idle thoughts.

Have you ever just wondered, what am I doing wrong? Why is nothing I ever do good enough? Well I do constantly. I wonder why I have never been "the best" at anything. I wonder how someone can be so completely average. I realised just recently that it was because I was trying to fit myself into this Alix-shaped box that everyone had of me...or was it an Alix-shaped box that I had of myself? I had to stop classifying myself as one thing or another. For my whole life, I've always been the type to gauge things from one extreme to another. Either I was extraordinary at something or I was terrible at it, and since I wasn't extraordinary at anything, my default setting was to think I was terrible at it. I realise now that I have spent more than half my life hating myself for things out of my control. I have held myself back from life changing opportunities based solely on my fears. I recently read a quote that struck a chord somewhere deep inside me. 

"But what if I fall?"

"Oh but my darling, what if you fly?" 

I am not entirely sure what it was about this that affected me so much...it just seemed as though this unknown person was speaking directly to me. I'm not going to spew cliches like "life's too short..." or "you've only got one life," but I will say this: Think about how old you are now. Most of you are probably around 20 or so. On average, that's about a fourth or so of your life. You've only got 3/4 of your life left to do everything you've dreamt of doing. Why waste that time afraid and resenting yourself for it?

Here are some videos from the concert the other night. I won't try and explain the quality, you can hear that for yourselves.

Patrick James. Facebook. Twitter. Insta @patrickjamesmusic

Boy & Bear. Website. Facebook. Twitter. YouTube Insta @boyandbear. 

We Must Take Adventures to Know Where We Truly Belong.

"Some people think that they were born in the wrong era, I think you were born in the wrong area."

-Something Sarah said to me yesterday that struck me.

After graduating high school and moving off to uni for a few years, "home" can be a very hard concept to grasp. If you're like me, you have lived your whole life in the same room, same house, same town, with the same people. When it came time to move to uni, "home" was supposed to become my dorm room...but that absolutely did not feel like home. The strangest part was, that when I did go home-home, it didn't feel like home either. I was in the place that I had always called home, but I was living out of a suitcase...it didn't add up.

I always had expected everything to be the same as I left it when I came home from uni; my high school, the people in the community, the businesses around the county, but they weren't. They were foreign and this really confused me. How could I feel so alien in a place that I had always called my home? 

But to be honest, I had always felt out of place there. I had always felt as if I should be somewhere else, as if I was "born in the wrong area." Ever since I can remember, and I honestly couldn't tell you when this obsession started, I have been in love with the ocean. Everything about it seemed so fascinating to me. My room was ocean themed, and I wrote pseudo-research papers about dolphins when I was 12. 

This obsession with the ocean quickly started to include an obsession with surfing as well. I made my mom bring home the Bethany Hamilton poster from the high school when I was in junior high. I worshipped Mick Fanning and claimed Creatures of Leisure was my favourite surf team. Because of this I was made fun of a lot. People would say things like, "Have you ever even surfed?," and "You're from Iowa, act like it."

This made the feeling of home become even more foreign to me. All I have ever wanted is to live in a beach house in a beach town, with a cat and an Alaskan Malamute, with tons of house plants, a bike, and a surf board with a job that I don't have to look fancy for. 

I guess what I'm trying to say, is that I have never been somewhere that feels more like "home" than here in Australia. As crazy as it sounds, it almost feels like I belong here. I feel more myself than I ever have before. I used to try to fit myself into different molds and never really knew who "I" was. I was so terrified of being judged and being abnormal, that I never let people see who I really was on the inside. Here in Aus, I am finally living the life that I've always dreamed of living. 

Yes, I do miss all of my family and my friends from back home with every fiber of my being, and I would never be able to survive without them in my life. But if it weren't for them, I would never leave here. I think I've finally found "home."

More anxiety?

I want to let you guys in on a little secret: I have absolutely no idea what I'm going to do with my life. Yes, I am in my third year of university, studying marine biology in Australia, but so what? Do I actually know what I am going to do with my marine biology education when I am done here? No, I don't and that absolutely terrifies me. You all see this trip as me furthering my education, and yea, I guess it is. But at the same time, I don't want to falsely exude that I have my life planned out, because it's far from it. Yes, I love the ocean and yes, I want to live near the beach, but what do I want to pursue as my career? You tell me.

To some this could be seen as an absolute waste of money, and technically it is. Why pay for an education that you're not going to use? But that's the thing, I hope I'll use it and what's more powerful than hope? It's just for right now, to me, the future is terrifying. Being on my own is terrifying. Taxes. Health insurance. Debt. Rent. Responsibility. I can't handle it sometimes. I don't know how to not want to cancel plans right after I make them. I don't know how to start a conversation with someone or maintain a friendship. I am not ambitious, although I try to pretend to be.

I guess the reason that I'm writing this, is because I feel that some people have a false view of who I am. I care about a lot of things, the happiness of others, the safety of the environment and its natural inhabitants, educating people about different diseases, mental and physical. But there is so much more about me that you don't see. You don't see me making up excuses for cancelling plans or not going to job interviews because I'm terrified out of my mind. You don't see me sitting in my room thinking that everything that I've ever wanted will come to me if I just sit and wait. You don't see me crying in the bathroom because I was five minutes late to class and too terrified to walk in late.

I try to be strong, and I often try to create an image of myself that's a little skewed. Sometimes I wonder what everyone would think about me if they got to see my life in a movie. You would stop after five minutes because all I do is sit on the computer on Tumblr or watching YouTube videos that I've already seen 10x. I'm not entirely sure why I'm writing this. There are just some things that I needed to get off of my chest and out of my head. They have been swarming around in there for ages and I've never really had the platform to let them out. This was all written in one go, and I am not going to go back and read it through to proof-read it because I probably will decide not to publish it. But there you go, another look into the mind of an anxiety ridden 20 year old.

Social anxiety summed up in two photos:

Wonder

My brain works more clearly when the air that I breathe isn't being recycled inside these four walls they call a "dorm room."

Where my thoughts are being recycled as well, spinning out of control until they become cliche and superficial. 

This process makes me distressed about the most basic things and forget what is actually critical to my happiness at that moment.

Because of this, most nights I find myself outside, preferably sitting on the ground in isolation.

The finest time is late at night, when the breeze is biting at my bare toes and I'm cuddled in my jumper that smells like home. 

The stars are shining in the sky, an infinite sea of the unknown, and I notice ones that I have never seen before.

If I close my eyes and really listen, I can hear the sound of the waves rolling in, adhering to the power of the moon.

A train whistle, signaling its whereabouts to passers-by.

Cars driving to or from, or both, or neither.

The best part is, that I'll never know. 

I'll never know their stories and they'll never know mine, but that's okay. 

It gives me room for wonder.