Project 35

9:00AM My knee just cracked. Finally. I had been feeling a need for it to crack for about 30 minutes and maybe sitting down did the trick. For the last …

9:00AM

My knee just cracked. Finally. I had been feeling a need for it to crack for about 30 minutes and maybe sitting down did the trick.

For the last year or so, I’ve felt unusual tension and cracking in my joints. I think my body overall has felt quite tense—maybe from not “succeeding” enough, having a lot of uncertainty in my life, or believing that I always have more work to do. Regardless of the cause, something perhaps I may explore at a different time, at this moment I’m going to focus more on the effect.

I believe that so many of us have things happening with our bodies that we don’t tell other people but inevitably affect them anyway. Perhaps we have consistent and powerful headaches; maybe we have indigestion or constipation; or we have intense muscle or back pain.

More often than not, we don’t tell people what’s going on—well, directly that is. We may shout at them, insult them, ignore them, condescend them, or shower them with jealousy, when really it has little to do with them and more to do with our bodies at the moment.

When I wake up and feel tight, groggy, rushed, sore, and unsure why all of it is happening, I will often be very short, annoyed, and gruff with people who are interacting with me. Sometimes I’ll think it’s them that’s causing this reaction and many times I’ll realize it’s because I didn’t sleep well. In other bodily scenarios, like hunger, consistent pain, etc., I think I’m less likely to recognize how much my body is contributing to the conflict I’m having with the other person.

I believe, however, that when other people are short, annoyed, or gruff with me, I rarely attribute it to their body. I’m trying to get better, to remember that what I’m doing or did probably brought no more than 50% of the emotions to that person’s current state, and yet it’s so easy for me to forget. I think they dislike me, want me to leave them alone, or didn’t like what I said. More likely than not, they’re probably already feeling something in their body that contributes to their reaction.

So what to do with this? One, take care of my body. Two, tell people what’s going in my body. Three, realize that other people have a lot of stuff swirling in their body that I’ll never know and is probably causing their external interaction. Four, remember to breathe?

Our bodies are us, we are our bodies.

Two years. That’s probably the maximum amount of time that I’ve committed to something—a project, a relationship, a job, an apartment, or even a city. I’m sure there are a …

Two years. That’s probably the maximum amount of time that I’ve committed to something—a project, a relationship, a job, an apartment, or even a city. I’m sure there are a few examples outside of that, but I’m starting to see a pattern in how I switch it up after just a couple years.

I was talking with someone about how romantic relationships and she said that maybe I’m just more focused on contracts and it clicked. I think marriage scares me because it feels forever—most forever things seem to scare me. The idea that something will be static, unable to adapt to its environment for the rest of my life gives me pause—a lot of pause. I’m sure that I overplay the rigidity of it and there is more flexibility than I imagine. I want to dig into this more.

I don’t just fear the forever of a romantic partnership, I fear the forever of one company, one brand, one product, one location, one house, one look, one story, one anything. I fear getting bored. I fear feeling stuck. I fear feeling suffocated.

I wonder if I’m overlooking the fact that my parents have lived in the same house for my whole life. As much as I’ve explored and tried new things, I’ve always had a very solid, stable base. I’ve roamed free, changed things, and known in the back of my head that this was always here. Perhaps that gave me freedom to explore.

Perhaps that stability at home gave me the desire to explore. Seeing things that seem to be the same day-after-day and wanting to taste a new part of the world. This desire has led me to places that few peers have dreamt of seeing—by age 34, I’ve been to maybe 25+ countries and have lived on three continents. It has introduced me to so many people from so many walks of life—rich/poor, young/old, tech/artist/factory worker, and from so many homes. It has led me to learn so much—computer programming, marketing, emotions, conflict resolution, web design, salsa dancing, juggling, etc.

This desire to explore has taught me much but maybe I’m out of balance on the explore/exploit spectrum. Maybe I need to recognize that I can explore a lot within a narrow field, that I don’t have to create a new field to explore. I don’t always have to be a beginner. I can become really deep in one topic, place, or relationship.

Who knows. I still like to explore, maybe I can reframe exploiting into an exploring challenge.

I think I fear being one-dimensional. That people will see me and only think X and not A, B, C, 1, 2, 3, and some alpha and beta as well …

I think I fear being one-dimensional. That people will see me and only think X and not A, B, C, 1, 2, 3, and some alpha and beta as well (is gamma the third greek letter?). I worry that as a public figure, either other people will stuff me into a tight-fitting box or I’ll do it to myself. That I won’t be able to adapt to my surroundings, that I’ll forever be known as X.

Perhaps this is just how it is. I think about Helen Keller and how I read she did a lot of activism work in her later years, and how she seems to be remembered just for being deaf and blind—or was it deaf and mute? I’m not sure.

Perhaps this goes to show that people may not even remember us that much at all. Maybe that’s even more scary—that we spend our whole lives doing only one thing, and then we still can’t even be remembered for that.

Maybe that’s just the essence of human life: we remember few details, if we remember them at all.

I think about the public figures that I know of and honestly, I only know of them for specific things—their most famous songs, movies, speeches, topics, books, etc. I don’t know their full humanity, and even if I did, I still would probably remember them as “the person that did a lot of things but mostly did X.”

Perhaps I struggle because I think that I have to come up with the X for which I’ll be known, but I don’t think that’s the case. Maybe it’s more of the situation where other people decide that part of my identity. Even if I commit to doing X my whole life, people may say, “Oh, he’s the guy that does Y.” Noooo! I remember fighting this in Oakland, California. I was doing a little bit of web development to help pay the bills and I wanted to shift to focus on emotional communication—either iFeelio or Emotional Self-Defense. I remember how frustrated I would feel when people would introduce me as the guy “who knows a lot about computers.” Ugh, no, please no.

This is one area that frustrates me often: thinking that I am the only one who can control my identity. I think it’s always a balance of how I self-identify and how others identify me. One time while riding the daladala in Tanzania (little minibus), someone referred to me as a girl. I remember feeling angry and frustrated, and yet, I did have shoulder-length blond curly hair at the time. Perhaps he saw the hair and guessed from there.

As I said before, maybe I fear having to figure out what’s my X label, when I don’t actually have to do that. Maybe society will figure it out for me, change it, keep it, and overall has more control over it than I do. In a way, I feel free thinking that.

“More here, less there.” It’s one of the mantras I created in 2012 when I first started to work on emotions full-time and to build iFeelio. It is one that …

“More here, less there.” It’s one of the mantras I created in 2012 when I first started to work on emotions full-time and to build iFeelio. It is one that I remember in my head and so often forget in my body.

I woke up this morning feeling tight again and stressed, almost as if I hadn’t slept and it hit me: I’ve been so distant. I mean, physically I haven’t because I have barely left my house in 5 weeks, but emotionally and mentally I have. My attention has been elsewhere, not on the sounds, sights, smells, and other sensations of my surroundings, but on business ideas, political decisions, friends overseas, and so many other things far out of reach.

I went for a walk near my old middle school and tried to focus on being more present. Again, the mantra isn’t only about being present but just shifting to have more balance between here and there. I started to walk more slowly, I heard more of the birds calling, I felt the sun shining, I saw the dew glistening, and I even felt nostalgia for how I used to do this exact path as a pre-teenager to school. I felt my muscles relax, I became more playful, and I felt more at home.

At home. The irony is that I cannot be more at home than I have ever been in my life. This shelter-at-home order happened when I am living with my parents in the house in which I grew up from 0-18. I know no other family home than this one. So, theoretically, I should feel the most at home as possible, and yet I haven’t. Last November I was Italy for 2 weeks and then Germany for maybe 1 week, then I came back here, then in January I was in Mexico for almost 2 weeks, and finally in February in Uganda for about 1 month. Traveling, exploring, interacting with lots of people—I felt very free. Now I’m back home and often yearning to be out, to be free, to be on the road. So I feel stuck, I feel distant.

I notice that one of the ways I try to be present is to go to a place that forces me to be present. In a foreign environment with a foreign language and foreign customs, I have no choice but to pay attention to what’s happening—everything is new. Here at home, everything is almost the same as it has been my whole life. Nothing forces me to focus on the moment.

In this way, I’m grateful to be home because it is almost one of the biggest challenges I can face in terms of becoming present: how to be present in a place where everything is familiar.

It’s not about the bad dancing. Well, partially yes, but that’s not all of it. It’s about people seeing my long beard, the items in my childhood family room, the …

It’s not about the bad dancing. Well, partially yes, but that’s not all of it. It’s about people seeing my long beard, the items in my childhood family room, the shirt that barely fits because I’ve gained 20 pounds since I bought it, and any other thing about me. It’s not really about them seeing bad things about me, it’s about them seeing anything about me.

I’ve shied away from posting things, I think, because I’ve felt afraid of people knowing me. We call it being famous, but we also call it being well known. And I haven’t wanted to be well known.

At least not consistently.

I have posted some very deep intense videos on the internet, including one of me bawling my eyes out after a breakup. However, even in that situation, I was careful to not mention names, to mask details of what actually happened in the relationship, and in so doing, making it harder for people to know too much about me or about the people in my life. When I do gain the courage to post these things, I often will wait a while before I post again, sometimes going months without posting much.

And it’s not just about posting, this is how I can be in interacting with others in conversation as well. I don’t use names, I don’t reference too many details about my life or the lives of others. I show emotions, yes, and show quite vulnerable emotions, yet seem to do it in a way that hides a lot of the things that would help someone know me well.

This causes me a challenge: to be well known, I have to let people know me—and I have hesitated to let people know me. The more someone knows me, the more power they have over me, or ratter, the more powerless I often feel. Yes, this means that people can hurt me more—just as loved ones seem to know how to jab us in just the right spots—it also means they can help me more.

On the call with the author support group today, I realized that by me taking down the video of me dancing, I, yes, was hiding what I thought to be my bad dancing from other people, but really I was hiding myself. I was hiding my facial expressions, living conditions, physical condition, and many other aspects. I was hiding.

But how do I spread the work that I’ve been doing if I keep hiding?

I’ve often said that, while they say “it’s not what you know, it’s who you know that counts,” I believe it’s more “it’s who knows you” that counts. Sometimes these ideas stay stuck in my head and take forever to sink into the body.

I feel scared when I think about people knowing so much about me. I feel scared when I think about strangers knowing so much about me. About my dreams, my hopes, my fears, my past, my future, my friends, family, and other people.

I guess that’s normal. Maybe again, it’s about the courage to face this. The courage to put this out there. The courage to let people know me. The courage to let people see me. After all, I’m just a human like everyone else—we’re all pretty much the same underneath.