RoM+UA+Wanted Another Journey to Find Myself

Journals - Major Programs
#41

So this past work week screwed me up. I didn’t realize how bad I was until it all hit me yesterday. I’m in pain because I’m still not recovered from all the other emotional issues in my life. So this event was a huge trigger for me. It feels like being in a dysfunctional family again and I can’t stand it.

I’m continuing to stretch out my core, but at this point it feels like it folds in half in an attempt to keep everything in. When I release it, I pretty much can’t deal with the emotions that come up. I was basically in a panic attack until about 2pm yesterday when I finally pulled out of it to see my friend.

I just felt awful. Like I couldn’t handle even one more day of shoving this all aside just to be functional. At my limit and not knowing what to do.

Also deleted all my online dating apps. I didn’t like how those things manipulated me. I don’t like how they manipulate people in general with their algorithms. Wasn’t getting anywhere with those. I was getting tired of finding women I really liked and knew there was a 1% chance of them responding. And I rarely had any interest given to me so I just said fuck it, I’m not gonna have some app wreck my self esteem. Maybe in the future if I’m in a more solid frame I’ll leverage them but not now.

Overall I just found myself thinking what’s the point of running wanted? I don’t go out, I just closed off the online window, I’m pretty much subconsciously doing everything to not be closer with women at this point. Is there any advantage to me running this sub if I’m not actively following about half the goals? But I don’t want to give up on this. I won’t give up. But man if I don’t feel like the most unwanted guy in the world right now with nothing redeeming.

And it’s not only that, it just feels like work and it’s unpleasant thinking about dates and all that. It should be fun and it’s not. To be honest I’m just tired of pushing for things all the time. I’m just thinking of self isolating again because my relationship with people in general sucks.

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#42

Whatever I went through it’s settled but I feel like I legit snapped these past few days. Apathy at an all time high today. Yesterday I just decided I wasn’t gonna go into work, just used a sick day today to recover mentally. They don’t need to know specifics.

Thoughts have been surrounding me like who am I really and what do I like? I was feeling like crap and I’ve been looking at updating my dress style. So I ended up buying a leather jacket I stumbled upon that I liked. Vintage from the 70s about 50 bucks. Mature, isn’t loud or flashy, but has character.

Doing my best to avoid “try hard cool”. I think most everyone knows what that is. Buying clothing to fit some image vs clothing that resonates and complements you. Even among people who dress in alt fashion, it’s still consumer based and mass produced nowadays. I really respect the hell out of early punks and their diy aesthetic, it was a subculture but a lot of individual expression and innovation. Nowadays people want to appear like they’re on the fringe without actually being that way in mentality.

Idk I guess being an outsider in my younger days and being ostracized for it, but now people want to mimic that for the clout. It just rubs me the wrong way. Bit gatekeeping on my end yeah.

So yeah still trying to figure out my own expression. I’m sure wanted will help with putting together my own style that I’m happy with. But that starts with listening to my inner voice and how it wants to express itself. Something I’ve kept shoved in a box for years.

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#43

Oef buddy the Reconciliation in this sentence is heavy. It seems you had a rough couple of days. Glad to hear that it’s settled and you’re moving on. Not to quote @RVconsultant, but a couple of rest days would not be a bad idea I guess.

Regarding your question about Wanted. I think Wanted can also be a self-improvement kind of style sub right? Getting more self-esteem and loving the way you are. Maybe you’re building the foundation right now and the woman will come when you’re ready for it. When it comes to online dating I have to agree, it sucks haha. Especially if you’re not the type of guy that likes to text girls.

Maybe you’re evolving into the type of dude that just walks up to a woman and start talking to them. Like we did in the 70s ;). When I think about punk, I think about people that go against the mainstream and the shiny things. You’re not doing it for the cloud, just be you and don’t think about how it would look to other people. Be the most authentic you that you can possibly be. the worlds love you the most that way and it will attract the right kind of people (woman).

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#44

Yeah I was actually thinking about taking some rest days to recover before diving back in. Good call.

Absolutely. It’s a deep sub. I think I got hung up on the women aspect of it and was feeling pretty bad. I think you’re right. I’m still building myself up and it’s better to go inward for now and take care of my needs vs looking for those external situations.

That’s the plan. I’ve always had massive anxiety and I’ve gotten tired of structuring my life around it or pretending it wasn’t a big deal. I think wanted is definitely bringing out more of my authentic self. I’ve always disliked mainstream and following set paths and traditions so it makes sense it’s manifesting itself more now. I just have to lean into it more and own it.

Thanks for stopping by for the encouraging words. Much appreciated

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#45

Got confirmation that all the bs I’ve been through at my job wasn’t in my head.

Here’s the thing. I don’t have strong boundaries. And I don’t have strong boundaries because my self worth has been so low for years. So whenever I feel I’m overworked, taken advantage of, or generally given a ridiculous workload I just whip myself to get it done. But I’m changing that now.

I told my boss I can’t have another event like what happened. For the sake of my own mental health, if things continue the way they are going I can’t be part of this company. I know I play a strong role in this company so I wouldn’t be cut or replaced on that statement alone. It’s more like communicating a very real issue that needs attention. I will see where we go from here. But a boundary has been firmly established today.

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#46

@Malkuth Finally got around to listening to this. These are deep, thanks for sharing. Nothing like RoM and intelligent dnb, I’ve heard some of these before but they hit different now.

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#47

weird how ‘futuristic’ pieces end up sounding nostalgic just a few years after their creation.

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#48

I read a comment once that resonated with me. It’s like a nostalgia for a future that didn’t come to be. A lot of these tracks have this sort of peaceful wide expansive feel to them, sort of hopeful in vibe. It’s like looking back in time but simultaneously forward, few genres hit me like that.

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#49

I had a realization hit me today like a ton of bricks. I had my therapy session today and I expressed my concerns about not being able to open up. We dug into it more and my therapist just pulled out a long list of behaviors and feelings from emotional neglect in childhood. And she basically told me this is the root of why I struggle with doing that.

And I’m just sitting here now like who the hell did I think I was to be able to just sidestep all of this? I’ve always wanted to believe I had control, some kind of mastery or advanced knowledge. No that was me thinking I could hide from my emotions. That was me thinking I was beyond being human. So deep in denial.

Sometimes I can’t fully comprehend or unpack my life because it fills me with deep anxiety and dread. But I know continual avoidance will just make things worse. I don’t know how to deal with any of this, so I’ll just keep working with my therapist. It just feels like I broke through a major wall but there’s a lot more behind it.

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#50

i’m new here, what do the 3 acronyms stand for?

#51

Revelation of Mind – it’s one of our newest programs. UA is for “Ultimate Artist.”

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#52

I think I’m done with the idea of healing journeys. That was my life for a long stretch of time. Trying to brave these emotionally turbulent weeks or months, waiting for it to clear so I’m better. It’s all bullshit. I need to live. I need to stop making my life about this self improvement journey focused solely on being better. I’m tired of it. I’m tired of losing whole days in some misguided assumption that it’s worth it or I’ll come out the other side stronger.

Speaking with my therapist the other day made me realize I don’t have balance. I just get by. And when I do face stuff I go too deep too fast. Instead of spacing it out and then also having a life I can enjoy. I know I’ve got issues but my bigger problem is my life became these issues vs zooming out more and seeing the bigger picture. And maybe that’s not my fault. Maybe that’s just a consequence of the trauma in my life.

I know RoM is just weighing heavy on me because I’m having a rough time of things unfolding. Unfolding to me implies trust in oneself, understanding motivations, preferences, likes, etc. It’s really hard to do that when you can’t even feel those things a lot of the time. It’s like an entirely foreign concept to me. But I know this step in a different direction with my therapist was needed. Otherwise I would have continued down the same path that didn’t get deep enough for inner change.

#53

Feeling immobile lately. I don’t have greater plans for my future and I rarely ever spend time in the present actually enjoying what I’m doing.

I think it boils down to safety for me. I don’t feel like I can engage in anything until I can have some comfort in knowing my life is under my control more. So maybe start there and work my way up. That means

  • Setting strong boundaries

  • Identifying, accepting, and working with emotions (despite everything I’ve done in my life in regards to my internal world this was never a strength of mine). Managing them and not getting swept away? Yes. But not in a very healthy manner.

  • Identifying what I really want out of life. I don’t know. That’s not an intellectual thing though, it’s emotional. I’m not connected with myself enough to understand my intuition or needs

  • Start engaging more with things I enjoy guilt-free. Stop waiting for everything to come together before I live my life

  • Build more trust in myself and my ability to handle hardships as they come my way

At this stage in my life I’ve already accepted that nothing has really gone the way I wanted in my life. I was just pushed around and drifted through life just trying to make sense of it. Everything I’m learning now makes it more apparent that wasn’t a conscious choice, despite everyone always probing me on the intellectual level for “what I want”.

#54

Something in me clicked the other day. I just said fuck it and worked on a track again. I was like “wait what about your career? If you focus on this how are you gonna get a good job? The music will never sustain you, etc”. And I was like I don’t care. I don’t care anymore. I’m too burned out to care. I’d rather work on this now and enjoy my existence than put it off and potentially die in a week.

There’s been no planning in my life. Only worrying about potential disasters that I feel somehow prepares me. But it doesn’t. All that wasted energy that could have gone to building vs bracing.

But that’s all I know. And that’s all my two brothers know. And that’s how we were raised. And I can’t snap my fingers and do a 180 on survival patterns.

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#55

I still feel like crap, but I’m feeling a little better in my attitude. Things aren’t great, but at the same time I’m not holding so much blame over myself for how things have turned out. I know my life isn’t doomed, there’s a way past all this. And it starts with letting go of how I perceive life in general.

I view life through a distorted lens of negativity, I always have. Positive thoughts are painful. I just expect things to hurt me. I have a lot of difficulty talking to people about stuff like this. Some people don’t get it. They had the healthy foundation, they had the emotional wellness to fallback on. I never got that. It’s a lot harder to navigate life and change habits when you don’t have that underlying sense of security to begin with. It makes things really difficult, it makes existing as a person difficult.

I am slowly uncovering myself. I’m doing my best not to push, but to listen. It’s still very faint, but I feel like the more I acknowledge these calls I start to feel closer to “me”.

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#56

So RoMs fluid intelligence is definitely showing up.

We had a new system implementation at my job. The plan was that the IT team would be hands off. So we got zero training, zero overview, I’m talking only seeing this thing 2 weeks before go live. Well as utterly dysfunctional and needy as the business side of my company is that didn’t happen.

So for the past month I’ve been learning this thing from the ground up on my own. I was showing my coworker some stuff the other day and he was impressed how I figured it all out. I’m a natural problem solver for the simple fact if I’m spoon fed info I don’t retain it. I need the big picture and for it to link up in my brain.

So long story short I’ve very much surprised myself at the speed I was able to grasp this new system. Especially how intimidating it was previously. For once I’ve acknowledged how skillful this was vs my usual “anyone can do this, I’m just secretly an idiot that needs validation”.

Oh also leaving the online dating was the best thing I’ve done this year. The interactions went nowhere. And if I did match with someone I liked I hardly enjoyed the conversation because it was like pulling teeth. On top of that I wasnt about to lower myself to the level of dancing clown to keep conversations going, screw that. People would say I just had no game, whatever I don’t care. I think about going back sometimes and then I’m like “for what? One sided convos? Crappy manipulative algorithms? Pressuring myself to take good photos and make it seem like I didn’t do it myself?” The list is endless. I’m not playing those stupid games.

I’m not exactly a good catch. I’ve got a lot of stuff wrong with me at this point in time. I know it’s this stuff that makes me anxious around women because I feel like I have to hide some dirty truth from them. Inevitably the relationships fall apart because the facade breaks and I panic. I’m working at being authentic from the start. But in order to do that I have to feel better about myself.

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#57

I hear you on the dating apps lol. You don’t have to use them, I never did.

Women in general will start showing you interest. You might be standing in a line-up for some food and boom, all the women there are staring at you.

If I’m not mistaken, some people even report getting approached. If you end up in a scenario where a woman is showing interest, don’t hesitate to explore the potential of it if you desire to.

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#58

Yeah I think I’m throwing out mixed signals in public tbh. I can legitimately feel the aura expand sometimes and then it just gets sucked back in and I’m invisible again. Highly depends on my mood. It doesn’t stay consistently and my energy is a combo of check me out/please don’t give me any attention

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#59

Although I can’t prove it, I’m convinced women when on those dating apps are more critical and rejecting… Uh, I mean selective… when browsing. In person face-to-face, that same woman who blew you off online might be much more open to liking you.

Women on social media are bombarded by men, especial men who seem to have few social skills.

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#60

The irony here is that if you had lower self-awareness, you’d probably just frame your characteristics as 1) not a problem, or 2) other people’s problems.

You’re showing, in other words, a capacity for Self-Responsibility that is higher than average. That makes you a good long-term investment, though in the short-term it’s associated with loss. As long as you stick with your processes and growth, it’s very likely that over time you’ll be a more developed person than the average.

I think one important thing for you may be to invest more time into paying attention to what’s happening inside of other people. Like just treat it as a fun Sherlock Holmes or bird-watching project. Your mind’s biases seems to naturally focus on and to over-emphasize what’s happening inside of you. (That’s actually healthy and normal, but combined with other factors it seems to have become too one-sided.) As a result those details (about yourself, your deficiencies, your struggles) are inflated and magnified.

The end result is that in your Picture of the World, you are drawn as a detailed human being, in 3D with textures and depth. Other people, in contrast, are more like cartoons. Flatter, less detail. So, it’s like you describe yourself with all of these problems, but you also see yourself as much more detailed, realistic, and, let’s be honest, interesting, than others. In contrast, you see others as not having these problems, though at the same time your views of them may be suspiciously simplistic.

(The above two paragraphs summarize why you’ve always struck me as having an Enneagram type 4 personality structure.)

Reminds me of that Tolstoy quote from Anna Karenina:

“Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.”

It’s a genius quote. But it says more about the narrator than about the families. I think it’s revealing the narrator’s bias that pain and suffering are just more interesting and meaningful. More dramatically compelling.

I guess I think it’s important–at the same time that you continually work on yourself :muscle:t6:–to also understand, accept, and normalize the experiences and mental factors that got you to where you are. By being more interested in and observant of the interior realities of other people, you may see that you are not the pariah that you feel you are, and that your inner conflicts and difficulties are actually shared by other human beings. Actually, I think you are doing this; it just takes time.

Anyway, you’ve been doing so much great work over the past couple of years, and you’re clearly growing in very real ways. And these little points I’ve made are also missing a lot of key perspectives. So, just take this as however you take it, or if it’s not timely, just put it aside for the time being.

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