Process of Progress

As I progress through life, I meet people.  I hate, love, like, loathe, obsess over, aspire to be, am driven by, and grow with these people.  Each one of the people I have met in my life has taken a very and almost equally important role in me finding out all sorts of amazing things about myself like how I can grow as a person and be the best person that I can be.  To myself and others.

No one stays friends forever.  Well, maybe that’s not right, that’s kind of negative.  It’s rare that people stay friends forever.  As I evolve within these relationships, I grow closer to some of those friends and apart from others.  There also comes a time when the growing apart ends up causing a rift.

What I don’t consciously think about as I enter these relationships is what my role is going to be to each of my friends as our time together grows.  Even if I could comprehend that, I would be so careful about it that it would make the relationship less organic, and turn it into an unnatural walking-on-egshells type deal.  No bueno.  So here I am and here we are, all meeting each other, loving some and hating others, gravitating towards the ones we love and avoiding others.  This seems to be the natural ebb and flow.

There are certain people who I meet along the way that I let into my super close inner circle of who I really am.  I let down walls and allow them in, to a certain extent.  If you are an introvert like myself, this is horribly scary, very difficult, and takes a very long time.  So when it happens, these special people are the ones we end up growing with on a spiritual, physical, and mental level.  They help me truly see who I am.  They show me all of what is amazing and beautiful about myself and at the same time showing me my character defects and short comings.

So what happens when one of those people grows apart from me or what happens when I grow apart from these incredibly special people?  Well, there ends up being a gap.  There is a void, a hole, and a lack of growth that I have gotten accustomed to feeling and experiencing for a long time.  What does this hole do to me?

That’s a huge question.

10 years ago I made a massive change in my life which ended up leaving one of these massive holes in me.  Spiritually and emotionally.  I needed to fill that with something so after years of stumbling around with that hole raw inside of me I began to fill it up with spirit.  I’m not talking about religion, I nether believe nor disbelieve.  What I am trying to express is that I became a spiritual person.  I’m not going to define this here, people have been trying to define that concept in novels and essays for ever and I don’t have that long so I’m going to stay out of that game.  I just have been following a path of spiritual growth.  There are certain actions that I try to take on a daily basis to help in this growth those being things like reading to strengthen my brain, exercise to strengthen my body, writing to cleanse my soul, meditation to gain clarity and calmness, and socialization to gain unity.  I try to do these often so I don’t really consciously think about some and struggle to do others.  These things also are what seem to go to the wayside when catastrophe hits.  One thought about why is that in practicing all these daily exercises I am facing myself.  In catastrophe so many fears from my past experiences are what come to the surface and that is what I am afraid of and therefore find hard to face.

The importance in practicing these things on the daily is the simple fact that just like beautiful and amazing days happen, shit days days happen too.  That’s life happening in all it’s glory.  It feels like by practicing all these things I am building up what some of my friends refer to as a “spiritual bank account”.  When the shit hits the fan and I can’t write or read or meditate I need a full spiritual bank account so that the withdrawals from the lack of practice will not suck me dry.

I am writing all this because, well, catastrophe hit a few weeks ago.  What this is doing to me in real time is making me SUPER raw, grumpy, and emotional.  I don’t want to go to school, I don’t want to go to work, and I don’t want to be around people.  I just want to buy useless shit, eat ice cream, and stay in bed, after I have ridden my bike so much that I throw up.  The difference in me now as opposed to me years ago, the growth, is in that I can see this as part of the process of progress.  So what so I do?  I observe myself in this process watching that I don’t get too far off track and when I’m close, I get back on track with those certain spiritual daily actions and refill my bank account.

It seems that these practices have brought me to a point of inner clarity with which I can handle catastrophe and loss with an objective perspective!  This is so incredible to me!  I can remember back to when I have dealt with a similar loss and I pull to present time my experiences and actions and see that I am simply on a path of healing and need not beat myself up when I have problems.  I look at my lack of motivation and drive toward school and work and see that it is not real, it is valid and important to note yes, but it is not real that I need to act upon it.  I can look at my drive to bludgeon myself on my bicycle and in my running and see that that drive is not real, yes it is valid as that too is a part of the healing process, but it is not real that I should not act upon it.

THIS IS SO CRAZY TO ME!!!

Just the fact that I can look at my current experience, at this huge loss, and still get out of bed and associate with other humans is massive growth.    I’m making decisions and looking at this experienced form the perspective of a whole different person than I once was.

This I feel is the grace and dignity that I was promised over and over again by the people who have been guiding me along my path.  I can’t wait to see what I can handle in the future as I continue to investigate spirituality and I can’t wait to see what I can bring to people who were once where I was.

Forgiveness to Begin Again

When I was a youngster I used to be a photographer, that’s what I thought I was going to do with my life.  One of the first life goals I had ever had was to shoot for National Geographic.  That was after the “I wanna be a fireman and an astronaut.” boyhood fantasies.  I first picked up a camera on a family vacation to Hawaii when I was about 10 or 11.  I shot and studied photo until I was about 18.  The last time I picked up a camera to shoot artistically was in the summer after I graduated high school.  I remember the dread and shame I felt when I looked up at the taxi in Athens, Greece and realized that in my drunken stupor I had left my Nikon N90s and both perfected portfolios I had been working on in the back seat as it drove off into the night.

The photography, especially shooting photos for National Geographic, didn’t feel fantastical goal to me.  Somehow I knew that if I tried hard enough it could happen.  So I gave it a shot.  I became totally obsessed.  It got to a point where I was using the camera so much that I could look at a scene, at anything really, and I would have internal meters in my head that would compute the aperture, f-stop, and what developing process in the darkroom I would need to go through to produce the photo I wanted from said scene.  I would test myself and in my head adjust the scene, mentally burning and dodging , changing the levels, on and on and on.  I would do all this without the camera in my hand.  Around 90% of the time, when I would pick up my camera and test out the levels and numbers that my head came up with I would be right.  It felt fantastic knowing I was this good at something when I was as young as I was.

I felt safe behind the camera.  I felt like I could change life into what I wanted to see and feel.  It gave me a sense of power and strength and I loved that.  I felt like I could see scenes though my camera that a normal person’s eye could not see.  I had problems expressing myself, but when I found what I could do with a camera, expression was a gift.  When I first got into the darkroom and saw my photographs materialize right in front of me it blew my mind.  I was 11.  I spent so much time in that darkroom.  I even grew to crave the smells of the chemicals, they brought me comfort.

Month after month, year after year I shot photography obsessively.  It felt like I could never have enough.  I kept progressing forward always thirsty for what I can do next and what photography could do for me.  As the years passed I enrolled in the Saturday High classes at the Art Center, the photo classes at the Armory Center for the Arts, and the summer courses at OTIS.  When I was in my senior year of high school my advisor told me about a friend of hers who was the photography instructor at the Aegean Center for Fine Art on the island of Paros in Greece.  My unquenchable thirst for photography and darkroom work and the fantastic support of my parents afforded me the opportunity to spend the summer after I graduated.

As a graduation gift my family game me the Nikon N90s.  At the time that was one of the top dogs of Nikon cameras.  This was before the digital revolution came in and changed everything.  A non manual camera meant it had light meters and auto focus back then.  I felt like all the hard work I had put in and all the hours in the darkroom and in the classes materialized into that gift.  In a way, it did.

And then there was her.

I was dumb struck head over heels in love with a girl.  We were young but we were talking about plans for some sort of future together so there was a lot of hope for forward progress with that relationship and not much fear of failure.  I remember as the day of my leaving for that art school in Greece approached I tried to brought up the topic of what we should do with our relationship when I left.  We decided to put it on hold when I was gone, to be free to date other people if the opportunity came and we would get back together when I came back. Some of my motives behind that decision were hormone induced and self seeking as I wanted to have the freedom to meet and become intimate with beautiful foreign women I thought I would find abroad.  Thinking about that I wanted my girlfriend to also have the option of meeting and hooking up with other men.  It seemed only fair.  That was a terrible idea.  The “putting a relationship on hold” concept, to me at least, is no bueno.

So there I was in the city of Parikia, on the island of Paros, in the beautiful country of Greece.  Watching a dream come true as it materialized in front of me and I called it my life.  I was studying photography in a fantastic school, learning from a professor who was one of Ansel Adam’s understudies.  No joke!  And I had it all set up so I could meet these amazing foreign ladies and blah blah blah.  Well, as you can imagine that never happened.  There were some girls at the school I was interested in and I even gave a half assed attempt once or twice but when I laid my head on my pillow at night I thought about the girl I left back at home and how stupid I was to decide to put it on hold.  I called her often,  some times daily.  Just hearing her voice transported me back home as I imagined I was next to her.

The school session was 3 months long.  About half way though that, maybe a month or a month and a half in, I was talking to her on the phone…her voice sounded tight, like she was holding something in that she wanted to say but didn’t know how.  “So there’s something I need to tell you.” She said.  “Ok what’s up?” I replied.  “I got back together with my ex boyfriend.”  Boom.  The end of what was.  She did her best to explain it all gracefully and I did my best to pretend to be a strong man and listen to what she was saying as I probably replied untruthfully saying that it was ok and it wasn’t a big deal or something untrue like that.  I remember hanging up the phone like it was yesterday.  It was 13 years ago.  I remember the room I was sitting in, the stairs leading up to it, and the doorway out to the alley.

I took to the bottle pretty heavy then, doing my best to drink away those sorrows.  Again, I was only 18 and I was completely ill equipped to deal with something like that so far away from my best friends and on the other side of the world from my family.  I had made some wonderful friendships with some of the students at the school, however I don’t remember if I even spoke to them about what was going on.  I wasn’t a big talker of feelings to begin with.  When I wasn’t drinking away my sorrows, I dove head first into my photography.  I finished up a portfolio I was proud of and made a second one as well.  I was inspired and took some of the best photos I have ever taken in my life.   I battled back and forth between the drink and the art, twisting and turning some times ending up creative and some times being struck totally uncreative days and weeks.  It was rough and I’m honestly grateful that it happened because here I sit holding a new beginning in my hands.  A new camera.

In my drunken state standing on a curb in Athens I left my portfolio and camera in the back of a taxi.  I watched it drive off into the night and after the explanation of what those photos, what the last portfolio and those shots, what that camera meant to me you can probably see how that experience totally demolished me.  It did.  I felt ruined.  Empty, like a shell of a failed human.  It felt like all those feelings I poured into art and the solution I had through photography was, got ripped from my by some unseen force.  It was horrific.

Time has been fair as I have grown a lot since then.  I was 18.  I was confused and testosterone filled just like most 18 year old boys.  I am now 31 and a completely new man.  A great friend of mine tells me that it is important to look at growth not as having fixed my old life but rather given me “a whole new shiny life”.  I couldn’t agree more.

Here I sit, exited to tell you that, after 13 years, I have decided to pick up a camera a look through it’s lense artistically as I had back when I that kid.  Most of my friends know that art had been a HUGE part of my life for pretty much my whole life second only to books and literature.  I breathe art, we all do in my opinion, but I know the power of art and I respect it.  It’s through this respect for  art that I committed to myself a few months back that I need to save up and get a camera again, to treat myself to that passion for photography I once had.  I deserve it.  I deserve to forgive myself for how I reacted and ran from my art.  I sit here looking at my new camera with fear.  Scared.  My hear beats in my chest as I plug in the battery to charge it so I can start shooting.  There is a lot behind this and there is a lot that had built up to this moment, as you all now understand, and I am excited to see what happens.

The photography landscape is all so different now.  Everything is computerized and new.  I’m excited to see where that takes me.  I wrote an email to put out my feelers to see if my Mom and the rest of my family knows where that first old all manual Nikon went in hopes that I can also shoot with that once again.

Here’s the kicker….in April I am going to be in Hawaii.  I am going to be back to the place it all began for me back when I first picked up a camera with zero knowledge of what I was going to get into.  I had no knowledge of the joys and pains, the struggle and growth I was going to experience due to my relationship with photography.  I am going to be back where I began shooting photos as a boy, now shooting photos as a man.  Grown and different, open to and excited for the new world photography is going to show me.

Introvert Love!

I also am an introvert, always have been and always will.  I used to go to parties in high school, yes I do like people, and I have a ton of amazing friends.  It’s not like I’m isolating, I’m just an introvert.  I love my introversion, I really do.  I find a personal power and an ease with finding my personal identity as an introvert.  When most people in the early 30’s (age) culture of Los Angeles, the city in which I live, spend their Friday and Saturday nights out at the club or whatever they do in what I consider overly social environments, I would rather spend the weekend nights at home, writing, reading, or relaxing with one person or a select few.  I like my home, I love my friends, and I like to sit and feel like I am not putting up a false front to be a part of an environment I don’t really want to be in.  I look at it this way, when I am at one of those overly social places, I act a certain way, when I am home and my guard is down do I act that same way?  No.  I am only writing my story, I’m not trying to speak for others.  Some might act the same at home as they do in a massively social environment and that’s fantastic if they do, I just don’t.  When I place myself in these environments, when I act differently around a crowd of people then I act when I am relaxing intimately with my close friends, I feel like I am putting on a false show.  I feel like I am being fake to those people around me and more importantly to myself.  I do not like this feeling.  It simply makes me uncomfortable, sometimes unbearably so.  Why is this?  It’s because I’m an introvert.

If you are reading this and you pose the question, “Well then what do you do?” you might want to think about that question for a sec.  I do a lot.  I run a lot, I ride my bike a lot, I work, I read, I write, I create, on and on and on, and best of all I hold and nurture beautiful relationships with some of the most wonderful people on earth.  Yes, most of the time when I run, I run alone, and half of the time when I ride, I ride alone, but that does not mean that I’m isolating.  This is a false misconception unfairly laid upon introverts like myself by an impossibly, and at times unhealthily social culture of the early 30 year olds in a massive metropolis like Los Angeles.  Yes I said unhealthily, I don’t mean to say that it is bad to go out and party like many of my friends do, that’s fine, I just found that at a point, a long time ago when I was trying to be more social than I really am, I lost myself.  I had no personal identity.  I was doing things and going places that I though others wanted me to, not because I wanted to.  I was watching fiction happen on tv and in the media landscape and I was trying to be a chameleon to be “cool”.  Yet when I was alone at home I was more lonely than ever, I was craving something that I could not identify.

So maybe the unhealthy social aspect was only within me.  It’s not my place to point any fingers at anyone, I need to not judge my insides to other people’s outsides and when I point my fingers at someone I have 3 pointing back at me.  Try it, it’s true.  I would, however be surprised to hear that I am the only one who has ever felt a lack of identity coming from trying to fit into the cultural and social norm.  I write this only to let anyone who has felt the same way know that it is ok to stop.  It is ok to not go to out on Friday and Saturday.  It is ok to stay at home and read or watch movies and spend time with yourself.  Here’s why…

I feel like through spending a lot of time at home with myself, with an individual, or a small group of close friends, I have found the power to open up to them in intimate ways that I cannot open up to bigger groups.  I feel more true to myself.  By not putting the stamp of what others want me to be upon the glasses through which I view myself, I can see that who I want to be is totally different and far more amazing that who I thought I wanted to be.

Phiew!  That was a tongue twister.  It’s true though, it really is.

The other thing I am grateful for with being an introvert is the love I save for those I care about.  When I stopped worrying about the importance of going out and playing a part I was never comfortable with playing in the first place, I found a whole level of struggle was lifted from my life.  At massively social gatherings all the stimuli and all the people distract me from engaging as intimately as I can with one or two people.  I find that those distractions make it so I hold people at a distance in those overly social places as the conversations are more superficial small talk.  I don’t feel like I am involved in anything as deep and meaningful as I am when I engage in a night of personal friendship.

Most nights I like to stay in solo and watch movies, write, or read my books.  These transport me to places I could not go otherwise.  In these overly social environments I find that I am also restricted by certain insecurities I feel as I try to engage with the mass.  I do understand that this could be personal issues I have, it happens even if it’s not in places as massive and noisy as clubs, bars, or parties.  For example, even at places like an art opening where it’s not as hectic or places like that I cannot concentrate on my purpose of being there to see the art.  I go after the openings.  There’s simply too many personalities and things happening for me to focus.  I’ll go to these for sure, it’s not like I never go to these places I have dubbed overly social places.  I have many friends and that means many birthdays.  A good amount of my friends are artists and musicians so that means a good amount of art openings and shows at bars and clubs.  I’m happy when I go too because I show up for these people who take time to spend with me.  It’s simply what friends do and I love my friends.

I do feel that there is a very special creativity reserved for us introverts as well.  It is easier for us to bond with ourselves, find our independence in our social society, and truly fall in love with who we are and what we do.  In our spare time we tend to pour all of ourselves into these things and relationships.  Not as in a “loosing our identity within it” sort of pour ourselves, more of a “we care deeply about what we do and who we love because to us they are true treasures” sort of pour ourselves.  It’s how we as introverts find out who we are and how we relate to the world around us.  At least that’s how it is to me.

What it all comes down to is the question of how to I feel when I am alone?  Do I feel an uncontrollable urge to rush somewhere, to someone, or something?  Or do I feel drawn toward a feeling or comfort and “Aaaaah” as I sit alone with my books and movies on a Friday or Saturday night.  The answer to that question is up to the individual.  I feel like I excel in the one-on-one and I am more uncomfortable within a huge group.  So I simply choose what feels best for me.  Either way is just as good as long as one is accepting of themselves in whatever world they live, the social butterfly or the introvert like myself.