Socratic in the Ferns

I think that the only way for me to retain my sanity lately is to let myself go a little insane. It's not like I'm in immediate pain at all here - I have good days and have fun and friends and all - but that's not really what keeps me sane lately. It's the times when I get blinded by things that I never saw before, when I have a violent reaction to something that doesn't matter 24 hours later. It's just another one of those contradictions - you have to go all the way one way to know what its opposite is, then maybe go all the way to that opposite, then maybe figure out where the common ground is.

Truthfully, at this stage there's no point I'd rather be at - I do feel a lot like I've been killing time while I could have been doing something else, but everything happens for a reason and I'm glad to have grown in the ways I have in the past 7 months or so. I didn't expect this kind of growth at all in August, but I'm glad it happened because I finally found out what I'm like when I'm screwed up this much. It's only pushed me further to understand that I need to live by my own rules - I don't think that this is true of everyone, but it's all that works for me. As soon as I fall into a path that everyone else has worn ahead of me, I go all Socratic and keep questioning myself can't rest until I know that I'm just a little bit off the path. I hate to be that person stepping on all the ferns and stuff, but knowing that I'm off the track is what keeps me sane.

Going along with that, you can't please everyone. My dad's said it to me more than once - the lawyer training talking, I assumed - but maybe he's on to something there. Well, if you can't please everyone, there must be some order in which you choose who to please. I guess selfishly the person at the top would be yourself - maybe I'll change that at some point, but it's true for now. We're all still trying to figure out how we want to live our lives, and the only way to know if we're on the right track is to ask ourselves, in all honesty, "Is this what I want?" I don't like that question as much as one might think, because it seems so selfish and introverted. Well, I did take a personality test and it turned out that I was 93% introvert, which is probably undeniably accurate, but I'm not really sure what it technically means to be introverted, or where the line is between introvert and selfish. Maybe there isn't a line and I'm like Cruella DeVille or something. At least I like puppies?

Oye Vey, do I have a point? Maybe there was one in there. Lets try to sum it up quickly, shall we?

Regardless of how happy we are, what we're doing or who we're with, we're all still trying to figure out what we want to do with ourselves. There's no telling where we'll end up, and we have to be willing to do what we feel is necessary to see all sides of the spectrum. But there comes the question of the path as well - at some point we will choose a road to follow, and at some point maybe we'll be more stable human beings than we are now. Stability's kind of overrated, anyway. But the truthful answers to each question come from the heart, whether we're aware of it or not. Simultaneously, not everything is a life or death matter in the long run, but at some point maybe it really was. There's also the saying that goes something like, "Regret nothing, for everything you ever did was at some point exactly what you wanted." Well, there are contradictions to that, I mean we do stuff we don't want to do rather often, but we then have to ask ourselves why we do them. Maybe it's so that you can know what its complete opposite is, and then you can find the happy medium. Maybe it's because you're not doing it for yourself, but then who are you doing it for? Or maybe because we know it will be worth it when it's all over (but we don't, really).