Good morning crickets. Welcome to day number one-hundred-twenty-eight of Operation Achieve Anything. Yesterday was my first day working my new job and I already can’t wait for this week to be over. Not really because of the job but it definitely does play a part. I’m more excited for this week to be over because I have a pretty big paycheck coming in from a couple of one-off gigs, and I really can’t wait live a little more luxurious for a couple of week with the added comfort of knowing that even bigger checks will now be coming in on a more regular basis.

Until that day comes I’m still stuck in a bit of a limbo phase since my last paycheck has been long since gone. I can’t stand how, no matter what anyone says, money is required to be happy in the modern age. Yeah, there may be happy moments while broke but in general, fun really does require funds at least from someone who is involved.

Speaking of someone, the Achieve Anything… book is still on the topic of how you cannot achieve success on your own while pitching the importance of friends. For yesterday’s assignment, I had to journal about my friendship history. If you read this segment of my blog with any regularity, you may have seen that I explore this area of my life all the time, since I lost my last group of friends just a few years ago.

When I say last I mean both the most recent collection of friends while also using last to mean final. It’s not that I hate any of the friends that I’ve lost over the years or that I’m even against the concept but there’s something in me that’s always felt a bit detached to where even when I was with my closest friends I felt like I was just entertaining them from the periphery as if I was a character in a show.

I used to joke about this all the time but since I was always so happy as a performer, I don’t know if anyone ever knew that I was actually telling the truth. It could have also been hard because I never blamed anyone else for these issues since it always felt like it was coming from my own head. I can start to get into a bit of a blame game when things start to fall apart, but that’s always been the only way that I’ve found to make a split more bearable.

This pattern with friends has been going on my entire life. I’ve always had groups of friends where I was the funny one who snuck into an already established group. This is because I’ve always been super shy so rather than approach an individual, I would hang out near people I found fun and would chime in with jokes from time to time until I was discovered.

I guess that way I felt like they wanted me over me needing them, so I always kept a bit of a distance which just made me more intriguingly weird. After a while, I’d start to feel like I was actually growing on people, once they figured out my quirks and I was just happy to have people around to keep all of the sadness out of my head.

Then, inevitably, as time goes by and people grow apart I feel like the odd man out because I need the group as well as the individuals and struggle to cope with this specific type of change. I’m sure part of it has to do with my parent's divorce, where I felt the same sort of connection with my family. I’m starting to think that a bigger part is that I fall somewhere on the autistic spectrum which I don’t mean as a joke whenever I hint at it through this blog.

I’ve always thought that my quirkiness came from a personality disorder or some combination of bipolar disorder and depression but as I’ve grown older and have lost my last social mask, I’m beginning to think that it’s more. It feels like I’m now the real me that everyone always told me to be before they left, leaving me with no reason to hide. Meanwhile, everyone seemed to like the me that I was while in my not-shy disguise.

To make things worse, I never learned how to interact as an individual entity, so when these groups break up a major part of me dies as well. This cycle has happened so many times that I just don’t think that I can handle going through it again. Which transitions into today's assignment based on the quote of the day at the top of the page about the purpose of life is to help other or at least be active in your efforts not to hurt them. This is why I’m fine being alone especially after so much defeat.

I’ll dig into this more when I check in with tomorrow’s update. Until then, it’s now time for me to sign off by saying, good day and good luck to you and all of your projects.

Talk to you soon.

Sincerely,

The Wicker Breaker

P.S. Below are links to my novel, which I plan to promote as part of Operation Achieve Anything, as well as a link to where you can buy the book that is providing the structure to this project in case you would like to purchase it in order to play along.