I suck at First Impressions.

I think this is a common issue with people my age. We tend to give people the wrong impression the first time we them, and it is usually because we're lazy, and sometimes we just do not care. I know personally I have screwed up first impressions more times than I can count. The hard part is living with that and moving on.

Moving on would be easy, if only I could stop dwelling on those mistakes. I guess that is what I have had to learn, which is to not dwell on my mistakes. Sometimes that is difficult, because the amount of things I have to dwell on are ever expanding. Most recently I have suffered some social loss, mostly in the form of some long term friends, people whom I have known since pretty much the time I move over to the East coast of Florida. I really do not know what I did, but they no longer wish to associate with me, which is a real bummer.

See I could move on, if I did not get this nagging feeling at night reminding of all the relationships and bridges I have burnt in my time. I try to occupy my brain with other activities to distract me from these things, and yet somehow my brain manages to remind of exactly where and what I did long and torments with the idea that if I had the chance I could do it better, but I digress, dwelling on these things does me no good, I need only move forward.

Speaking of moving forward, what am I going to do? I have a tendency of announcing to people my lofty goals, and then falling completely short of those goals, mostly because I find an excuse to not pursue that goal, or I give up in some kind of fit of futility. That's the part of me that I struggle with, the one that keeps reminding me of the futility of it all, that EVEN if I do achieve my short term goals, somehow in the end my long term goal just turns to complete crap because it does not matter what I do, I am still stuck in the same shitty circumstance.

Maybe my attitude sucks?

To take a page from Socrates himself, when asked about the secret of success from a young man who he ended up walking out in the deep end of river and holding his head under water til he had to fight violently to get a breathe of air, relating that the sensation of fighting for the air at the time is just like how you become successful; you have to want it hard enough to fight for no matter what.

A lot of the fighting I have been doing as of late has been with myself though, I am constantly fighting the urge to just give up and jump in front of train, or maybe even on coming traffic and just end the struggle all together.  I am to stubborn to do that however, because I realize that is an easy way out, and despite how much my life SUCKS right now, it will SUCK LESS down the road.

Do I have a plan for success? Not exactly, I am not really the planning type, but then again, I am at the point in my life where I need to cut the bull shit and start doing the things that will ultimately make me successful which means I need to seriously invest some time into myself pinpoint exactly where and what I want to do with my life.

I got a little detracted. What does this have to do with first impressions? I guess I give people the impression that I am some kind of sad sack who is mostly coasting through life, which is mostly true. It's time for a change, and I am going to make that change. I once again publicly humiliate myself stating that I will achieve a major change in life and that I will amount to something within the next three months or so.

Here's a video from Eliot Hulse, a guy that's helped me with a lot of the shit going on in my head: