Insomnia

I think one of the worst feelings to experience is not being able to fall asleep. It drives me nuts that I can be so tired throughout a whole day, struggling to keep my eyes open at work, then when I finally get to my bed, I lie there for like 40 minutes, wide awake.

It's been a long time since I have slept well, and I wish I knew why. One thing is that I seem to always be thinking about stuff. I try to clear my head, but so many things are on my mind.

They're not always deep or stressful thoughts, but all kinds of stuff clutters my brain. I get excited that baseball spring training is only a couple months away. I think about a game of Starcraft and what I could have done to play better. I think about work, about friends, about Olivia, about my future.

Sometimes people ask me how I always have weird ideas for blogs. Or, how I always seem to write so much. Well, I think the answer to both is that my blog is just a reflection of my life. Throughout the day, I've been spending a lot of time in personal thought, some of it is by choice, other times, I wish I could just relax and not think about anything. It's not like I sit around thinking "what should I write for my blog?" but more that I have so many random thoughts and the most accessible outlet these days for me is this blog.

The past year has been a tough year, among other things. And after talking to some of my friends, it seems that they have gone through (and may still be going through) tough times of their own. In my life, I don't think I really ever went through any identity crisis or anything when I became a teenager, or when I went through high school and college. As I have written before, the first 21 and a half years of my life were somewhat of a honeymoon for me, in that everything was laid out for me and that there were few things for me to doubt.

But right now, I think I'm going through maybe a mini-identity crisis. No, I'm not gonna quit my job and go pursue a life of painting or something. But I often wonder, where do I stand and where am I going? I've graduated college and found a job, now what?

I used to look up to people in my position and say to myself, "that is where I want to be. That is what I work hard for." And here I am, having essentially reached my goal. Who do I look up to now? What should I work hard for?

Even though I still admire my dad and respect him for being much older and wiser than me, he's no longer the invincible master of all knowledge and undisputed authority in everything. A lot of people see this earlier in life, but the realization that my parents are as imperfectly human as anyone else has only struck me in recent times.

So this is a time for me where the one feeling that seems to blanket all of my thoughts is one of ambivalence. For example, I feel too old to be buying clothes from places like Abercrombie, but I'm not ready for shopping at Marshall Fields or Nordstrom for stuff my mom or dad would wear. I feel like I should be past the college habits of sleeping late, going out to bars, etc., but at the same time I feel too young to leave that all behind now and start going to theater and musicals instead, drinking brandy instead of beer and listening to Kenny G and Celine Dion instead of Nelly and Britney Spears.

I don't think I want to be dating "just for fun" like in high school or college, but marriage and settling down with kids feels like it should be at least a few years away. And I know it's only a matter of time before I will move out from my mom and dad's house, but on second thought, am I really ready to live on my own, alone in this world? Scary.

As always, I've wandered far from my original topic. And of course, I don't really have any answers or solutions for myself. I'm just babbling here. At least now you know that I can't fall asleep, and maybe you know a little bit about why. But yeah, it sucks.