You ever get that feeling, you know the one, things start to slip and you just can’t be bothered.  How long does it last for you? minutes, hours, days, weeks? Have you forgotten how long it has been since you cared?  Does it feel like you’re living in your own personal groundhog day, the day may be different but you feel the same.  Leave a comment, send an e-mail, dispatch a carrier pigeon or maybe a telegram.  I’m curious and want to know what daily life is like for you out there.

Now I don’t want you to think that I don’t care, if I didn’t, well I wouldn’t have spent the time and energy to write this and attempt to share and engage with you strangers, lovers, friends, and family out there in the ether.  That doesn’t mean I don’t struggle and that is where these questions come from.  Talking with friends and even some random people, there has been a noticeable commonality that these feelings are abundant with many people, however not often discussed.  Now I understand that I’ve spent a great deal of my life ignoring, hiding, masking or lying about feelings and thoughts out of fear of the reaction to them.  Fast approaching 4 decades of this dance I’m feeling exhausted so fuck the draining banality of pretending and let’s get real.

Someone who I would like to call a friend but if I’m being honest is really more of an acquaintance, a guy I look up to personally and professionally, has been exercising his own brand of blunt honesty.  I won’t say it has inspired me cause I kind of loathe that term in a similar vein to “Live, Laugh, Love” ugh, but I’d say it has encouraged me to do something similar.  It feels scary sometimes to lay it down and give the raw untapped truth instead of the filtered safe for public consumption version.  Anyways this new direction of bluntness has been curious and a few of the adventures it has taken me on have really surprised me.  

Recently I was being reviewed at work and when posed with a negative about myself instead of making up some kind of bullshit like I’ve done in the past to make myself not look as bad, I tried blunt honesty and well it surprised the shit out of me.  Midway while explaining to my boss the reason for this negative feedback my mind starts talking back to me like “Good job asshole, the next time we meet with him it’ll be with HR and that’ll just be great won’t it.” Thankfully it didn’t, which I have to give credit to having the privilege to work with a true leader who does his best to make sure I am enabled to do my best.  I left that meeting thinking holy shit a. I still have a job and b. it felt really good to share what was really happening and be supported.

This exercise of brutal honesty has also extended into my personal life and it has been really interesting.  In the last 6 months, I started a new relationship that has tested my personal boundaries and has helped me grow in ways that I never thought about previously.  This is the first time I’ve been in a polyamorous relationship and it has been one hell of an experience, I am grateful for my partner and for the richness of our time together and what that time has taught me.  The most important lesson learned is being completely open and honest about everything, the good, the bad, the embarrassing and the shameful.  It has been mind-blowing to experience love and appreciation from someone at this level, for just being me.

It’s humbling to think about all of these really great feelings and people in my world that I am deeply grateful for and appreciate with every part of me and its fucked up that I still wake up some days, a lot of days with this apathy so deep I don’t know where it even began.  Does it matter to know the genesis of this void, by wondering about it am I feeding into it and giving it relevance?  How do you deal with it? do you deal with it at all? is this what drugs are for? are all adults like this?  I am truly curious and would love to talk with anyone about this, hit me up on the intarwebs or if you’re in Toronto we can go for a coffee some time, hell I work across Canada and sometimes travel down to the states so we can schedule some time to drink some kind of beverage, breathe the same air and talk about life and shit.  I know I’m not alone and I want you to know you’re not either.

-MDB

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