who

I find myself constantly grasping for something because I’m deeply dissatisfied with who I am. I think I want to be a certain person and I don’t think I am that person. Or maybe in my head I see myself as that person but I recognize externally I’m not that person. That’s why I have all these projects and things I try to do that are beyond my reach, why I spend most of my waking time consumed by different things that don’t relate to my job or my day to day life. I’m searching for some sort of meaningful thing that I want my life to be about, but even I recognize that likely isn’t how life works. Almost every waking moment when I’m alone and not doing my job or doing survival upkeep, I’m researching things online. I go down several YouTube and Reddit rabbit holes every day, usually on some technical topics I convince myself I’m interested in. Or I’m drafting up project ideas that, if I actually managed to do, would make me the person who I think I want to be.

The downside of all this is that it’s impossible (or atleast infeasible) to be this way. Not only is there no measurable progress in any direction, but responsibilities and obligations are constantly neglected or simply forgotten about. And most of all it’s EXHAUSTING to be the way that I am. But like, I can’t stop. Like I can’t just not be this way, I find that impossible. My brain is constantly running at Mach 5 on the hamster wheel (Mach 5 = 5x the speed of sound, yes my nerdiness knows no bounds). I literally get distracted by thoughts, and while I’m thinking about something I get distracted from that distraction by another distracting thought. They’re all in the category of projects to do or topics to dive into, etc. one moment I’ll be halfway through watching a 3hr video on schematic and pcb design for a single-cell LiPo charging circuit and how the typical TP4056 approach doesn’t have “power path”/“pass through” charging, and how what I’m thinking of is sorta like a small-scale uninterruptible power supply, and the next moment I’ll have 5 new tabs open about Lyapunov stability, lunar Lagrange points, thrust vector control, vlogs on level 3 model rockets and what the tradeoffs are between solid fuel engines liquid engines and hybrids are. And if all of that sounds like gibberish that’s cuz it literally is to me, I know absolutely nothing about these domains. I have no need to know about these things in my life and yet I have ~200 chrome tabs open about it all, which if I actually tried to get through would take atleast 40 hours (and this isn’t counting the stuff I have open for all the other topics I didn’t mention here. I hope you never see how many chrome tabs I have open cuz you’d get dizzy looking at them like I do 💀).

But if I think about it I’ve actually always been this way. I have a 1tb hard drive on my desk that I filled up in highschool. On that hard drive is a mind-numbing number of textbooks on stuff that I literally don’t have enough time in my life to look at. I have 100s of hours of video courses on different coding things, none of which I’ve ever actually looked at once. I have over 3000 chrome bookmarks I’ve collected over the years, most of which just point to larger collections of information and resources. Like a giant library where every book is actually its own giant library that has its own books.

In short, my pattern is that I hoard knowledge of topics, most of the time without actually learning anything or gaining anything out of it.

So why am I saying all this? It’s cuz another thing I tend to do, especially when I exhaust or overwhelm myself (ie. all the time) is that I brain dump into written words. Like a Frankenstein version of what journaling probably actually is, because the brain dump is so overwhelmingly large.

I don’t really know how to be content. If I just stopped the pattern and picked a direction and consistently stuck with that direction, I’d probably be a lot better off and maybe a lot happier. But I haven’t figured out how, and I don’t know that I can. For all the things I know about, I have nothing to show for it. In my head I’ve visited multiple universes, but from the outside it looks like I’ve never left my house.

Everyone around me seems to have figured out how to pick a direction, things that they care about, the person that they are, and stuck with it and made progress with it. Like it’s not my intention to sound pretentious, but it’s incredibly lonely being me. Yes I have friends and a family and also miraculously the most loving and kind and sweetest soulmate wifey, but I am still alone in my mind. I actually wrote about this a couple years ago in a note (extract below)

Nobody will ever understand you the way you do. There will always be a uncrossable distance between the dimensions that others interact with you on, and the mental realm you inhabit alone. Any attempt to traverse that distance will result in translation error or perception error when trying to condense ideas into transmissible communication. Only I will ever really know who I am. Any interaction with any other being is restricted to the limitations of every form of communication. That’s why I’ll always be alone.

The original note says edited Jan 2, but that’s not 2024 or even 2023. I wrote this years ago. I’d probably word it differently now, and have 10x more to say, but the idea is the same.

idk how to resolve all of what I’m talking about, I don’t even know how to define it. All I know is that I wake up every day and there’s this thing in my mind that doesn’t let me be content, ever. And it makes me feel isolated from and alien to everything and everyone that isn’t inside my mind.

However I noticed early on that when I’m with you, I don’t feel this way. For whatever reason I’m able to be 100% present when I’m with you. Even when thoughts about things I wanna do or look into cross my mind, when I’m with you I don’t feel that negative tug in my brain that sucks me into a rabbit hole down a random direction. I can just be with you and my brain is quiet and I feel relieved honestly. I don’t have to feed the image of me in my head if you say I’m good enough, somehow you smile at me and my brain goes “oh, I guess you’re fine as you are for now if she’s happy with you”.

Thanks for always reading this far and still being nice to me afterwards ❤️ I love you 💕