Chapter 0: Prologue

I always regret things that I write post 11 o’clock. Mrs. Hagen told me I shouldn’t apologize in my writing, but this isn’t an apology. It’s an experiment.

                                                                

I come up with schemes, plans, and complaints all the time. And none of my plans hatched entirely after dinner are ever executed. There are so many things I have been planning to do (and writing a blog is one of them). Earlier this evening I wrote up a new Pokémon team that I will probably never follow through on. As I sit here eating pretzels, I’ve already thought of three other things to do. Alice’s father believes six impossible things before breakfast, and I plot six impossible things before bed.

I myself even object to writing out that I’ll never start on that Pokémon team, since I probably won’t after I’ve announced it. I’m always telling myself and others not to think that something won’t work because they will convince themselves to fail. But maybe we all need to be a little more realistic. I’ve not thought about how my plots will actually turn out, and I’ve forgotten about a lot of them. I think that’s the issue. I’m just a dreamer, and I have to involve others before I can guarantee I’ll complete my objective.

Here comes the distraction. I turned away from the screen too long, and I almost gave up there.

I’ve got tons of ideas, grand ideas and crackpot schemes alike, but I don’t have the guts to do everything I want to. I consider myself an extrovert now, but from being entirely awkward up until 8^th grade, I have to fight myself to engage with others. I like talking to people and making new friends. I like acting and performing for others. It just took me a while to figure that out. Now I’m stuck inside a shell that I wish I could break out of at any time, but I’m conditioned to hang back and observe.

I don’t know if people like me. I’m sensitive to being called a nerd, a loser, a creep. Yet I tend to operate under the belief that people are generally good. It’s like I’m living in two different worlds. There’s a confident me that shows himself in selective situations with close friends and by myself, and the nervous me that is uncomfortable almost everywhere else. If I’m not with people I fear am judging me, I’ll be confident and have fun. But I can’t tell what a lot of people think of me, so I get apprehensive and don’t know what to do.

I’m not someone who thinks everyone hates me. Hell no. I just don’t feel comfortable if I don’t know where I stand with a person. Not many people are mean to me, and maybe that is what concerns me. I don’t know who to open up to, and honestly I would like to open up to a lot more people. (There’s confident Ian talking; all talk, that one is.) I know I certainly have made a lot of friends in high school, but just like friends on Facebook, except for the ones that write on my wall, I don’t know what to do with the other hundreds.

I’m not a depressed person. This is a downer of a first blog post, but I think it may be helpful (for you and me) to get this over with. I enjoy life; that is not an issue. I just think I can enjoy it better with others. I refuse to think that my life sucks, or that I have no worth, but I think there is even more to life than I have right now. Clouds have silver linings, but they’re not always there for the taking. I can create my own silver linings, but that’s no substitute for a genuine success in life. Someday I will succeed, and that starts right now, with little baby steps.

Fear, Hope, and Freedom

Ian