I’ve grown so much in the last year.

Actually, it hasn’t even been a year yet. It’s only been nine months. Nine months! That’s how long it’s been since I started at Kwantlen last September. Nine months, and I am still not done being born.

I like to take my time.

Nine months. Three quarters of a year. And yet it feels like a lifetime ago.

Hell, it feels like ten.

I guess once I got my life going, I really got it going. I find it hard to identify with that weak and sleepy person who was so damned nervous and scared on his first day at Kwantlen. It’s not that I don’t remember being that guy… I do.

But it still seems like someone else. Someone with whom I only share a history. Heck, I have trouble identifying with the version of me that walked out of Kwantlen on my last day of class there.

VFS has been good for me in a lot of ways. I feel more grounded and purposeful than ever before. Like my life is going somewhere. And I am really enjoying my classes.

I’m still a loner, though. My “forcing myself to be more social” project is taking longer than expected. I feel like I am fitting in a little better when hanging out in the lounge during lunch. But it’s not like I’ve made new friends there.

I’ve made a bunch of highly pleasant acquaintances, though, and that’s better than I ever did at Kwantlen. VFS has both small class sizes for certain classes, and I have a stable group, Class WR52a, for all those classes. There’s eight or nine of us now ^[bye] and I know them all by name, and they know me. We have workshopped each other’s stuff, and talked about this n’ that, and every now and then they even laugh at my jokes.

Not that often, though, and I don’t blame them. I realize now that all these years with the same group of friends has made me soft. Comedy is so much easier with La Gang because they know me, they get me, and I have had years of practice on the same audience. Plus we have over a decade of shared references to draw from.

I don’t have that with my group. Doesn’t stop me from trying, though. Very little can. I know this because I have been trying to be funny my entire life, and for a lot of those years, I was not good at it at all. It was a behaviour with very little reward and very little chance of success. And yet, I just kept plugging.

What can I say… comedy is me.

And I take comfort in that compulsion. It’s good to know that there are some things which genuinely drive me. Depression can make it feel like I am entirely inert. A noble gas that doesn’t react to anything. Or at the very least, nothing that isn’t immediately hyper-rewarding.

You know…. like food.

Anyhoo, back to life progress. See, I’m getting better. I still wander off on tangents… but at least I remember to come back now!

Right now, I have a glorious feeling of unfolding. Blossoming. It’s slow – you’d need time lapse photography to see it in action – but it’s powerful and profound. Eventually, I will emerge fully into the sun and bloom for all the world to see.

And if that doesn’t happen to include being as socially integrated as I want to be, I can live with that.

I say that because I realized that putting pressure on myself to “fit in” or make social progress faster than I am can only lead to disaster. Trying to force things like that never works. What I truly need is the opposite of that – to just relax, be myself, and see where I naturally fit.

I am pretty sure that must be what normal, people do. Any striving to fit in they do is done by instinct for the most part. And because it operates on that level, it is much faster and more successful than anything our overheated intellectual imaginations can conceive.

Life isn’t chess. You don’t always get to think then move. That’s a very hard truth for me to grapple with, but grapple with it I must, because denying it makes life worse and I went it to be better.

I will always be a thinker, of course. That’s just my natural disposition. There’s thinkers and doers, and I’m the former. Doers sometimes think they don’t need us thinkers, with our boring need to stop and think instead of just getting things done, but we’re the ones who decide what needs to be done, and why.

With us, the doers would have nothing to do!

That said, whatever experience I can get dealing with life in realtime is appreciated. It’s never something I want to do, but it’s something I need to do if I am going to escape the ice prison I have trapped myself in. Coming back to life is never easy, and almost always comes with a lot of pain…. but then it’s done, and the pain subsides, and you are left with nothing but the new, expanded consciousness.

And suddenly, you are more alive and awake, and the question of whether it was worth it becomes laughingly trivial and small-minded.

That’s what recovery is like for me. Waking up. Like I have said before, it’s like rubbing your foot to ake it up after it has fallen asleep. Sure, the immediate result is a lot of pins-and-needles pain as the numbness leaves and blood returns to the affected areas, and a person without any sense of the future might feel that pain and immediately stop, and decide that it’s not worth it. They might even go around limping with a numb foot for the rest of their lives simply because they couldn’t bring themselves to endure the temporary pain needed to wake it up.

But once they do…. they will kick themselves with said foot for not having done it a long time ago.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.