“Lafeyette be telling me how tired he is, and I always ask him this because I made a mistake with Terence once,” LaJoe said. “Terence used to tell me he was tired, but I used to think he was tired from just being tired and I’d say, ‘go lay down.’ But Terence didn’t mean that. Terence meant he was just tired with what was going on. So that made me in the habit of asking now when they say they’re tired, ‘What you mean, you tired?'”

One thing I’ve picked up from crowd hopping, maybe just from life, is the sense of how different everyone’s perceptions of reality are. People get strongly bonded between their social identity and their beliefs. I’m wondering how much I can leverage that experience to change the course of mine.

I’ve been thinking lately about my feelings for people not always being as in line with their actions. This year has been hard, the hardest in years. Perhaps, that’s a call to reshape a few things, reshape my values and my personal feelings toward people that exceed my compassion.

My father told me today that he was proud of my compassion. I shake my head thinking of how enigmatic our relationship is, and has been. I’ve been thinking tonight about my accomplishments that I tend to undervalue, and about reshaping my feelings of success around them, hoping to lure some of my disappointment about relationships away. I can’t help but think of my father in this case. His comments about feelings. His obvious efforts to avoid feeling them, the drinking, the hermit tendencies. At some point, I feel like there are feelings I simply need to stop speaking of. It doesn’t matter that I feel them anymore, the are nonreciprocal. I’m afraid of the darkness, the isolation, the internal torment. It very well could be my imagination, but it’s presence haunts me all the same.