Stream of Consciousness

So I stumbled upon a blog in which the blogger wrote about their own feelings in such a personal way that I felt I'd crept into their bedroom and thumbed through their diary and it was odd. I felt as if I knew the person even though they're a complete stranger to me. I know that my blogs are pretty personal in that I write about the things I've done on a given day and it's pretty obvious if I'm upset or angry about anything but I don't think I genuinely pour my heart out into them, and having stopped writing in my diary months ago, I've realised that I don't do it with anything.

When I was all over the place last year my head never used to be out of my diary but now that I see myself as being saner and more mature than I used to be (a natural side effect of moving out from my parents' and building my own life I guess), I don't feel the need to put myself onto paper. Maybe it's because I've started relying on my friends more and telling them whenever something's wrong. I dunno.

After reading this person's blog and learning about their every worry, I thought, being that it's 2am on a Friday night and I'm not drunk or asleep, I'd challenge myself and do the same, properly open myself up on here for you all to judge me even more so than you already do.

And people do. They must. Even this week someone I barely knew (well I didn't know them at all at the time) told me they'd read my blog and my immediate reaction was "Well you must think I'm a bitch then" because I'm fully aware that I really should learn to shut up. It's the same with any journalist though. Go on any blog on The Guardian and you'll see people writing their controversial opinions down in the most obnoxious way possible, ensuring a lot of people that have never met them, hate them. I dunno. I don't really care. As Kurt Cobain once said "I'd rather be hated for who I am than loved for who I am not" and you can't say I'm not genuine. Trace my blog back to 2007 or whenever I started writing and you'll find all kinds of meltdowns that, embarrassing or not, I refuse to delete because why should I? If I'm going to be an unstable, annoying bint than people should at least know about it, right?

I digress. Trying to stick to my little challenge of pouring my soul out for you all and I really don't see what I can say here. I'm upset that my two best friends are studying abroad next year and worried that my social life will suck, but you all knew that. I'm worried that summer will be dry because I don't know when I'm moving into my new house and a lot of my uni friends have moved back home for summer but you all knew that as well. I don't have some need to vent any complex emotions or fears or whatever because, genuinely, there isn't any really. I'm fine and life is sweet.

The only thing, and I'm clutching at straws a little here, is something deep down inside that just doesn't seem to be there. There's a kind of emptiness in my stomach somewhere. It's not that I'm not happy with my life, because trust me I wouldn't trade with anyone, and it's not that I'm not happy with myself, because I'm not gonna lie, I love myself. It's a discontentment and I don't know where it stems from or what it will take to be content. I think everybody (or most people at least) have this feeling of emptiness inside them. When I first became a believer in God it disappeared but because I'm not one of those Christians that thinks about God ALL THE TIME EVERY SECOND and sees Him in everything, from the bus arriving on time to the vending machine stocking my favourite chocolate bar (Boost at the minute, if anyone's offering) it came back.

I'm young. I don't know what the key to proper, permanent fulfillment is. In my unprofessional opinion, I think it's a mixture of things, akin to Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs. Obviously we need the material essentials but I don't think we can truly be happy until we have not only a secure set of friends and a loving family, but a partner who we love and who loves us, a career that we are passionate about, and probably lots of other things that I'm too young or tired to be considering right now.

On his pyramid of things that are needed in order to reach self-actualisation (or the contentment I've been talking about), I'd say I'm in the top triangle, the Self-Actualisation one, the top of the pyramid, theoretically meaning that if I have more creativity and spontaneity in my life than I should be happy as fuck, so fingers crossed all that will come either after uni, when I begin to travel and find out some more about the world and the people in it, or maybe even while I'm still here in Salford as my course becomes more interesting and I get some proper writing experience. I can't say. I just believe that, depending on where they are on the pyramid, everybody feels discontentment at some level and I believe that only a few people in this world, such as the Dalai Lama have achieved self-actualisation. It's completely normal. Courtney Love wrote in her diaries "Why do I always crave change? When will it settle?" and she was a famous rock star with more money, drugs and fishnet tights than she would ever need and a husband that, before things went wrong, she was deeply in love with. Robbie Williams is a classic example of someone else who is unsatisfied with life at the top. Eminem, Whitney Houston, the list is endless.

All we can do is be grateful for the things we do have rather than worrying about that which we don't, and we will come that bit closer to the contentment that we were created to experience.

Didn't do too badly in the end did I? I'm off to read The Linnet Bird before I go to sleep, it is a wonderful book and you should all go and buy it right now.