In the vast majority of my life, I've lacked a clear sense of identity. I've always maintained a few very distinct personas; I can easily identify the traits of leader-me, addict-me, antisocial-me. But whenever I tried to take in the whole picture, it was as if I was looking through a glass darkly. The distortions of my own self-perceptions and biases made it a Herculean task to approach objectivity in regard to myself, so I stopped trying.

Many times I've subconsciously tried to counteract this by identifying with others or with groups, but that unsettles me to no end. I've never really trusted people as a whole, so tying up some vital part of my personality in their existence seems like too dangerous a gambit, with very little possibility of causing anything positive in the long-term. In my estimation, it's a tack that's saved me from a lot of hassle and stifled as many opportunities for interesting new experiences. C'est la vie.

Today, though, I feel an uncharacteristic urge: to state who I am. So that I may understand it a bit more. Maybe even to introduce a bit of vulnerability to this somewhat sterile, if ultimately fulfilling, record of my human progress.

Okay. Inventory. Here's where I'm at:
(note: after writing this, I realized that each subject went from the most superficial to the most private in descending order. I guess self-disclosure takes a while to work up to. I'm glad that I have this Neue instead of a psychiatrist, though; here, extraneous verbage is free, whereas a shrink would charge me for it.)
I've been thinking a lot about the art of the rice. Japanese imports, general theory, basic automobile information has started to intrigue me to no end. Plus, I'm sad to say, it functions as a rudimentary barometer of masculinity. I really don't like ascribing to conventional gender rules/demands, but at the same time I recognize that they're easily manipulated, convenient factors for low-effort, easily understood social coding. Well, that and I like driving very fast.

I'm a college student now. Huh. I highly enjoy researching medical terminology. It combines three things I love: memorizing complicated-sounding compound words, gaining functional understanding of a useful field, and cultivating a more complete understanding of my body and its workings. My interest in medicine doesn't define me, but at many times it does compel me.

I'm coming to identify more as a gay man. It's a fairly long uphill battle, as I don't have any gay friends or anything much that could be termed a support network. As a mostly closeted homosexual man, gravitating mostly around circles of straight men (with all of the subtle and explicitly oppressive homophobia that comes with) is an easy way to feel that one will never belong, no matter the situation. As I matured, I realized that I could choose to relate with the world by identifying more wholly with others, at the cost of sacrificing some portion of my personality. An unsatisfactory option. I realize now that by cultivating my own identity and sense of belonging, I can learn to relate to people on a much healthier, happier basis, even where this new growth runs counter to mainstream acceptance.

And out of this grew something different. For the duration of my life I've felt . . . dispassionate towards the roles expected of me. As a man, I don't wish to fulfill the heterosexual stereotype. Particularly, I feel minimal attraction to women and little desire to be the dominant partner in a relationship. The masculine image is rubbish; while I prize within myself many of the qualities associated with the male gender-image (strength, constancy of persona), I find the physical trappings and lack of emotional depth unappealing. To put it more simply, I'm considering whether I'd rather live as a woman. I've dreamt about it as long as I can remember, but only recently have I conceded that the possibility is within my reach.

Of course, with such a statement comes a host of questions, none of which I feel like asking right now. Currently, I'm in the process of adopting the female trappings that can be had without anyone questioning my XY phenotype: panties, pantyhose, painted nails, and bras. It feels natural, more natural than I really could have imagined. I feel so free, really; I've fnally taken the first step by allowing myself to question, to explore. Of course, that's only the first step. Right now I'm living with my mother, which places a lot of strain on the expression of the in-between parts of my personality.

The next challenge is the quest for self-sufficiency. Once I'm able to live on my own, the application and exploration of my new meta-identity will be able to enter their terminal stages. I'm excited, like a seasoned world traveler finding out that there's a half of the world she has yet to explore. At the same time, apprehension grasps at me, a vague feeling of being lost. I mean, I'm sure that I have it easier than most; I'm not really unsure of myself, but I'm as yet uncertain of how to proceed with this new knowledge. I'll muddle through, I guess; I always have, I always will. Reconciling the harsh need for independence with my desire to be submissive in a relationship is hard, though. I want to be a good fighter, a great fighter, world-class, but would that be too masculine?

I read once a male-to-female transsexual describing their gender identity as not fully male or female, but containing elements of both. Gender seems to be viewed by most as being like the two poles of a magnet - opposites defined simply by their differences. I'm growing to understand that I'm more of a pastiche. This I can live with.

I took a trip, and I ended up back here. Wherever here is and whatever it means to me.

I realize now that I've deliberately stunted my growth to avoid certain things. Things which need to be done, which I need to be able to say have been done.

See, I even use intentionally vague language when talking to you. Always in indefinite terms. Hey, diary, shouldn't we be more open with each other? Well, since you can't open up to me, maybe I should open up to you. I need to open up to someone, at least. Sidney Jourard, a psychologist, said that self-disclosure is a basic need for all humans. True, we will not up and die due to lack of frank discourse as we might with lack of oxygen or food. We will wilt. We will become stunted, malnourished.
...eh. I'm not sure if I want to talk about that.

I know now that things can't just be neat and easy, they viscerally require complication. Bah! I say to all needful things. I want to live unemcumbered, spartan. What a dream. Yet . . . I do yearn for something much more than the pleasures of the simplest possible life. To see vistas yet beyond my grasp. I don't know. I just know that I want more, more than1 life has yet offered me, possibly more than I'm willing to let myself have. How do I get there? I'll need a plan. I'll need some time to think. I'll need to be secure with my insecurities. Ah, hell.

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.

I've never experienced romance, even in its subtlest forms. Every so often I reach out a tentative hand towards forging a connection with someone, and every time it gets slapped away. Before, I thought that this was due to some great, base incompetence on my part. Something that everyone else had that I was somehow missing, a manufacturing defect that I couldn't rectify because it was simply beyond my capacity. I felt a spiritual impotence, the cold, intriguing flower called alone. It's not so much the sensation of being without anyone that staggered me. I've spent, and probably will spend, the majority of my life by myself. It's the suspicion that it's going to be that way forever. The feeling that maybe you're the special case, the one designed to live out your years anticipating a day that will never come. I tasted bitter bile, and I reveled in it. If I couldn't have love, I could have the next best thing: the glee of anger without reason or focus.

More time passed, and through analysis, I realized that there was another possibility. Maybe I wasn't an incomplete piece, but rather hampered by my own expectations of rejection. Maybe I'd grown too close to my bitter heart. Maybe I'd fallen in love with being alone. But the realization wasn't coupled with any new resolve. I now understand that I could just as easily stay home as I could go out and try meeting someone new, sparking up a conversation, passing some time. If only by the law of averages, eventually I'd have to find success. Still, I don't. I guess I'm resolved to being alone long enough to complain every so often, but not lonely enough to actively do anything about it. Ha ha! Funny joke.

I got an e-mail today. It was a chain letter from a girl I'd known some time ago. Fifteen points of mildly sappy inspiration. I read it, and I saw one that I thought about for a bit.

"6. You mean the world to someone."

I know there's no great authority to a mass mailing that promises 10 romantic screwups in the next 10 years for not propagating itself. I know it's superstitious, even. But I can't help wondering who that one person is. Though I may be a bitter, cantankerous bastard, a vindictive asshole, and pretty much totally clueless, this tiny e-mail convinced me that I had, at the least, a bottomless reserve of hope for slim chances. At least, I can now say to myself, I have hope; hope that the future can be different than the past, that I don't necessarily know what surprises lurk around the next corner, good or bad. It's a hope that can coexist with the bitterness, because I know I won't be bitter forever. At least, for this specific reason.

I wonder if this is just my desire for a happy ending. To say 'maybe tomorrow will be better' is to ignore that our future is the culmination of our actions in the present. I can't expect to sustain the same behaviors and get different results; it defies logic, common sense. I have the great dilemma of the alcoholic : knowing the problem quite intimately, but still as far from the solution as ever. No amount of reflection is going to fix whatever block I do have, yet it's all I seem to do. Mindless self-indulgence of the highest order. If I write it out, at least I can see the trails of my thought processes, try to understand the knot in the middle of it. Hell, maybe I can even find a new scapegoat.

(Why did I write that? Is my bitterness focused inward? Do I really have anywhere else to focus it?)

The trail winds on. I guess I'll stop obsessing over it, at least for a bit.

Desperation and sin.
Sin and desperation.
I am getting desperate. Sitting and waiting has become my forté, "Wait for change" my motto. It's surprising how effective waiting for a bad situation to resolve itself is. Effective, but not at all satisfying. Now, in theory, if you wait for a bad situation to turn into a good one, the situation itself can get better or worse. For me, usually better. But there's a downside: things always become less interesting. If you sit around long enough to wait for the ideal situation to occur you'll just wind up with less time and more bills.
I think I might have a strong will, but I've never really tested it. Instead of force myself to bear some hardship, I subconsciously put myself in situations where I have no choice but to endure said hardship. It's weird. Even now, I'm trying to do the same thing to get myself into a different situation. Danger doesn't matter at this point. Wait, no, let me clarify that: danger does matter. Any truly constructive effort, any process that really matters, entails danger. Peril. Otherwise people would make real, meaningful accomplishments

every

day.

Every personal psychological discovery comes at the danger of the person seeing themselves as they are in truth. What could happen then? At the time, to those contemplating facing their demons, it feels as if one's very self will vanish from existence. I'm feeling like that now. If I can't change something big now . . .
No. I choose not to live that reality. I will make a different one.

Ha. Pfeh. I'm currently on a jag of excitement, so I see the world as a character in a play might: One-dimensionally and sort of shaky. Maybe I can run faster than the world itself, thusly exceeding reality itself. I don't fear danger, but rather see it as opportunities for heroism. Hmmm . . .

My body is telling me that it wants to give up. It's a feeling where you might not be drained of energy, but drained of all will to go on, no matter how insignificant the task. This might be a glimmer of survival instinct on the part of my body, or even my mind. I feel very fatigued.

At many occasions, I think about making very permanent and very hurtful breaks with good friends. I never do, completely, but I start moving in the direction where maybe I say the wrong thing (on purpose), maybe I blow them off when they need me. When I do stop, it's not out of any emotion, but from the fear of lack of resources (whatever they may be) that person may allow me access to directly or indirectly. Looking back over my previous entries, it appears that perhaps I should get some new friends or, more likely, less friends. No matter what, I am not able to deny the sadistic instinct. But what if I were to follow it? What then?

I don't like where I am. I've always had a huge urge to leave, to someplace with a different feel, a different smell, and a different mindset. Whenever this overwhelms me I have a vision, a vision that soothes me. For a while now, whenever I daydreamed of where I wanted to be, I've dreamed of Neuestadt. All of the houses are made of wood, and there's always a softness to the light. I don't want to find this place; I want to make it. I want to make a place where people just live their lives.