Another Friday, another climate demonstration

We did another climate change demonstration today and we’re doing the monthly demonstration in Hartford tomorrow, too. I always have a good time though we didn’t get quite as much response as usual except from the kids who come through the intersection and hold signs while they wait and they always cheer me up. I am always aware of how anxious I am about just being and the passage of time, like there is something I should be doing but I’m not doing it, but what is more important than raising awareness about climate change (and what could be better than getting paid for something that I would do for free?) I think when we’re out there I do a lot of though and reflection about various things while also being more social in a way than I usually get to be. I want to be in more situations where I am around a lot of happy, grateful people.

Today I was thinking a lot about… well, I remind myself, there is no timeline, there is no race, it’s okay to be exactly where I am in life, but I keep feeling so much like I missed out on it, and it’s my fault. Of course there is so much that I couldn’t have known and it would have taken a lot of shifts for me to have the courage to step into my life from a situation that pretty much deteriorated me. If I had taken action probably I wouldn’t have trusted that I was taking the right actions and I think the main thing and the embarrassing thing is I didn’t see the point of taking action. I felt like I was stuck in such a horrible situation because there was something wrong with me, or everybody thought there was, and nobody was coming to my aid, which for me just meant… a little bit of expression of care, kindness, empathy, a nice message of support, and when I said that I wanted to get independent from a horrible situation, someone expressing that they believed in me or something, and nobody did that. I know so well and it’s ever clearer all the time that I was just getting in my own way by letting my emotions be affected so much by my fear and by the actions or lack of action of people I may not have even known very well. I did not receive a single response to my vulnerably expressing that I needed serious help from those that I emailed, and I admit that most of them did not know me very well at all, but I have been stuck in resentment rather than letting other people be as they are and doing my own thing and finding my own happiness with or without them.

I said I wanted to generate between $43,000 and $113,000 to feel totally safe and resilient and have the resources to accomplish everything I wanted to accomplish but I felt like even without that people thought I was a fool. Even to have heard, I believe in you, from someone, about something, would have been great. I was aware that in some way, though that goal sounded and continues to sound quite reasonable to me, that most people in the world, even when you are not in a crisis that is tearing you apart emotionally, do not know what to say to people who want to generate that kind of money without working for it for a year. I tried to tell my host today about my interest in the stock market on the way to the demonstration and he was like, just get a damn job, and I realized, yeah, people are going to think that way. The pain I feel around how so much of the world doesn’t get it and doesn’t get me… well, sorry for the tautology… it hurts. It reminds me what I am up against as far as what I’d like to contribute to the world which is more people seeing they have more options to be free and fully alive and live life their own way without being drained by jobs they don’t like and when I hear people who are exhausted by their jobs I honestly just want to save them.

The author of the book on trading that I just devoured wrote, I love all traders, because they are doing something most of the world says is not possible. You have to just do what others think is impossible and not let their ideas and opinions of you hold you back. The idea of building passive income streams, of not needing to work for money, of having an unfixed income where when you envision something and need to bring in more you have confidence you can bring it in: these ideas are so alien to much of the world and these are the ways I want to change the world. I know it’s not for everybody but I do want everyone to feel like they have more freedom in their lives to do what they love.

The fact that I was honest and stated that I had a goal of bringing in a certain amount of money, to me, is admirable, but the fear in the middle of that kind of crisis is that most people are going to point to you as a problem and consider such ‘unrealistic’ goals as pathology. So much of this is just what I *thought* everyone must think of me and how I interpreted getting no response at all when even minor expressions of care and I’m here for you and everything might have worked wonders. I would not have ended up getting more and more scared of the world and wasting so much of my life away, maybe, and I’m still honestly trying to get over my resentment that a person in the situation I was in could not garner any community support, just the way I was. I needed to change to be worthy of being heard and supported or something. I was expecting others to change, I was expecting communities to change, and yeah, I think when people in communities are in a crisis some kind of collective, compassionate response is a sign of a healthy community whereas in less healthy communities people probably distance themselves from people going through these kinds of things and people get isolated when just a little bit of attention and care could prevent that. It’s not worth getting worked up about it. The world is imperfect and people in crisis don’t always get supported. I felt like everyone was telling everybody else, stay away from me, there’s something wrong with me, I am more trouble than I’m worth or whatever, but so much of this was stuff going on inside my head rather than real experiences. I wrote about them though as though they were real experiences. It is how I assumed the whole world would respond to me, not how the whole world actually did respond to me. A lot of what I got was a sense or a sinking feeling in the stomach more than experience, except from the sense of feeling totally ignored when I needed to be seen and loved the most.

A little bit of that, and I might not have wasted so much of my life in a sort of agoraphobia and fear of other people. Just someone reaching out to tell me, I’m still here. And I am so bad at checking my email and everything, who knows, perhaps someone did reach out in that way, and maybe if they had it wouldn’t have registered, but yeah, I know that there are ways that I could have probably taken action no matter what other people think of me, and if I’ve wasted too much of my life for comfort, how can I blame anyone else but myself? I need to be responsible and accountable for that. There is still a strong tendency to want to blame, though, to say that others should have acted in different ways than they did. I used my resentment to justify my getting in my own way or to let myself be a victim rather than seeing what would happen if I did the scary thing and got out of my comfort zone and lived my life. Now, I really don’t know if there is anything I could have done to change my circumstances sooner, especially because I don’t know if there is anything I could have done to relieve myself of the fears that paralyze me around my mother and her health and everything (which, by the way, is a lot better: her surgery went well, she is healthier and even got a bike for her birthday, and her cholesterol is normal now for like the first time ever), but I know when I continue to feel waves of resentment about how people should have been there for me, and blame them for my regrets about how much time I wasted in my life, I am still getting in my own way, because I have a chance to live my own life now. I have a chance to take responsibility for it and to not let anyone get in the way of that. Other people’s actions or lack of caring about me not need to affect how well I live my life, especially when I don’t even know them and I am maybe basically just using them as an excuse to stay stagnated in pain and suffering. I was afraid of taking the action that needed to be taken anyway so I might as well use people who didn’t even know me that well not getting back to me at a time when I needed support most as an excuse to make me feel better about being stuck. I couldn’t have taken more blame on myself.

I felt for a long time that, based on perceptions that I felt people already had about me (and I thought most people thought I was a fool and word was getting around that I was one) they were just laughing at my goal of bringing in that money. That is kind of tender for me. I realized today that it’s so important to me to help people who are like me in certain ways to live their lives on their own terms, to make a living without needing to be held down by a job, and to bring in every bit of income they need to have a life of full vitality. It felt so lonely to be alone in my awareness of all of these things, and it’s like knowing too much for my own good… so I let myself suffer, let myself blame the world for not being different, rather than just doing my thing and setting an example. Resentment about things you think people might possibly be thinking about you can be easier than showing by example. Lots of people show by example that there are other ways of being, but there are still so many people in virtually every community in the world that does not see my way of being in the world as realistic at all. And, the truth is, I haven’t done a very good job at showing anyone that it is… if I had, I would have found my way out of that stuckness that sucked my life away.

I felt like I had to put on a mask where I kind of acted the part of the fool and affirmed what I feared that everybody was thinking about me. I was sure people’s judgments about me were negative and unfair, that they felt that my being stuck in a bad situation was because I was not capable as a person, and I was sure that some people thought I was a fool, but I did not know who or how. I just felt strongly that nobody was seeing me and people were talking about me and the things they were saying were not things I would appreciate if I heard them. I took some minor setbacks and experiences with others and generalized them so it sounded like the whole world was against me. At least in retrospect, from a place where you have more emotional resources, the setbacks felt minor, but at the time feeling ignored or rejected served as all the reasons to just keep hiding. If one person treated me a certain way that I didn’t like, I wrote like everybody was treating me in that way. I was well aware that these would likely sound like red flags to others, like oh, if nooooobody understands that person, and people are allllways responding this or that way to them, it must be a reflection of them and not others, and I was aware I was creating that perception of myself, but I didn’t really care.) I knew this would likely lead people to believe that I lacked the social skills or stability to interact effectively with others or whatever, but I didn’t care. In my public written persona I guess I put on this mask to deal with these feelings of being so misunderstood. It was a mask that I put on with my written words. Talking to people in person, I did not act the fool, but I kind of acted like a fool with my written words, so that my fears of people’s evaluations of me wouldn’t hurt so much. And now I am ready to see what I can do to live a life… but when I think of taking leadership, I still feel a resentment towards this vague collection of people who I felt discounted me in one way or another. I know that is just getting in my own way. I don’t need to let myself be pushed around by what I think other people think… and I don’t know what happened but it hit me like a sock in the eye or something like that, that what I was doing wasn’t working, and as much time as I have wasted, I’ve learned so much somehow and I hope I can pass something of that on to others.

Anyway, I am so into this stock market thing right now. Wow, it is so fun, it kind of feels like navigating an airplane, like ooh all those colourful charts, all those fancy controls! I read through this whole book in two days and I have reread a good part of it too, taking notes. So that is probably how I will spend most of my evening, just learning as much as I can about all the aspects of this that I want to learn more about. I am interested in buying options which requires taking a whole lot of factors into consideration which is really fun for me! saw a YouTube channel that looked really interesting by someone who sells options for a consistent and safe passive income. I don’t agree with everything she says especially about how buying options is like gambling and you are bound to lose while selling optins is a way to generate passive income. Buying options has a limited downside whereas selling options, as far as I know, carries the danger of potentially unlimited losses like shorting stocks. And as far as I can tell she’s not selling options she already owns, either? I have to find out more about this, but one of the good things about selling options might be that if you sell the right kinds of options and people buy them you can have a really high success rate meaning a huge unlikelihood that the stock will surpass your strike price that you agree to sell it at so much more often than not these contracts end up expiring and sellers get to keep the premiums. Depending on how she is doing this I’m very interested in it.

There is so little time until the holidays now and I never want to spend holidays away from my mother, that makes me so stressed out, but I don’t want to waste money and time finding a place of my own to stay around here, either. I am not sure I will make it in this house till mid-December, I don’t want to wear out my welcome even though I am welcome to stay here until then. What I’m thinking now, that occurred to me as I was admiring the lake on the way to the demonstration (fall is really at its peak now, the colours started turning brown overnight and leaves are starting to fall more rapidly from the trees), is that maybe I will spend some time before the holidays at Lake Panajachel in Guatemala. I want to be near water and though I love the ocean sometimes lakes are just as gorgeous in their own way. Then after the holidays I will go to Colombia and maybe I’ll end up staying in Medellín rather than Bógota, who knows, I just don’t want to get my hopes up about how amazing I think Medellín is going to be and then get disappointed. And I think that’s about all I have to say for right now. I want to catch up on reading other entries and leaving notes this weekend.