My life needs more content.

It’s really come to a head lately. As I predicted back in March when I officially stopped the daily baking, I have gotten very very bored with only having this one “thing” I do, and crave another.

It will probably be videos. Time will tell.

The way I know it is coming to a head lately is that I have starting dreading the job of filling my hours again. I find myself thinking “this is my life?” and “what’s the point of me, anyway?” and “How long till the next meal?”

When eating is the highlight of your day, something has gone dangerously wrong.

What I really want is something new. Something that will feel fresh and new and interesting. Baking did that for me for a long time. I had baked before, but never every day and I tended to make the same things over and over again. Baking was the perfect thing to absorb all my excess energies, as it was both physical and mental exercise along with a small amount of stress.

And you’d be amazed at how stressful a stress-free life can be. ^[1]

But it eventually became boring and routine. Plus messy and very expensive. So I stopped.

Writing fiction instead of this stuff does help somewhat. Right now, I am waiting for inspiration to strike. Don’t hold your breath, though, True Believers, because that doesn’t happen on demand.

Still, odds are good that sometime soonish, you will be reading a new work of fiction by me, and not the same old psychological navel-gazing and bone-chewing that ends up in this diary.

And maybe that will be enough, although I doubt it. I still have a lot of hours to fill.

Oh right. It’s my birthday today. Happy Me Day! For whatever reason, I just can’t get excited about it this year. Normally I try to boost my enthusiasm for life via promoting my birthday, getting a party together, basking in the one day of the year where you are supposed to make it all about you.

But not this year. I suppose I have reached the “thanks for the presents but who gives a shit” stage of life, where birthdays are less “yay me!” days and more “one digit closer to death” days.

I’ve always found that to be very sad. Your birthday is your special day! Everyone deserves to be celebrated once a year. And I am still pretty excited by other people’s birthdays. They are excuses for me to express my natural effusiveness.

What can I say, I feel things strongly and my natural inclination is to express that to the hilt. Most of the time I hold back because I have high emotive force and me at full (nonliteral) volume freaks people the hell out.

Especially because I am a big guy. We big guys can’t play by the same rulebook as average sized guys. Everything we do is amplified by our size. We are, through no fault of our own, “loud”.

But still, I dream of finding a place in life for myself where I can be a full-strength version of myself. Maybe some echelon of gay subculture full of people with big personalities, a sort of Valley of the Giants for the large of body and soul.

Where was I…. oh yeah, enriching my life.

More than a second “thing”, though, I think I need to think in terms of making my life more satisfying and meaningful to me. I am loathe to admit it, but depression has made my actual horizons very, very tight. Sure, my mind can go all over the place without fear, and I can pat myself on the back for being such a powerful and fearless philosopher all I want.

But my actual life is nowhere near as wide open, and the truth is, the reason is cowardice.

I need all this hyper-familiarity just to keep myself from freaking out. Even just the thought of going out of this tiny little corner I have painted myself into makes me feel anxious. Forget actually doing it.

And yet, I desperately need it. I have hid behind the excuse of lack of funds for a long time. But I have a bus pass and feet. I could go to stuff. I could prove to myself that I am not, in fact, trapped.

But then I have to face the angry chorus of options all screaming “Do me! Do me!” at me as I stand there frozen in place just like when my siblings used to all shout instructions at me at the same time.

Just pick something and do it, people say. And they are right. But it’s not that easy.

So maybe I fool myself into thinking my life is far more restricted than it is because true freedom represents the hopeless agony of option paralysis. Easier just to pull my head back in my shell and pretend that’s all there is.

Some philosopher, huh?

The answer, as always, must be somewhere in the middle. Somewhere between too many options and not nearly enough.

I think the real problem is lack of faith in my own ability to choose. If I was stronger in that area, I would just make a decision and go forward and not worry about whether it’s the “right” one. It just has to be good enough.

Hell, it just has to be better than doing nothing all day and hating it.

That’s what coming out of your shell really means. Opening up your world, not just your mind. The shell is transparent… you have always been able to see everything. And you have tried to pretend that is enough.

But it isn’t. Life is more than mere survival and we need experiences in order to grow and thrive, not just thoughts.

Life in realtime. It’s a scary thought. But I have to do it.

And one of these days. I will stop talking about it and actually do it.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.