I feel like I keep going through crisis periods where everything feels like it's falling apart, and nihilistic ideas ring through me as if they're the only truth. I've never really felt so desperately dark before now, when I'm in one of those moods - but I've been getting through them, lately, because I'm finally really internalizing and believing what I'd been just telling myself for years. Life has to balanced between good and bad things, and what that really means is that if I want to be able to FEEL at all, I have to have some terrible times and difficult mornings and car-crying sessions to be able to feel elation and simple pleasures like cups of coffee and late nights with friends and breakthroughs with clients. Sometimes I wonder if other people have such violently ill periods of thought, sort of a vomiting session of the mind so that you can go about the rest of your next few days uninterrupted and much soothed, but then I figure it's best to focus on what works for me instead. (Although I do still wonder!)

I've also been finding lately that my decision - because that's what it WAS, about four years ago when I heard someone critique "open-minded" people of being exactly the opposite - to be truly more open-minded has...really been working. I don't get upset when hearing most conflicting views (when told in a normal format) and even when someone is angry. After reading parts of a book (for myself) on anger management and several on childhood development I feel like I can...understand, at least in basic concepts, why people like say my mother are so unaccountably rude and volatile at random times, and I try to keep my cool in return. Why let their negativity wash through me as well, when it's themselves that are the problem - not me?

Ever since embracing religion and learning more about it - all different kinds of religions, not just Christianity - I've felt a lot calmer about other different beliefs to my own. I used to be a defensive and aggressive atheist, mostly because of my parents being that way and some religious people taking a strange offense to me just...stating that I wasn't Christian. I felt alienated for something that hadn't even been a conscious decision on my part, just the way I'd been raised, and I was understandably upset over it. But now it's just another facet of learning about how humans function, how we used to explain the unexplainable and how we still reach into that rich pocket of ancient not-quite-understanding to help ourselves.

I had a lot I wanted to discuss and I feel like I'm just barely scraping the surface of everything, it's been so long since I wrote about myself at length on the computer, and not just scribbling down in notebooks some of my feelings so I could better cope with them. xD

In conclusion: I had a terrible past two weeks interspersed sparingly with some phenomenally good times, and my morning at work just absolutely saved my mood. I love that I can love my job.

I've been slowly re-integrating my altar and chanting into my life. I wouldn't go so far as to call myself a theist, but knowing that there is some proven science behind chanting helps further me into using it in my life. It gives me something to concentrate on, divine powers or no. I adore using the gods I find in Hindu and Norse and all the rest of the mythologies to help personify ideas, obstacles, and positive notions. It's like a shorthand for life's troubles and if a placebo works, why knock it?

I also just got a second job, at a nearby-ish salon, and my fiancée and a mutual friend have all filled out an application for an apartment! Money will be tight at first but I anticipate working pretty much full-time, by hook or by crook, come January or February. I've giving my current jobs some time to give me more hours and if not, I'll just get a third job at a coffee shop or a petstore to fill my downtime with some minimum wage - it's better than nothing, and I think I can handle twenty hours a week of bad bosses and bad customers if I have massage to look forward to outside of that. It should keep me grounded and feeling like I have a purpose, instead of the uphill struggle that it was to work at Dunkin Donuts 35 hours a week, without a car, and still try to set up interviews for jobs I couldn't even drive myself to. Life is a lot better now, even if it's more expensive, and I wouldn't go back to my childhood if someone paid me anyway.

It's looking good, I just have to stay motivated and strong.