Action/Inaction

 I enjoy what I write but something has been eating at me. The point of writing is to challenge myself. I want it to be hard so that I can build something. It's easy to make observations about myself and it's easy to write meaningful rhymes. What am I missing? What's challenging about writing in a vacuum? I don't have to deal with critique. In fact, I dance around critical aspects of myself for fear of judgment. How can someone judge me harsher than I can? I fear the consequences of revealing truths. If I admit x, then y will happen. I don't think this way. I know the y is not set in stone. I feel a need to justify myself. There is so much I may be able to say but what if I say it in the wrong order? What if I become anxious and I fall into a cycle of anxiety and depression accompanied by feelings of incompetence? What if I speak my truth only to realize that my truth is not what I thought it was? I suppose I can only know by speaking it. This is just delaying the inevitable or, perhaps, a cyclical way of thinking that will lead me to a lifetime of emotional suppression. It may be easy to make a few assumptions from this and I can imagine what they may be. Maybe you're right, maybe not. It's easier for me to be mentally free when I'm alone for extended periods of time but I wonder if that's only true because it allows me to ignore my difficulties with other people. I'll say this, in the past, I have been convinced that I have autism. I have felt a social deficiency since I was a child. Not only this but I haven't felt satisfied with myself in a very long time. I think the expectations that were placed on me, or that I placed on myself, made me fear life. I remember the years beginning to fly by at 13, 14, 15, etc. I remember thinking that the way I lived my life must change, eventually. I have decided to make changes to my life and it's entirely different than how it used to be for the most part. However, I still fear life. I fear making mistakes and being seen as unseemly even though I know that is a part of life. Maybe there were mistakes I was supposed to make when I was younger that I neglected to and it is too late for me to make those same mistakes. I made a mistake in not making mistakes. Well, making mistakes IS just a part of life. My mistake was to neglect myself and my life. So, I guess there are good and bad mistakes. Or, maybe, it's about the volume of mistakes. I habitually made the same mistake over and over and grew in this world of my one mistake. I didn't make different mistakes in different areas of life, I made one mistake which was to reject and avoid the portions of life that made me uncomfortable. My mistake was to live comfortably. I have learned from this, and I am still learning. Maybe I can be the person I have always wanted to be. To make mistakes with this knowledge is to make mistakes from a vantage point of respecting mistakes. I should be more comfortable making mistakes but psychologically, I'm not used to acting to make a mistake. I'm used to the mistake of inaction. There's plenty of time to think in inaction and I've certainly realized I live with inaction. Because my experiences are so limited, the way I think is also limited. I can have the most profound thoughts in the world but they can bear no importance because they're from the depths of inaction. The level of importance I place on my inaction and laziness only reinforces this idea. It is a big part of me. I have to make a choice when I am doing anything other than inaction. There is hope, though. Sometimes I gleefully realize that I acted upon something almost unconsciously, after making concerted efforts to act in a similar way beforehand. I do have the ability to form automatic thought patterns in which action is logical and not up for debate. Certain actions even go beyond what someone of action may comfortably do. It is in the little actions which I become concerned about. When I notice differences, however small, I want to return to inaction and prepare myself before I return to action. However, when I return to inaction I once again feel the comfortability that kept me there in the first place and I once again am a slave to unconscious inaction. I never liked calling myself a perfectionist, even though at times I may fit the bill because it's not perfection I seek, but to avoid the fear of imperfection. To do this, I can either be intensely aware or ignorant. Of course, ignorance is temporary. Ignorance is the antagonist of action, which the mind craves. So how do I appease my craving for action while remaining in inaction? I convince myself that I am acting by thinking. Thinking can be a form of acting but it can also just be a more deceptive form of ignorance. In a way, though, ignorance is also action. To shut down instead of power through. The problem is, once you've lived in this state of inaction, to now power through is to power through every moment in which you doubt, or fear. All of the times you would normally cave in, you don't. If you aren't used to this, it can be sloppy. If it is sloppy, people recognize that. Now I have another motivator for inaction, the thoughts of other people. Now I have to either show you who I am or shut down. I can't, and refuse to, deceive us. It's easy to believe that other people think of you as much, and in the same way, you do. I focus on my flaws in order to justify inaction, you focus on my flaws and hope for my inaction. I worry that the only way for me to sharpen out my flaws is to jump into the deep end. I wonder how to do this the right way. An easy way to build conversation skills is to have more conversations. When or if I say something that makes someone uncomfortable, perhaps I will be oblivious to this, and the other person, who has greater social skills will easily glide out of the conversation and I am left failing to understand what went wrong. This depends on the conversation, of course. Perhaps blunt honesty is the way to go. How blunt? I've made the mistake of blunt honesty in the past and tried to justify it by it being honest and true. Is this a fair justification? Why does it feel wrong?