and is a poor testament to my having spent (not wasted!) 2.5 years in school learning nothing else except how to make things not look like crap. I’m a dissapointment to myself for so many reasons, the point that I’m not even sure if dissapointment is spelled correctly being one of them.

re:design.

I spent a good few minutes just talking about typefaces with one of my coworkers today. It was a pleasantly familiar, yet slightly uncomfortable kind of conversation, because I miss having those conversations in my life yet I don’t feel like I should rightfully be having them anymore. I truly feel like the part of me that is creative and vibrant has atrophied from disuse.

This goes also for my promising yet brief career as a published journalist. Now I just sling my opinions wildly into the world with the expectation that no one beyond a very limited circle (that means you, Graham) will ever see them. I feel safer that way. At the heart of it, creating for a real, live audience is something that I don’t want to do. I do, but I don’t. Because I’m scared.

Of life.

Seriously. I listed all of the major decisions I’ve made in the past five years, and my rationale behind making each one. They were all essentially made out of fear of something or the other. Fear of failing. Fear of succeeding. Fear of consequences unknown. I don’t know where all of this fear came from to begin with it’s there and it’s very loud. I perpetuate this fear by ruling every past decision as a gross mistake, regardless of the circumstances under which the decision was made. The latest example of this is my job. This is a decision I was afraid to make for many reasons, but I bit the bullet and applied and got it and took it and all should be well. However, I make it a disaster by complaining about it constantly, for no good reason. Thus, I can think of taking the job not as an example of me doing something reasonable and sticking it out, but as an example of me making yet another horrible mistake.

College was the first time I truly made a decision for myself, so in essence, I have lived my entire adult, brief though it has been thus far, in this totally unproductive way. Correcting this pattern is proving to be incredibly difficult because I don’t even know where to begin. I’ve been told that the beginning is seeing the positive in things rather than the negative, but that’s the essence of my whole problem, isn’t it?

Sometimes I wish I were just content with being a misanthrope.