This is what I've been told my entire life. You need to FOCUS. Calm down. Stop getting so distracted. Yet distraction after distraction comes my way and our ways as a whole. If we take the modern baseball ballpark as an example, it is strictly designed not for the folks who love to pay attention to a three hour game but to get as many people in as possible even if they definitely cannot pay attention to a 3 hour game. I can't fault this design in capitalism because everybody's gotta get theirs while they are here before who knows what's next. Yet all I see is an acknowledgment that it is an entire collection of people who cannot even be bothered to focus on one thing for too long. It isn't just me. It isn't just the people who were diagnosed at a young age who can't seem to focus too long. Advertisements of the moving picture nature tend to not be more than 30 seconds with the official knowledge that you only have a maximum of that amount of time to get the consumers' attentions to what it is you are trying to communicate.
I have gotten to the point where I am fed up with my lack of focus. I'm also fed up with everyone else's. I am told I have one of the worst attention spans yet I try to have a focused conversation with certain people and there isn't even a remote chance to get anything done or discussed. My body and brain, probably without me even realizing, says, "If the whole world isn't going to focus, then why should I?"
It is hard these days for me to focus on the positive. All I can do is see how far behind I am. How I've gotten to this 34th year of mine (I'm 33 for those I just confused, because I AM INDEED finishing out my 34th year on this Earth before my February birthday) having self-medicated on a cannabis carcinogen when all I needed to quell my anxiety, depression and lack of focus was a big, deep breath. That deep breath seems extremely hard to come by. Maybe a healthy dose of certain substances, but the moderation I have been looking for so I don't feel like I'm going insane on either side's extreme has not come as I've preached finding it. Here's the thing, though, and a positive to take away so I'm not so fucking down on myself all the time:
I'm actually currently doing it. Besides the fact I'm actually writing right now, I am getting into a healthy pattern of going to the gym, and I am staying disciplined in places I've had a hard time as an adult staying disciplined.
What ends up happening is that you get into a crazy cycle of skipping for now the adulting that you desperately need to stay sane in this world, smoking yourself to a stupor and keeping yourself in a perpetual state of suspended adolescence, where the childlike anxiety and insecurities some can suppress once you mature and come into your own as an adult just bob in the water like a ship out to sea. That has been my experience. The worst right now is trying to remind myself the adolescent mess I have made out of my life and the snail-like trail of disgusting childlike behavior I have left behind cannot get fixed in one day. Fifteen years of that will not go away in only 3 weeks of working hard. This is the most important thing I can do right now, otherwise I will stay angry and frustrated for the rest of my life.
There is a great divide in my head between wanting to get things done and actually getting things done. The only way to shake the negative as much as possible is action. I want to write about movies, I want to write movies, I want to write about music, I want to make music, I want to have fun, which is hard for me to do these days; but even if I write about my anxiety, insecurities and my struggle with focusing (and no, I will never take pharmaceuticals for that ever again...)
...at least I'm writing.
The bright side of life.
