Stranger in a Strange Land

Sometimes I feel like a stranger in my own skin. Life changes, so I do my best to change with it. I am constantly vacillating between happiness, anger, sadness, and bliss so rapidly that I sometimes have to stop and think just to figure out how I am feeling.

There's a lot of shit going on in my life that would definitely send me into an awful depression if I let it, but casual observers of my life would never know it! I mean you definitely get a sense of it when you read my blog because if anything, this is probably the only place where I don't try and censor how I am feeling. But to people out there in the "real world" I kind of come off looking like one of those people that are so sickeningly positive and eternally happy that you would probably want to punch me in the face!

For me, the best way to cope with the stress of life and all the crap that goes along with it, is by forcing myself to have fun. I have been surfing, snowboarding and hanging with friends. The general idea being if I pretend like I am having fun, eventually I will actually start to have fun! It’s worked and things have been going very well for me. The problem comes when I stop and I think about what I am doing and I start to feel like a HUGE poser!

For awhile I was having a lot of personal conflict with being fake. It really seemed to be counter intuitive to what I was trying to accomplish in my life. Then one day after a particularly hard workout with Johnny, we went to meet a third friend for lunch. This dude, who is a very close friend of both of ours, showed up and he put his hand on my shoulder and asked me how I was doing. It was such a genuine question and the way he asked it you could really tell that he wanted to know the real answer. So for a split second I was just about to start pouring my heart out to him, then Johnny interjected!

“Why the fuck are you going to ask a grown man how he’s feeling!? That’s like asking a retard what he's thinking!”

I fell on the floor laughing! It had to be one of the funniest things that I had ever heard in my entire life. I think I have been spending too much time trying to be open and honest with everybody 24/7. At the end of the day I am still a man and certain things just don’t come as easy to me as they would my female counterparts. It doesn’t mean that I am an emotionless bastard that isn’t in touch with his feelings if I don’t cry during, Beaches! It means that I am a man God dammit!