Friday, November 30, 2007     6:50 PM

My Drug of Choice, originally uploaded by Fraochsidhe.

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i transcribe.

that is to say for the last several years, that is the majority of what i do to make a living. sometimes i love it, sometimes i hate it. always it takes up most of my time. for three years, i worked a regular office job where transcription was just part of my job function. now, working from home for various reasons, mostly not my choice, all i do is transcribe. sometimes it's very lucrative, sometimes not so much. i take what i can get, i overextend myself, and i just do until i can't do any more. then i do some more.

so that's a good summation of why i haven't been writing, or really doing much of anything besides working. sure, there are places i hang out, go to unwind, but they aren't the places i used to go for respite. that's okay, though. i've changed, which is of course a given.

even though i haven't been practicing the physical act of writing, i've done a lot of mental writing these past few years. figured out quite a bit about myself, my choices. given myself a dose of reality that was sorely needed in years past.

here's the thing, i used to be very insecure. i'm not afraid or ashamed to admit that. this insecurity manifested itself in a desire to be liked (or loved, depending on the situation) because feeling that everyone that i gave damn about actually liked me, i got a huge sense of fulfillment that i wasn't getting from within. classic, i realize. and see my various jobs, and all the titles i claim for myself on my business card, that's where i get that fulfillment from now. it's not so much that i've replaced one with the other, but that i finally got that i'm good at quite a number of things and that i can be successful. i don't need other people to feel successful, i can just be that way, do that for myself. it's a very duh kind of statement, but i had to figure it out.

and with that, i figured out what i'd been doing wrong in a lot of past relationships, which i'm sure is at least partially responsible for the demise of some of them. i had a very convoluted notion of the emotional vs. mental vs. physical aspects to a relationship. i confused them all the time. if i had a great physical chemistry with someone, and mentally/intellectually we were on the same page, then of course there had to be some great emotional connection. no, not so much. and that's fine. once i figured that out, it was very liberating. sure, all three would be great, but that's not always what you get. as long as i realize what's there and what's not, as long as i can level with myself, it puts me in the best position to know what i want, as opposed to believing certain protocols should be followed because that's the way it's supposed to go.

and so this leads me to what occurred to me today, that i am alone (please don't mistake this for lonely, for which i am not at all), and i'm happy. generally, i am happy. sure, i need to lose weight, and i'd like to see more movies, read more books, work less. but emotionally, i'm not in some dark place i was in for years. i don't hate myself. i don't think badly of myself. i don't have a reason to, and not that i necessarily did before, but i'm done making excuses for why life sucks. i'm just going to continue to be and see where that leads.

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