God, I have felt like using today; so bored. Boredom: after two decades being bored I know today it is Fear, like most things. First of all, the coolest thing is to become aware that I don�t have to constantly be doing something. A fellow artist brought my attention to that. One of Society�s built-in rules is that we must constantly be occupied. Idle thought is discouraged. That�s all I�ve ever done! So, you can comprehend my relief when I discovered that like most of Society�s built-in rules, it wasn�t one I had to follow. This was good since I never could figure out how to. Finally I am ceasing to try to pound myself into a round hole when I myself am square, though it did dawn on me a while back that this
practice didn�t make any sense. Surely it would be wise to go somewhere outside of the field of round holes and carve out a square one for myself. I am trying to do that now. Believe me, as futile and hard as it is to try to squash oneself into an opposing shape, it is actually tempting to go back to that behavior. It is familiar. Familiar = comfortable; change, hard. I am trying to start my own business; something that I will be able to commit my time to and not hate. It is exciting. It is scary. Meanwhile I am still navigating my thoughts and I am still bored; I am feeling bored. Another recent revelation is that I am not my feelings. In fact, along with the help of my therapist, I have decided that when I feel anything, I imagine myself alone in a factory standing alongside a conveyor belt with empty boxes being conveyed along its surface. Into these boxes I place my feelings of the moment: �I am feeling sad and into that box you go and off down the conveyor belt you go to that place where things on conveyor belts eventually end up�and I am still right here.� So, it�s great to be aware that I am not what I feel, that I can feel them and send them on their way and still remain unscathed; not untouched but unscathed. Now ofcourse I must do this with boredom also for it is a feeling like any other and it is not who I am nor is it lasting any more so than all the other nuanced emotions I experience. I must be willing to become curiously detached. Observe it and wonder and let that be it. Whatever I feel has its beautiful purpose but I don�t always have to be aware of what that is. So, using: what I always did to get out of boredom. I�ve used everything from sex and drugs to chocolate cake, which believe me, I would mainline if I could figure out how. The point is they were all masks and ultimately only served to distract me for a very short time from whatever feeling I considered too unpleasant or unbearable to be in at the moment. So today I was feeling some pretty heavy boredom and fear and I really started to feel crazy and I wanted to get high (This is where I exhale deeply). What I knew I had to do was get out of my house and change things up a bit by doing that physical thing. When I got a couple of blocks from my house I decided to go to a place where I used to hang out and see if somebody there would get me high. What ended up happening was that no one was there to do that and instead I got on a computer and began writing what was going on with me. And here is the sum of all that! My want to get high dissipated and as a result of writing I was reminded of the conveyor belt image that is helping me deal with my fallible and transient emotions. I don�t ignore my feelings. I explore them all the time. Like the emotional response of Anger being in actuality Fear, I understand there is usually if not always something else and more real behind what I am feeling.