PERSONAL HOT SHIT #2

First of all, allow me to address the elephant in the room. I know full well that the title of this post sounds redundant and silly. Hot shit? #2? Really? All I can say is: Look, "#2" comes after "#1." That, and I like the term "hot shit" for these posts. It doesn't have anything to do with actual shit. So let's move on and not make a big deal out of this. I mean, seriously. Shit.

As a recap, I've been trying to think and communicate directly about my childhood and life so far. What's gone right and what's gone wrong, at least as much as I can make sense of it through my limited, human perspective. I heard somewhere recently that life isn't about milestones so much as moments, and I like the sound of that, so I'm not focusing on big events from my past so much as I'm looking for behavioral patterns. Things I do regularly that work for or against me. The first thing to stand out is my tendency to be passive. By all measures I'm too passive. I'm very, very passive.

When I was a kid, I used to hang out with whichever other kids would ask me to hang out with them. Although I didn't realize it at the time, my friends would always choose me, and not the other way around. That's not to say I had a lot of friends—because I didn't—but only that I don't recall ever taking any initiative socially. Sometimes in grade school, two friends would actually fight over who got to hang out with me after school while I stood by passively, not knowing what to do. And although I wasn't wearing an old-timey dress or a fancy hat, and my friends weren't dressed up as gunslingers, in retrospect it all seems so silly that we might as well have been. Unfortunately, the only thing that's really changed since then is that now sometimes my friends and I do dress up that way. Just kidding. This may work better if I resist the urge to make dumb, albeit hilarious, jokes.

I've read that the people who are most successful in life are the ones who learn from an early age that they have the ability to reshape the world around them. When I was a child, I was pretty aggressively taught the opposite. My family culture was such that I was supposed to do exactly as I was told, and that amounted largely to doing well in school. The good news is that I did do well in school. I got good grades and I received tons of academic accolades. The bad news is that this required a lot of hard work and studying, all of which came at a cost: I spent most of my time alone and I didn't learn to socialize in what I feel is a normal and healthy way. For whatever reason, I seem to have been brought up as if school mattered but social development didn't. As it turns out, in my case anyway, this was not a recipe for success.

I should note that, on the whole, I think my parents did a fine job raising me. These days my family gets along great, and I know what a rare and wonderful thing that is. It hasn't always been that way, and the fact that it now is certainly isn't lost on me. The point I wanted to make is merely that I'm naturally a passive introvert, and it just so happens I was brought up in a way that amplified those qualities, rather than balancing them out.

Cut to today. I'm 34 years old and, for the most part, I've spent the last fifteen years trying to figure out how to socialize normally. I suppose "normally" isn't really the right word. Let's just say I've been trying to develop a version of myself that's compatible with the social realities of our world. In some ways I've made a lot of progress. In other ways, not so much. I still spend almost all of my time alone, and I almost never ask anyone if they want to hang out or do anything. The idea simply doesn't cross my mind.

Now, I may be mistaken, but my understanding is that it's very difficult to succeed or experience fulfilment in a vacuum. So I'm under the impression that it would do me good to get out more. In all honesty, I've been under that impression for years. But it's very, very difficult to motivate myself to get out more. And in the rare event that I do get out, it's usually to go for a walk or go shopping. So I'm still spending that time alone. I guess part of the problem is that, a lot of the time, I really enjoy spending time alone. I love being alone with my thoughts and I actually laugh a lot when I'm alone, just talking to myself or thinking about interesting, unusual, and oftentimes ridiculous hot shit.

But what I've got going isn't so much a life as it is an existence. For example, I enjoy writing alone, but it would be rewarding in a different way to write collaboratively with others. It would be fun to write a play and perform it with friends. It would be fun to write a movie with friends and film it, even if it turned out really, really shitty. Who cares? The whole process would probably be a blast. It would be fun to start rapping again. I would love to put together a rap group or a band. It would be fun to teach kids how to rap. It would be fun to dress up as a kid and play basketball on a grade school team. All joking aside, I could probably score a lot of points on a grade school basketball team. Maybe it could be an all-girls team and I could work my way toward a bench position in the WNBA. Holy shit, yo. Streets ain't ready.

All those things would be great. But as it is now, I probably average only an hour or two of human interaction per week. I need to pump those numbers up, playboy. I need to take the initiative to somehow teach myself that I do indeed have the ability to reshape the world around me. That's step number one. And I don't know yet what comes after number one, but whatever it is, hopefully it'll be the shit.