JB Long

I still don't think I'm gonna be spending hours a day on social media... because it's social media... but while I'm here: if you're curious at all about what is going on with me work wise, the answer is "something really cool that is still very far away". I hope it tickles your (eventual) fancies.

And with that, I'm going to try to fake normal til I make normal, again.

I want to kill the part of me that fears living.

Hell, maybe I'll end up being the exact same person again. Just in a different time and place and with different people.

I don't know. I just know this:

I am tired of being resilient, because it means that I've had to be.

You hold on to little pieces of the prior you. Sometimes they're bigger than you think. Sometimes they regrow over time. Sometimes the negative associations fade. I know I'm never NOT going to be a rambling, wordy, over-explaining, heart on the sleeve cringe lord, but the rest... is hella fuzzy now.

I've gone through it a handful of times before. So, I am confident I'll bounce back eventually, but eventually feels very, very far away ...until it isn't. And it feels like every time, it gets a little bit harder. And finding the new direction gets a little bit harder. This one's been really rough.

I'm trying to figure out who I am, again. This'll hopefully be the most out-there thing I've said but I genuinely believe "death" is something that happens multiple times, at least to most folks. Not physically, but socially, mentally, personally. And I think I've gone through that this year. Again.

Summarizing the cavalcade of negative emotions that spurred this mood is probably going to be fruitless. Expressing them isn't likely to do me much more long-term good than bottling them, either. Maybe it dredges up more anxiety, maybe it makes me look bad to y'all — I'm not sure I care anymore.

Nothing will bring me joy like the reckoning that I choose to have faith those people will see, whether in our lifetimes or in the next. I'll cut that tangent short, but I include it because it's illustrative that I'm *capable* of resentment in a vacuum and how that contrasts to everything else.

For the record, the people I DO hate are the types of villains I repost news about. Shrunken de-wrinkled nutsack people like Stephen Miller. Your Putins, Netanyahus, Trumps. Special shout out to Mike Johnson and his Masturbators Anonymous group chat that's just him and his kid. Strange, evil people.

Reach out. Let's bury it. I don't expect that will be the case for many, but who knows who sees what. This app is public, after all. I'm trying to not self-censor for fear of my feelings being "too much" (a sentiment I have very rarely heard from anyone outside my own head to begin with).

I said before, I'm an isolating, introverted, quiet person in real life. I don't "need" to be in anyone's life, but if I was previously, and vice versa, I do hope that it's not with any resentment if that's no longer the case. If you read this and see "us" in it, that's the long and short of it.

All that to say I don't have any real, serious, lasting feelings of ire for anyone in my life currently or previously. I still have love for everyone I *have* loved before, even the painful ones. It's the way I'm wired. I just want everyone to be okay. Selfishly, I want them to be okay with me, too.

In the rare instance I do get outwardly huffy or argumentative, I feel exhausted and panicked after. I feel an overwhelming urge to "solve" it, even at my own expense. So it's not exactly something I seek out or naturally perpetuate, for that reason.

So feeling like there's beef with someone, whether perceived, real, or otherwise, is probably the most anxiogenic experience I have in life. Because it just drags that basal, primal fear of conflict barreling out of me, and a fear of being shitty and deserving the disdain.

You can hurt my feelings if you want. Push me around, take advantage — I just want peace. I need peace. That comes from childhood. Screaming matches, death threats, and things like moments waiting near the phone wondering if the ring was mom letting me know she's safe, or the cops with the opposite.

Not for ego or the protection of self worth. Simply because conflict is anathema to me. I like getting along with people. I don't need to be liked per se. I venture to guess by sterilizing and cushioning myself I'm paradoxically creating the recipe to not be, tbh!

But I do "need" calm social seas.

Looking back on everything, I'm sure there are people that assume I don't like them, or that I've got sour grapes over things. But I don't think I've got that in me, at least not anymore. Mainly I (admittedly self-centeredly) lament that they might hate *me*, and worry it might somehow be justified.

Thankfully, I can mostly count them on one hand, but of course there have been people who have hurt me in seriously life-altering ways. I always saw their side, whether it's "really" fair or not, and haven't ever mustered long-lived disdain. I just crave normality and comfort. Status quo, I guess?

But I do, essentially, live by them. I have been resilient, in actuality. I'm taking good care of myself, and my family. I don't hold grudges, I don't blame anyone else, even if it would be easier at times. I don't know if that's healthy, either. Where's the line between "blame" and "acknowledge"?

John Cena (of all people) likes to say "control the controllable" and on paper I find a great deal of peace in that.

Or, similarly paraphrased from the Boondocks: "If there's nothing you can do, but you can't do nothing, do what you can".

Neither makes the moment to moment actually feel better.

I really don't mean to be pretentious, I really don't mean to be dramatic, poetic, wax on and on, or be... CRINGE!!!

I just feel generally dreadful, in a way that I haven't, and didn't, even in my most miserable, awful periods of life. No level of understanding what is and isn't controllable helps.

Looking for the "why" is a pointless endeavor, and more often than not if you find it, you just use it to engineer more self-loathing. Sometimes there just genuinely isn't any sensible "why" for the things that happen, and sometimes shit just fucking sucks. Or shit just happens for no reason at all!

And at the end of the day, it all comes back to that entropy. No matter how hard we try, something else will fuck things up for us even if we don't fuck them up ourselves. Someone will misunderstand us. Over, or under react. Someone will make choices for us, or completely unrelated things sway them.

You can do your absolute best to live morally, treat everyone well, be self-aware, and you're still gonna fuck up. There's obviously a wildly huge range of "fucking up", and I certainly don't think I've ever fucked up in the ways any actually bad person does. But it didn't matter, and it won't.

But what even is "deserve"? Does anyone "deserve" anything? I don't think the entropy of life cares. I try to come to terms with the fact that we can work as hard as we want to do everything right and it doesn't matter as far as outcome. It matters that we try, and I do, but the result doesn't care.

But try as I might, and especially try as the disorder's voice might... after reflection... nothing I've done in life feels proportional to the complete and total obliteration of self that I feel. I own everything I do in life, maybe to a fault. But I don't really believe I deserve to feel this way.

I've tried, and hopefully succeeded, at apologizing and owning that harm, and those mistakes, when given chance to. I'm also sure I've taken what would be molehills and made mountains by doing so. Fair to myself (or others) or not... the OCD drives the car uncomfortably often, not always noticeably.

I tried hard to blame myself, as is customary in OCD: I HAVE made mistakes and harmed others, as anyone has, and I obsess over it. Made dumb, ignorant, or overthought decisions. But, when I haven't, no amount of logic or reassurance kills that intrusion of thought; the proportions are blown way out.

Whether actually true or not, I feel exiled from everything that formed my identity, and feel like I've woken up from a dream into a grand and vacuous nothing.

Like I've been playing a JB "character" for the last most of a decade but he was killed off, and now I have to be regular old _____ again.

Obsessive compulsive disorder also got me into many painful traps, with obsessions masquerading as positive feelings at times, creating what were not dissimilar to destructive manic episodes, honestly.

I've had a deep-seated fear of death for decades, but it went away. And not in a positive way.