It’s entirely possible that I open my mouth too much. Which is to say, that it’s become habit for me to often talk about what I’m thinking about, which presents itself as a conclusion rather than a process, by social norm.

I decided to ride to work today without music. I can not finger the last time this happened, it would surely have been the result of a dead ipod battery rather than a choice. My stop at All City found me with relatively intense anxiety in my stomach, which cleared up when I got back on the bike.

“We’ve already been through this.” Yes, and I’m still not satisfied with how it’s turned out.

Further reading last night and this morning in the previously mentioned Changing Lives. I’m about halfway through the book, and most of the stories cause such emotion in me to bring me to tears. There’s are repetitive threads, kids coming from ‘the county’ where theres nothing to do but pick potatoes and work in the woods (is there even that anymore in the post-NAFTA era?), which ultimately leads to drug and alcohol abuse. Broken families from alcoholism, physical and sexual abuse.

Persevere, hold on to what good you can, one step at a time forward.

I’m off to Portland tomorrow for a conference and won’t be back until Friday night. There’s a number of camping trips this weekend, and I don’t think I want to go on any of them. I need more time for myself. Being social doesn’t come naturally to me, and as much progress as I’ve made in it I easily forget how hard it is on me.

Ten years ago I returned to a brief stint at PC Tech, under new management, doing computer repair again. A family business then, one of the sons, I think Ben, told me he regretted spending as much time in high school partying rather than learning. In hind sight those remarks are always easier said, and perhaps can be used as leverage to achieve more at the time for some people. At the time, I don’t think I knew any other way to be. Today, perhaps I’ve pushed so hard to grow in so many directions at once that I’ve forgotten who I was a little.

I’ve been thinking a little about how the people in my life identify themselves, and what communities they’ve chosen to represent who they are.

I feel better after this weekend. At a party last night, Jarrod asked me how I felt, I told him that I felt better in my heart, but not physically, and we’d have to wait and see about that. I’m probably pushing myself too hard to deal with too many internal struggles at once. We’ll see.

Probably the difference between honesty and sincerity is that the latter contains more soul. Not just feeling though, you can be honest about how you feel at any given time, but more than that. All that is you.

“Wheel never stops turning Badger.”

Being broken. There’s this idea that something being broken requires fixing. Being broken is the human condition. Can change be a singular event? Something so transcendatal that you wake up one day and what wasn’t okay, is? Time, is often described to be the cure. Sometimes coping is a mechanism to make time pass. I think change happens with time. When you wake up one day and realized you’ve changed, it wasn’t that day that it happened. It happened along the way, bit by bit, and you didn’t see it coming.

An ex once told me she liked me for who I could be. Ignoring the obvious terribleness of this, it’s who you are that’s important. The good, the bad and the ugly, as they say. Broken and all, we are who we are, with time, we’ll be different, maybe better, maybe less broken in the ways that we consider ourselves broken now. But this journey has no end, just the paths we choose to walk along the way, and who we share those with.