Responsibility or compassion?

It's that thing in life we're all guaranteed to experience, in some form or another. Even if you aren't expected to work for yourself, you're still going to face some form of responsibility somehow. Dressing yourself, for example, can be considered an albeit minor responsibility. Since birth (like most of you, I'm sure), I've been programmed to accumulate -- and take pride in -- extra responsibilities.

When should I say no?

I'm cursed with an overwhelming compassion. It's bigger than I am and it is limitless in its reach. It doesn't matter if you've tortured me somehow; if you've encouraged me to fail; if you've helped people hurt me somehow. When you need a favor that I can deliver, I'll do what I can. I'll go against the better judgment of my more reasonable friends who know when to say that magic word I never really understood:

No. It's almost impossible for me to conceive what it means to say it. No. I can't even remember the last time I used it in reference to something someone asked of me. No.

I don't consider it a failing. Not really, anyway. Even now, when I'm goaded beyond what I can feasibly expect from my enormous work ethic, I don't think I'm failing myself. Because I'm afraid of what it will mean to fail other people.

Well now. There's a thought. Failing others. Is it possible to fail someone else if succeeding will hurt you? Chew that one over.

One sec. People are hovering outside the shop doors. Maybe when I start writing again, after the hordes dissipate, I'll have something more concrete to babble about.

2.5 hours later...

Back now. It's incredible the amount of emotional chaos that can happen in only a few hours.

I wasn't really able to ponder anything I was pondering while people were in here. A few people wanted prices on tattoos, on piercings, ideas for their child's birthday memorial piece, answers to why the shop is so empty, etc. I obliged with probably more bite than was necessary to most, if not all of, them. What can I say? I was having an existential crisis again. That waits for no man, woman or whatever's between.

When the trickle of customers slowed and people finally left altogether, I started catching up with a few people about my new mountain of problems. I mentioned them as my little stressors in my last entry-- they aren't really that little. Big enough, in fact, that after I had a nice, reassuring conversation with Lori, I let Sigur Ros sing me into my own dimension of turmoil, sat down in the middle of the shop, and cried for a solid three minutes. The song ended in almost perfect unison with my last heaving sob, and I stood up, brushed myself off, and went back to work.

"Work." I'm sitting here doing nothing still. I managed to edit Marshall's email, retyped it because I hate copying and pasting things like this, and did some more catch-up work on old facebook messages from dear friends. Now my memory of today is starting to blur.

A few more people strolled through the shop's door, right before I went to grab my approximately 32560346th slice of Sergi's pizza, and then I read Amanda Palmer's latest blog. Oh, and I stalked a few people via their various internet incarnations. It's crazy how out of the loop I've become. I remember being right there, absorbing all of the social goings-on and filing them into different categories of importance. Self-reflection means sacrificing my awareness of the things outside my immediate sphere of influence, I suppose.

Self-reflection. Here comes my looping, full-circle epiphany. I started writing this blog with the intention of expounding my beliefs in things like responsibility, tact and the melancholy that comes with neglecting everything else, with succumbing completely to the endless string of demands people can have of you if you let them.

Instead, I've come to the almost comical revelation that--

Interruption again. This time, it was a large man with a janitor's smock on who wanted a tattoo. I informed him that our artist is out of town for the weekend, but he'll be back on Tuesday. Actually, the conversation was more like:

Jack (the name on his janitor jumper): When can I schedule one?
Me: Well, you can you schedule an appointment for any time after Tuesday.
Jack: Tuesday? Alright.
He turned and started walking away.
Me: We open at 3 and close at 9.
Jack, without turning around: Thanks.
Me: No problem. Have a good day.
Jack, without turning around again: Yep.
Then, under his breath and to no one in particular, my new friend muttered something that sounded like "dumb fag," threw open the door, slammed it shut and left. Nice guy. I should have asked him to take a look at my toilet.

Anyway. Revelation. It's something most of you have already concluded, which makes it kind of silly that it takes me over-extending myself to the outer limits of my own strength and collapsing before I remember it: our first responsibility is to ourselves.

I don't have to feel anything but neutrality about the way Jack must be feeling (I wondered, in this string of thoughts, if he was having a bad day or if he had an abusive father or if he himself was gay and not really comfortable with it or if something bigger, something that exceeds the power of my imagination, happened and he needed to memorialize it). I don't have to worry about the woman who's crying on the park bench, and I'm not responsible for the bad things that happen to my friends and family, even if I'm there to witness them. I can still help, but I can also choose my battles based upon what I can handle and not by the way my broken fail-o-meter starts to buzz if I turn someone down.

I can spend my time for me sometimes, doing the things I want to do, without the threat of "feeling bad" if I say "no, I don't want to drink tonight, and please don't pressure me into it."

Anyway. I've written blogs like this before. Proof positive that history has a way of repeating itself. Or is it more an indication of how difficult it is to break our bad habits?

Is being too compassionate a bad habit?

I've wondered

The theme of my blogs tends toward the wonderment side of things. I ask the ether questions like "What happens when...?" and "Why do people do...?" This isn't an exception.

I've been teetering on the brink of a substantial meltdown. My truer confidants have been bearing with me as I belabor the melodrama of it all. The gist is:

To a writer, the idea that the act and art of writing, and writing eloquently, is no longer an easy thing of affluence has become a challenge is more than a little disturbing.

I'm experiencing a strange kind of block. When I used to be able to envision the way I wanted an essay or a post or a short story or a poem to be, from the beginning to the end, I'm lucky now if I can string together one or two sentences before I'm taxed to the point where continuing is impossible. It's draining to write now, especially when my expectations in myself appear to have taken the whole gym rat craze to heart.

Cue the existential wondering. What is causing me to second guess myself, literally every step of the way?

At first, I wondered if it was my new, in-depth look at this medium. I've started to take my linguistics classes seriously, using what Dr. Henry and Dr. Hersker introduced me to and running with it. Now, before I can really get my emotions aligned to begin whatever piece of prose I'm hoping to crank out, my focus lands, irrevocably, on my seemingly limitless word choices. Is this the right verb tense for this particular paragraph? Will it be more clear if I adjust the placement of this adverbial? The more I dug into the subject, the more "rules" I retained. Hmm. Thinking about it like this is starting to grind my writing gears and I haven't gotten close to the point of this post. Could be something to this theory.

My other theories are less structured. The second-most prevalent (would penultimate be more impressive here? who is my audience? stop it, shawon, stop. just write. just write) definition for my source of writer's angst comes from my inability to dial things back according to the aforementioned source of emotion.

Writers are emotional creatures. We utilize common vernaculars to elicit responses in our readers by knowing how to cater to different emotional responses. If you want someone to fall in love with you, you don't write about the bubonic plague in some poorly-written limerick (unless you're seducing a sadist). If you're trying to persuade people, writing with a purely academic tone won't necessarily do the trick. Therefore, writers usually a catalyst for emotional change, or at least, a halfway decent writer can convey his or her own emotions in a sentence or two. That seems to be one of my current problems.

I lost "it." The intangible thing that comprises all of the arts, but more specifically, the thing that rings as clear as a clarion bell in a person who knows, without any doubts at all, that he or she is meant to do something because it's just part of them. I had that "it" thing, the thing that made writing as easy as breathing, the thing that I've nurtured since before high school. The thing that I had before I knew I was gay. Before I knew what the world was really like. The thing that was so enmeshed in my person that it may as well have been coded genetically, and now, somehow, it feels... incomplete. Missing.

But not really missing. Even now, as I dust out my mental cogs and put endless quarters into the "insert talent here" slot, I can feel the old vibrations of talent, but, as with all complicated patterns, I also know that sometime today, when I'm feeling vulnerable or insecure about something, the entire spectrum of my personality will flicker a few times and then go out. Poof. It's like when people ask if a scream is heard in the middle of the woods if no one's there to hear it.

I hate that expression.

Another theory, and the one that my fellow writer friends keep throwing at me, is stress. Good, old-fashioned stressors are "dimming my rainbow," as it were. Can a rainbow ever be dim, though? Can a talent ever be ripped from someone's still-beating heart like this? Any time I've experienced some kind of writer's block, I can always somehow see what it is that's holding me back. I just can't always do something about it right away. I would realize that time, and time alone, is the necessary impetus for my successful recovery, but now... now it's all just me stumbling blindly through things.

I'll read through my old blog posts from high school, from past semesters--even posts on this very website--and I'm jealous of the writer who wrote them. I don't recognize my voice anymore. One of the same friends who I feel comfortable sharing most things with tells me that she remembers the assignments she had, sometimes, but that's it. That she doesn't ever really remember writing it all. We'd laugh at that and make fun of the professors who assigned them, but somewhere in the back of my mind, I'm screaming at the top of my lungs, "I do remember, though, or at least I used to be able to. Now I remember nothing."

I'm rebuilding myself slowly. I'm not necessarily sitting around feeling sorry for myself. Despite the absolute terror I feel when I can't write a decent poem or a short something--or even a halfway clever facebook status--I'm still forging ahead. I'm rereading old books and I'm cilnging to those brief moments, like this one, where a ghost of my abilities swells within my typing fingertips so that I can have some vestige of myself bubbling in my neurons for later, during the inevitable crash. I'm even forcing myself to deal with my stressors head on now, instead of evading the ones that cause me the most hurt.

It all sucks. I don't know if you've ever had to rebuild a personality, but it's hard work. My close friends keep telling me that I haven't really changed much. I hope that isn't the case. Through all of this, whatever this is, I hope that, when I reach the end and I'm comfortable with myself again, I'll have changed dramatically. Or a little. Changed enough to put things like this behind me once and for all so that I can start focusing on a career. Or Hell, so I can start focusing on bringing my grades back up to meet my astronomical expectations.

Hope. There's that word again. It seems to be one of my more prominent (ultimate? paramount? stop it) themes lately. Actually, screw lately. It's always one of my themes.

Dum spiro, spero. It should be one of my themes, especially now that I've had it permanently branded on my chest. It was originally supposed to be a reminder for occasions like these, and for all of the things I've trivialized as mere "stressors" because I don't really feel like sharing them with the world. I'm still breathing, so the rest is inevitable. Inevitability is another one of my recurring themes. Fancy that.

I'm reading through my old blogs...

Well, blog. I only ever kept a MySpace blog before I moved onto a paper journal, and then to this very website that you're perusing. After spending about 20 minutes reading through the first few paragraphs of many different entries, I've come to the conclusion that being an English major for the past 4 years really hasn't done anything to guide my writer's voice anywhere. In fact, nothing has really changed about my writing. At all. Go figure. Can I have a refund?

Anyway. Here's what I found that was interesting enough to repost (it was from a while ago, and I was very angsty, angry teenager [despite how well-dressed and like, lol, like... TOTALLY popular I was *hair flip*]):

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The art of manipulation
Thursday, December 01, 2005

So I'm sitting here sick and pondering. Already bad. But not half as bad as when I'd sit and ponder under the influence of something. Like that rotting reed smell when I open my sax case or the fumes I inhale at BOCES.

Manipulation fascinates me. When all the negativity that's usually aligned with manipulation is stripped from its definition, you're left with creation. People learn how to assert their quick wit and thus master the art of evincing results from their subjects without physical force. Ideally. When manipulation is put to force, it's called torture. Or worse, Stagecrew.

Right now, with simple words and innocent phrasing techniques, I could convince a lot of the dimly lit people that read my blogs that I'm leaving this place. That I'm biding my time before the flight leaves in Syracuse for Rockport, then onto a few more ports along the coast before I finally land in Australia to start a new life. That my postcards to all of my sympathetic friends will dominate the international postal service, and, maybe when the timing's right, I'll return home for a quick visit before shoving off again. That I'll miss everyone desperately, and I truly believe that I'll become the loving person that everyone's known once or twice, and leave behind this angry facade I carry so proudly. My goal is sympathy.

And how many people do you think would give it to me? Even after I post another few entries about bus tickets in Australia, and forwarded emails from the Embassy, saying it's A-OK for me to take up permanent residence?

It's harmless. And I'd have forced my friends to succumb to my will, craving the "Goodbye!"s and the "I'll miss you!"s. If I never left, I'd only obtain, "Thank God you're staying, I don't know what I'd do..."s. Everyone does it, and in most cases, they're being sincere. It isn't negative, as I mentioned above, but it's still the art of pre-understanding. The unconscious knows the emotions of its cohorts and can therefore play off them. I should know.

I do it all the time.

The hardest emotion to conquer is fear. I've been able to bedevil people into frenzies, lure people into lovetraps and mold personalities to my benefit, but I've never been able to strike fear in someone. Sure, I might've been able to rustle up some inconsequential, awe-inspiring respect that looks and feels like fear, but no one's ever chilled when I enter the room, or watches everything they say so as to not incur whatever wrath I can throw together.

Headache's here. It's been fun.

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I really just think it's neat that I was thinking about rhetoric before I ever had any formal rhetorical training. It's destiny, I guess. I also guess that this means I can't really demand a refund.

Damn it.