Spinning my wheels

In photo today, we watched a documentary about the senior class of a high school in Indiana, which was really just a whole year's worth of drama condensed into two hours. As I watched certain parts, I thought to myself that some of the people just let others make decisions for them. Those people were so immature. So shallow. But of course I, in all my infinite wisdom and life experience, was better than that, and always made decisions without regards to what others think.

That is obviously total bullshit. Something that's been buzzing around my head for a while kept getting swatted away because I thought other people wouldn't approve. This was almost all subconscious, automatic. I hardly realized I was doing it. But then some neuron decided to fire in a decidedly different direction and I became aware of this process from a different perspective. I saw it with new eyes and couldn't believe how much of a dumbass I was before (this seems to be a pretty common trend in epiphanies/sudden realizations).

Have you ever struggled with a math problem before- for hours, wracking your brain trying to analyze the porblem from every possible angle and with every possible approach? Only to realize that you just had to multiply the damn thing by two and the answer was forty two all along and WHY the hell didn't I see it before?

I'm now bringing that subconscious swatting up to full awareness, and saying would it kindly go fuck off? It's not entirely working, though. This isn't a total 180º "God spoke to me and I see the light" kind of thing. I still have doubts, plenty of them. But it's a step in the right direction.

As Nick, the man whose blog inspired me to want to hike the AT, said, "I'm just spinning my wheels, waiting for life to happen to me". That's how I felt for a while. A long while. And I still kind of do, but it seems like now I know the wheels are spinning, and I've gotten out of the car and grabbed a wrench.

P.S.  I apologize for the vagueness of this post. Like most everybody else, I'm leaving out personal details for obvious reasons and I know this would be OH SO more interesting to read with names attached. I always want other people to be specific in their blogs, but I'm just going to add this to my List of Hypocrisies.