(from saturday)

i'm edgy and shaky and cold and i don't quite know why i'm depressed. spent the day a-wasting in front of a computer playing a game, throwback to my insular teens, refuge in this bland place where i am in control of everything, where i have initiative, where the world makes sense. it's something i do every now and again, hide away like this, submerge in a meaningless little place.

my house is freezing, i'm typing with gloves on. the final semester of uni is scaring me more than i thought it would. i'm 23. this is time to do something with my life, but the things i think most valuable, the things i most want to do - influence people with my writing, start up a street press, eventualy write a book - are not things that i can see myself doing or even beginning. too much dreaming, too little doing. initiative, this is a downfall, a weakness of mine i know too well. i have to cajole myself, coax, build up a storm of wanting to make myself step into the great unknown. either that, or throw myself into something, completely unprepared, and try my best, like learning to swim after the boat sinks. i'm learning to cook now because i have to; learnt page layout last year because i had to.

if i get a job next year, i'll be fine, in one sense. i know and understand systems and how to work within them; a process of learning, feeling out constraints, working creatively within them, even excelling, in some way, sooner or later. but in another way, i'll be stuck, dead in the water. it's so easy to relinquish decisions, give up the difficulties of freedom in exchange for the security of a system. decisions don't scare me, but i never spend much time deliberating on something. big decisions seem to be intuitively processed and i already know which way i'm leaning, but little decisions, which restaurant to go to, what to fill my day with, these i find harder; no resorting to emotional processing for these things, these supposed wants.

it's why i like travel so much, i think, because i can take both more time and less time with decisions; i can turn over the options of what to do that day to whim, or give it more time, the time i don't think it deserves in real, tethered life.

this year has been strange for me. during uni, i've mostly been emotionally serene, post-teen angst. not this year. up and down.

thinking: for a long time, my main project in life was to form a strong sense of self. my early years, i was almost subhuman. i can't remember thinking conciously before 12, can't remember making decisions till a couple of years after that. a dreamer, a boy with no sense of self, a boy who forgot his own name in primary school because he didn't identify with it, didn't make the connection between outside labels and inside self. teens - loneliness at times, shy, sci-fi/fantasy books and computer games, escaping into realms safer than real life and people

since then, i've formed, developed some shape and structure. like a recent convert to life, i became insatiable, greedy for the things denied me: people, truth, emotion, love, sex, travel, the outward things in the outward world.

so now i'm formed, largely in a rejection of the things i didn't like about me before, i'm 23, i'm smart enough - though in an intuitive, logical-leap kinda way, not in terms of sharpness - and i know myself intimately, strengths and weaknesses (having been through an unusually rigorous process of formation, perhaps?). now i need a new project for the next phase of life. i'm here, but what do i apply this 'i' to? i don't know, and i'm terrified of not knowing. uncertainty is the edge between exhilaration and terror, and it's my choice which way the scale tips. if i get a job, will i ever leave the system which nurtures and protects me? ultimate freedom is terrifying, and that's why channeling it into small packages of travel is so fun.

i think why i do this, why i write here is to clarify, to send things out not leave them in. to write something is to make it real. to take it out of the clamour of the mind and test it against reality using real letters and real words. for me, writing is believing.