Identity.

x = x. Any algebraic equation that uses the reflective property is an identity. If I think about it, x = x is a comfort. It's a definition that fails to define. Were "x = x"-style thinking all that was required in Algebra, it wouldn't be necessary to get too deep into the details of problem-solving. But, obviously, this sort of laissez-faire thinking can't get one too far into the textbook. It's cursorily covered on the third page of chapter 1 and never mentioned again.

When I think about myself, my identity, I usually draw a blank. Every day, I slip in and out of personas to take the greatest advantage of any given situation. With my pseudo-girlfriend, I'm a nice, generous, stupid, and sweet guy. My best friends get a vulgar, constantly joking sociopath. With women or men I desire, I'm occasionally distant, sometimes wonderfully poetic, but mostly awkward.

None of these people are me, though. It's as if I'm split through a prism; my talents for deception have created a multiplicity of me, each existing only within a specific context and with a specific person/group. While convenient, this causes as many problems as it solves.

For example.
For the past few weeks, I've been dating a girl. I've no real interest in her; she's emotionally off-kilter, unattractive, and annoying. Still, she's the first girl in years to directly express any interest in me. I'd never been in a relationship, so I jumped at the chance to experience something new for the first time.

Since I couldn't feel any attraction towards her, I created a persona that did. He's a generally good guy who brings her presents, injures himself constantly and whispers "I love you" into her ear as they make out. But he's not me and he never will be. Over the course of the relationship, I realized that the constant duplicity was doing me no good. Telling her I loved her made me feel cheapened somehow; the words had lost their meaning, becoming instead a simple currency through which I got some action, no matter how minor. As time passed, my immoral acts weighed heavier on me. I became an asshole when I wasn't around her, reflecting the warping of my self-image. I couldn't consider myself a good person, so I made the choice to be bad. All for a kiss here and a grope there.

The complications of restructuring one's self should not be taken lightly. When there are enough imperfect copies of the core persona, it becomes difficult to tell the fakes from the real thing. I'm more confused than ever now about who I am, and I don't see it getting better all too soon. I'm breaking up with the girl tomorrow in a bid to save my soul and save her from me. Here's hoping we both end up better off.

Just now, I was sitting in my chair, in front of my computer, and I felt the weight of the world come crashing down onto my shoulders. I felt trapped, in a deep fog, and I realized just how hard it would be to escape.

Let's back up here.

For the past two years, it has been my operative plan to move far, far away once my eighteenth birthday came. To ... Canada. Toronto, in specific. Two weeks ago, I came back from visting Toronto for the first time, tired, sick, and with a much less optimistic appraisal of my plan than previously. I'm not moving to Canada anymore; what once seemed like a golden opportunity now looks to be just another youthful stab at a quick fix. A fix for a problem that I can't quite put a name to. A problem that just hit me like a sack of bricks.

I have no strong desire to do anything. I do have burning urges for power, strength, good looks, fast car, inner peace, high adventure, etc. All the trappings of humanity and adolescent testosterone levels. But I don't especially know what I want to do vis-a-vis achieving those goals, much less what I can do (except for strength and good looks; they seem to be the most commonly won of all the aforementioned things). I just do whatever I think is best with the choices I perceive to have in the short-term, following my id more than my ego.

I guess the questions I need to answer now go something like, "What do I really want? How can I make it happen? And how far am I willing to go?" Hell, I know that I don't need a blazingly fast car. I recognize that it would do nothing to make me ultimately happy. But the mind wants what it wants, and there's no changing that unless one can look past the short-term to see some grand design, a big picture tying everything together. I used to have a master plan: I'd hone my combat skills, then lay my life on the line every day to save the humans from themselves. Whether or not the fantasy of reaching Big Mind on the battlefield is worth the inevitable bloodshed, at least I'd get to fight. I like fighting and I hate that my everyday life entails none. It's a big part of my personality, though not intentionally; certain circumstances in my childhood welded my brain's Power/Fighting/Fatalism circuit closed, and now I crave violence as a matter of course.

It's just that I feel like a total mess whenever I look at where I'm coming from and think about where my future is headed. Before, I had infinite faith that I could always somehow bungle my way towards the right decisions in life. Now I see the timer ticking above my head, letting me know that my days are numbered. Reminding me that I can use my time in whatever way I please, and that how I utilize my time decides the course of my life. What am I to do? Where am I to go?

Solitary. I've cut myself off from everyone I know, and it feels natural. And I feel isolated, cut off from the world. Funny thing is, it's still somewhat preferable to my past contact with others. When I was young, I went for a period of 2-3 years where I had no friends. Nobody. While everyone else was practicing their social skills for use later on in life, I was practicing the key skills that have sustained me through the years: reading, playing video games, and writing every so often. Eventually, I discovered substance use; the theoretical end-all and be-all of one-person entertainment. But maybe all of that's immaterial.

I'm really not sure if I can trust people anymore. All that bitterness I wrote of, dammed within until recently, has put up a wall between myself and all of the acquaintances I had. It's a testament to my distance that I consider all of my peers to be acquaintances, I guess.

Originally, I created this blog to show some inner part of my self to the world in an anonymous way. I wanted to communicate the approximately 70% of me that never, ever gets revealed. It's easier for me to shout these things into the void than to whisper them to my closest friend.

After the third entry, it became clear to me that this, this Neue, is most useful as a tool for catharsis, not a means of communication. Every paragraph takes something from the inside, something unvoiced, and makes it real. Even as I write, I'm revealing a little bit more of my true self, whatever that is.

. . . I'm feeling down and I'm gonna stop writing now. Stop moving and look around.