You Can't Escape It

Meltdown last night.

Over fucking Christmas cookies.

Well, that's silly. It was Christmas cookies, and the cleaning I have to do, and the stress of in-laws coming, and my own self-critical nature. Not to mention a creeping sense of professional dissatisfaction. I do not feel at ease right now, and it exploded like a faulty pressure cooker...

As I am want to do.

Sometimes I really hate myself. I mean, everyone has those feelings, but sometimes my disgust with myself burns like phosphorous. Sometimes I feel like everywhere I turn is a reminder of my own failings and failures. Usually, I can put on the brave face, give it a self-deprecating joke, and soldier on. Other times, my Bruce Banner just gives up the go, and all I want to do is SMASH SOMETHING!!

I dunno. Normally, I don't have the "Holiday Blues" that I hear others talk about. I have no expectations about this time of year being so joyous and special as to be upset or depressed when it's just the end of one year, and the start of another. This is the shit we were put here to deal with. Game on.

Yet, I am also not dealing with said shit very well, right now. That's not even a "Christmas deal," honestly, but a "Mark's ending the year unsatisfied" deal (as usual). It's ridiculous, too. At the VERY LEAST, I appeared in the lead role (and I think I did it pretty damn well) of a show that I will always consider one of the high points of my career. I worked with a lot of people, in that show, and others, that I, flat out, treasure the time I got to spend with them.

I'm a winner. Objectively, I know this. Yet I don't feel like a winner.

I worry about that, because, as you can see from the blog I linked to above, this is becoming a recurring feeling. I work, work, work, I'm terrified not to work, because work begets work, and I have this sinking suspicion that my work is just getting worse, instead of better. What do you do with that? How do you box that up, put it away, and move forward?

I swear to God, sometimes I wish I had been born in the past somewhere. Someplace where you simply had no time to decide if you were "fulfilled," or not, because you'd be scrambling to simply survive. I imagine hunting and foraging, and knowing that when you brought home that boar carcass, and your family ate, it was a good day. Simple, straightforward markings of a successful day...you survived it.

A time when to could settle a dispute not with words and negotiation, but with steel and blood. How simple that would be. If you failed, you were gone, and there was no need to live with your failure. Except in some afterlife, and who knew what that was, exactly? There's something lizard-brain appealing about that to me. "Crush your enemies, see them driven before you, and hear the lamentation of their women."

Yeah, it is childish, kinda nuts, but, damn...Living on your wits and strength in a environment where that was all you needed? No more questions about "is this what I'm supposed to be doing with my life?" No second guessing of decisions, because, if you made the wrong one, you're dead. No guilt, because you did what you needed to do to survive.

Yes, I would miss the comforts of modern life, decent health care, etc. Thing is, if I never had them, I wouldn't. Modern me wouldn't last 10 seconds, but modern me never would've existed.

I also probably would've had a whole load of different gripes...Ah, well..