my own co-workers instead of the cowardly management. But ALL of them were different and NONE of them mentioned anything about what I gave while I worked there and what positive influence I had had. I mean sure, you don't expect a glowing review when you're being fired, but I was in A Helping Hand Staffing Services about a year ago and to this day, they still use one of the crappiest old spreadsheets I ever made for their scheduling when I worked there for six weeks in 2004. They STILL haven't done any thing to recognize the difference between punching the clock and the actual impact of the hours their employees work, and that shows a glaring lack of knowledge and confidence on the subject of your own business.

But what do you do as an employee? This plague exists in almost all businesses and only gets more contagious the larger a company grows. That's why the world is so screwed up and we have public industry that loses money by being affordable, extremely clean and well-maintained, while simultaneously a private industry offers the same service with better features and enhancements that cost more and are filthy. Somebody's making money, and it's not me. I'm too busy running around the bottom of the barrel of job stability at full speed trying to figure out how NOT to get fired, how could I possibly start thinking about how to better my career? In a sensible world, the things you do to get hired, avoid getting fired and better your career are all exactly the same and I think it's a bloody shame that our overtly convoluted society has made people forget that.

My aspirations have never been that high and the more I learn, the less enthusiastic I am about being successful. The more you know, the less it matters--sometimes to the point of feeling bad for others who give so much of themselves for so little gain. So my life isn't really about making a revolutionary and noticeable impact on the world at large because I don't think that's possible without a tremendous amount of luck. Malcom Gladwell wrote a book called "Outliers" recently that does an interesting exploration of worldly successful celebrities and public figures, focusing expressly on how the events leading up to their success can largely be attributed to good luck. Obviously, you have to want to succeed and there is a certain level of hard work involved, but Gladwell was trying to express that just because someone is successful, doesn't mean that they possess the formula for becoming so. For every high achiever who speaks strongly about the hard work, determination and perseverance that got them where there are today, there are a hundred other people who worked just as hard and got nowhere. There are way too many variables in life that are completely out of your control to justify walking around as though you can just will yourself to live the life that you choose. "Believe in yourself and you can achieve anything"--with a little luck. Without luck, though, it's just a gamble and you're trading your hardest efforts every day for something intangible and uncertain. It's naive and it works for some people--I won't hold it against you, but my case for it being a waste is empirically stronger than your case for boundless self-empowerment.

So I'm just gonna let this play itself out naturally. I can't re-create my entire work ethic overnight, but I think it's improving--and when I say "improving," I mean "conforming to the best possible fit for my own selfish needs without jeopardizing the outfit I work for and the role I play within it." I mean, I still have no idea what it takes to avoid getting fired but I don't think there's a formula for that. My work ethic is kind of a sub-conscious entity that behaves independently of my actual brain and doesn't evolve at the same pace. As I learn things, my conscious self feeds all that information slowly into my instincts and behaviours, so recognizing a needlessly strong work ethic is a good first step towards finding a way to do less than 12 hours worth of work in an 8 hour day for no reason.

The same thing happened over the last year or so where I went through a period of ridiculous self-loathing and took my own trivial failures so harshly that I'd hardly be able to function. My brain recognized the problem well before my instinct did and even as I stood there in a confused panic recklessly destroying things in my room just to let off some steam, my conscious self kept whispering the voice of reason in my ear. Louder and louder until eventually it drowned out the sounds of my panic. Now I'm fine--and that sounds pretty easy, but it took a long time and even though something like that doesn't totally disappear from your psyche overnight, I am now consciously aware of the way I was and the ways that I am better today. Back then, I was consciously aware of the way I was, I knew that it was wrong and I knew that I wasn't better yet--remember, don't overcomplicate your happiness. If you feel better, you're basically...well, better.

It's trait-based natural selection. Those features about you that serve you best in your own social environment will flourish over time and anything that has a negative impact will eventually fade from your character if you allow yourself the opportunity to change. The challenge is not in trying to become a different or better person, because who we are is defined by the people and settings we surround ourselves with. The buffet of life offers many different dishes for many different tastes and you can learn to love any one of them--the real challenge is not in selecting from the menu, but deciding where in the restaurant you want to sit.

On Love, In Sadness

Let me tell you about this world we live in. We live in a world so unabashedly complex that it dillutes our concept of what is important. It infects us with a mental sickness so pervasive and so potent that we become lost in the spectrum of our own emotions to the point that we are somehow completely unable to identify what makes us happy. We become fooled, tricked into believing that there are things more important than happiness and forget completely the simple notion that feeling happy in any given moment makes the moment a bright one. We overcomplicate the emotion, overthinking what it really is without realizing that happiness is far and away one of the easiest sensations to identify. It is easy to be happy in the short-term, and most people haven’t forgotten that, but the moment someone began to purport the unrealistic assertion that such a thing could be perpetuated forever—or for any extended length of time, really—the once-simple emotion took on two very different definitions and the human psyche has never recovered.

This is because the world is populated by cowards. People who are afraid to take a chance. People who don’t know what is good for them because they’re confused about what happiness is. They get so lost trying to “figure out” life as though it’s possible and would rather waste their years in the familiarity of their own solitary emotional disarray than take a chance, intimidated by the fact that it just might work. I know what it’s like to live that way, and you can do it, but you’ll end up learning the same simple lesson I did in a needlessly difficult way: happiness feeds off of happiness.

If you, as an unhappy person, find yourself surrounded by other unhappy people all the time, you will be fighting a losing battle and getting more and more confused about what it takes to be happy every single day. It is a miserable climb full of rose-coloured deception and trickery—peaks and valleys like you wouldn’t believe. Like nobody would believe, until it happens to you. This isn’t the fault of the people you hang around with, mind you—they are your friends and they are your friends for a reason. If they all happened to be unhappy, it’s not your fault, but it won’t do you any good either. Which is generally why people make new friends, I guess.

You have to take responsibility for what makes you happy and recognize what an important role the other people in your life play in understanding that. You have to recognize that you make friends with people because they make you happy and you make them happy—that’s the unwritten rule that all friends understand. Most importantly, though, you have to recognize that when the friends that you care about are hurt, you must remember that you have the power to make them happier and that in doing so, you too will feel better and your lives as friends will carry on.

Love is the simplest form of happiness because you are free to exchange any obligations or responsibilities for a sincere conversation. It provides you with an emotional safety cushion unlike any other and is priceless in value because it does not waver in the torrential winds of the rest of your life. Always, you have someone who will hold you when you’re broken down and tired. Always, you have someone who wants to be with you when it seems like nobody else is. Always, you have someone who actually cares about you, will hold your hand, not be afraid to touch your face and will tell you that everything is going to be okay, even when it’s not. The only people who seem to understand how much that’s worth never have anything to say about it. I guess that’s because you don’t realize it until you really are broken down and you really are hurt, but when you reach out for the hand you need to hold, it’s not there.

In conversation, it’s easy to explain how important “the little things” in life are. All you have to do is make a vague reference to something everyone enjoys, like popping bubble wrap, and then follow it up with a question like, “are these and other little quirks about life important to you?” No doubt, when you frame it that way, they sound pretty important and most people are likely to agree. Rarely though do we really consider what life would be like when some of those things are actually gone until they finally disappear. A cliché that has been beaten to death by its sheer durability—its absolute unwillingness to die. A cliché about appreciating what you have whose lesson we never learn despite widespread acknowledgment of it as truth.

In love, a million clichés all come true at once and require no explanation. Out of love, a million different clichés all come true at once, but we reject them because we believe our own circumstance to be unique and somehow exempt from universal rationale. Well, you’re not special. Don’t think you can justify your actions based on your circumstance. You can’t fool me, happy couple—you can tell me that you’ve found your true love all you want, but I’ll know it’s bullshit. I’ll know that it’s not your “true” love because no such thing exists—I’ll know that what you found was love and good for you, but I know that love exists everywhere for those brave enough to grab it. So, you’re not special—you’re just wildly disconnected from the millions of embittered single cowards in the real world where love is a scavenger hunt and not a lifestyle. And I envy you.

I envy you, but I’m not fooled by you and for that reason, I wish that you would see cause to envy me and what I’ve learned. Then maybe you, happy couple, would understand what you have and how hard some people will fight to get it. Then maybe you’ll stop and think before making a big problem out of a trivial one. Maybe you’d think a little harder and remember why you love them when you look into their eyes. And maybe every time that you’d hold them, you’d do it as though you may never hold them again. As everyone should.

Finding love should radically change your life expectations. It should be a trump card that feeds the other forces in your life, not a byproduct thereof. Obviously, it doesn’t change your life instantly, but it definitely changes your plans and goals and inspires you to fulfill them at any cost. Because you know it will be worth it. If you do not understand this about love, you do not know what it is. If you reject the chance to find love, you are a fool.
However, if you lived lonely, confused and unhappy, but then found love, understood it, understood what it means to be happy, lived happily for so long that it becomes natural, then have it taken away suddenly, without explanation, spent years mortified as to what and why this happened, finally getting the chance to resolve it, coming to terms with what happened, then finding out that the “resolution” was really just another unexplained “fuck you”, dwindling into a pathetic lifestyle of perpetual loneliness, finding no one to blame including oneself, but punishing oneself anyway for lack of any other reasonable conclusion, then walking around every day for years feeling so alone that every step is a heavy, sluggish waste of time, nobody wants to hang out with you, not a girl in the world will so much as bat an eye at you, nobody wants to hear your story and by then, you’ve told it so many times that it’s meaningless, and then suddenly, a glimmer of hope appears and you meet someone who enjoys spending time with you, actually phones you to make social calls after years of virtually nothing like it, then the friendship grows and the taste of love dances across the tip of your tongue, but it’s not love, it’s actually a demon in disguise that represents not love, but deception, and so you become bitterly familiar with the game as the players have chosen to play it, fucking around with heavy emotions and pleading ignorance to get away with it while you sit on the roller coaster and get driven to the top just to be thrown back down without a seatbelt, the ups and downs leave you exhausted, frustrated that the world could be so cruelly unpredictable, then you descend into the familiar state of solitary loneliness, joining all the other cowards, becoming resigned to the fact that the world is full of cowards and coming to terms with how much pain such cowardice causes, idly drawing your attention away from the insurmountable mountain that love has become in your mind, subtly dividing your efforts between an increasingly fruitless quest and the responsibilities of everyday life until love seems almost meaningless, a dream that I once had perhaps, long-forgotten, but then hurriedly brought back into focus by meeting someone that not only wanted to spent time with you, but even shares your frustration with love and the ridiculous and immature way the people in the world handle it, bypassing the social hurdles that put road blocks in the way of love for countless people, defying every bitter truth you’ve come to believe throughout the journey, clearing up the confusion that clouded your thoughts for so long, challenging you to open up, and finally you don’t have to worry about what happened in the past and you don’t have to worry about the hopelessness of the future, because finally everything seems to make sense, and finally you’ve found love, it has found you, and in doing so, it has made the most confusing and challenging thing in the world shockingly simple and hugely rewarding, and you settle down, and its effect on how you plan to live your life begins to set in, then you too are a fool. All the sincerity in the world won’t prevent it from collapsing on you. All the trust, all the times you’ve had—even those great specific moments that seemed so amazing at the time—will not matter and you will be fucked over for doing nothing wrong. It will not make sense to you, it cannot be explained to you, but it will happen and you will be helpless and confused and once again, a fool. A fool for not seeing it sooner, a fool for believing “I love you” when you hear it, a fool for saying it and meaning it, a fool for trusting anyone at all and a fool for thinking that your story is special and that this time it wouldn’t be like all the others.

You won’t fool me again, world. Not by your watery eyes, not by your cheeky promises and not by the artificial lights shining brightly along the corridor of this endless black tunnel.

On 2008, In 2009

The beginning of a new year sets forth an immovable procession of mental triggers and casual crises that disguise themselves as pragmatic resolutions to do greater things for no other reason than the passage of time and its cycle as it appears on the calendar. You become reflective about the challenges of the year past--the mistakes you have made, the things you have learned and the things you have achieved. Rarely though, do we recall our own resolutions from last year and rarely do we check to see just how well we did compared to what we intended to achieve when this feeling bore down on us the last time the clock struck midnight on New Year's Eve. Sure, we may have been particularly resolute and even scrawled the resolutions of 2008 on a napkin somewhere, lest ye forget, but as the year wears on, the trials and tribulations of everyday life become more important than your prospects for the future as they appeared in the past. Then, before you know it, you're using that napkin to wipe up a coffee spill on a crappy February morning and your goals for the year get pitched into the trash alongside a sopping wet newspaper and a box of dollar store Valentine's Day cards. But that's okay, because really, even if you had written them down and kept them somewhere safe, you didn't count on all these other things happening to you throughout the year when you first made those resolutions. How could you? Life proves to grow exponentially more complicated every year and if you can't learn and adapt rapidly enough to keep up with it, you'll be caught in the undertow with the ever-expanding pool of stragglers already lost.

To conquer this, I identified the problem early and in 2008, I made no resolutions; I began with a clean slate and instead used the time of reflection to gather a picture of myself. I wanted to know who I had become and instead of thinking about what happened in 2007, I looked well past that and remembered the last time that I really knew who I was. Then, I compared it to who I had become and realized that I had never quite done that before. I had been so caught up in the veritable hurricane of my psychological environment that I didn't realize how much I had changed or in what way, if any, it was happening.

I've found that the person I was has been beaten out of me--against my will at first, but by the end, embracing the change proved to be the only way to keep myself together. But I retained a lot of the personal strength I earned earlier in my life and to my own surprise, I find that I want to be a different person now. Maybe it was the time I spent in virtual solitude, maybe it's because of how much I've learned about the sheer overwhelming size of the planet and the people in it, but whatever it is, I am oddly content.

2008 began with a lot of new things for me. Maybe not "new" so much as things that I just hadn't had in a long time. It began in a new house on Bowness Road with a nice little garage and a simple but charming interior decor. Mitchell and I moved there in December and I still had what I considered a relatively new job at the City. Typically, as long as I consider my job to have little to no security, it's still new to me. I also began the year with a sense of having actually achieved something, after years of doing almost nothing. I didn't get my CD done like I intended to, but I pretty much single-handedly ran At Melee's End, which is the kind of event that performs a real public service to a degree that I'd never truly realized in my own life. And finally, I began the year with new friends--real friends, not just a bunch of people that you meet, which happens every year. In a way, I didn't even remember what it felt like to be socially accepted and it has helped to inspire other feelings of tranquility and contentment that I thought I may never feel again.

With everything going so well, it was difficult not to make resolutions at its outset. But I guess that's what I learned by climbing the steep staircase so many times only to get kicked right back down--I know how this depression game works, I've conquered it. But I didn't know all of its moves until 2008 came to a close; I still had a few weak spots that I knew to be well-guarded, but weak nonetheless. So, about halfway through the year, just as I was reaching for the mezzanine level of happiness, I was kicked back down to the basement again and I remember the tumble vividly. Thankfully, I was ready to be kicked and the inevitability of psychological duress didn't factor in, but I didn't count on burning up those weak spots on the way down. Oh and burn, did they ever--cauterized the wound, frankly. I don't know of anything that "heals all wounds" the way time is supposed to, but I do know that you can burn the fuck out of them until all that remains is a scabby, carbonized patch of scar tissue.

And I know this all sounds kinda negative, but it's really not; I guess that's part of what's changed about me. I've always considered myself a realistic person, but I used to be able to spin it into writing however I would choose. Now, even my optimism comes off as pessimistic to the ears of most. Although I seem to be reflecting on the year negatively, I prefer to think of it as a strength exercise and the perceived negativity is only representative of a greater challenge overcome, which yields a greater reward.

Speaking of rewards, I was also granted actual vacation time in 2008--something that I didn't really have a concept of. I didn't really understand why people at work seemed to live for their vacation time as though they hated their jobs so much that a day at work was infinitely more debilitating than a day off. Back then, I still defined happiness with a bar that I had set far too high at far too early an age, wherein every day was a great day and it didn't matter if you had to work or not because you had so much to live for. Well, when I went on vacation, I guess the main thing that I learned was that it's okay to bring the bar down a little. It's okay to want less than what you once had--sometimes, you have to. It's better for you.

Additionally, it allowed me to live solely for myself for a change. After making so many deposits for so long, I decided to make a withdrawal from the karma bank and spent it ruthlessly on self-gratification. Although, I am a fundamentally selfless person (i.e. it is gratifying to me personally to do things for other people), so I did spend some of it on others where I could, but it was mostly my vacation and nobody else's. I drove out to Vancouver for a week to see Jodi and basically kill some leisure time and burn up vacation days on nothing as planned. Then I spent the most important two days in Victoria completely by myself; it still felt like home to me and I never used a map once even though I hadn't set foot on the island in many years. I also confirmed what I had known to be true for a long time but others had often doubted: Victoria is a special place for me for more reasons than the base association with Lindsey and that's not why I went back there. It represents a conquest for individual strength and independence that I won against all odds and the things that happened to me there form the foundation for who I have become, even though the frame may have changed.

The visit to Victoria wasn't nearly as heavy or emotional as I expected it to be and I'm glad for it. A lot of that can be attributed to being kicked down the stairs again shortly before leaving and rather than the vacation time just coming around as planned, it left me in a state where I needed one so badly that it couldn't have come at a better time. The trip to Victoria reaffirms my own position as to how I feel about the relationship I lost and the hundreds of unanswered questions about it. It hardens me to the reality of it all and convinces me that the rough mental challenges I've had to endure to cope with it have not been in vain, if a little on the time-consuming side. And above all, it leaves me comfortable with the knowledge that the next time I visit Victoria, there will only be one reason: because I want to.

I burned up the last of my vacation time in Peachland with Jon which also helped to answer a lot of unanswered questions about him and just why he's been so difficult to get ahold of. He remains a very strong friend who I am able to talk to, but he is very disconnected and I'm not sure he'll ever be as involved with the lives of me and my friends as he once was. However, just being able to see him was enough to bring that issue to rest and I now have a clearer picture of his role in my life--a role I had often overemphasized in the past few years.

Returning from my vacation, I really did feel empowered. I knew that I was returning to a landscape of my life that was far from perfect--and in some areas, hostile even. But I was ready for anything. And by anything, I mean I was ready to climb the staircase again with the full expectation of being kicked back down yet again. I still remembered that that's how the game is played, but this time I knew that falling down the stairs wasn't going to hurt one bit. I had no intention of sitting in a curled up heap at the bottom, no sir--I was just gonna stand up and start climbin' again! So I began, one foot after another. Left, right, left, right. By September, I was practically running and seemed to have climbed quite a bit higher than I had in a long while.

I'm still wary of the boot that could be coming around every corner, but as 2008 came to a close, I began to reflect on the truths that I had learned over the year. For instance, unhappy people don't know how to make other unhappy people better. It doesn't work, and I had been trying it for years. I live for other people, and so to be crippled of my ability to help others had a devastating effect on me and I didn't even know it was happening. Now, I've given myself some time and came full circle on a lot of my own issues that had been swimming around wildly for years and finally, I feel confident that I can make the lives of those that I care about that much better. In doing so, it fuels my own happiness and empowers me to do that much more.

At least that's what it looks like at the beginning, here, now, in 2009.