09/30/2026: A Fish-Eye Lens of My Own Design
The last day of September is here, and it’s also my last day at home after an unexpected setback kept me from working the rest of last week and the start of this week. New phone with a working GPS in hand, I’ll think about hard work and money tomorrow, and I’ll enjoy my last day of rest.
It’s funny how we always plan with reckless abandon as if we have control over things. It seems the more rigid we are, the more things slip through the cracks, and the more disappointed in ourselves we become. It’s a lifelong effort to find the balance between discipline and grace, between trying to be better and accepting who we will always be beneath it all even if we do improve by impressive margins over time. And some of us will never even own a scale. Instead, we’ll live a lifetime of running from one extreme to the next, never content in the middle, never safe in our solitude, never alone with our thoughts.
I watched a movie last night that will stay with me for a long time. A brilliant blend of horror and deep wisdom, it explored the idea of trauma and memories, and how each defines us and also distorts in our subconscious as things fade over time. There were themes of struggle with accepting reality and refusal to change, and of ignoring that part of us that wants to be better than we were, and the way these things were visually portrayed was also meaningful.
It’s a movie that really made me think about how I choose to carry myself through my own life, about all the times I’ve lied to myself or viewed past experiences through a fish-eye lens of my own design. How much have I actually changed? How much have I wanted to actually change? How much more am I willing to change over the course of my life? I can’t predict the future, but I do know this: I have changed, more than my past self could ever fathom, and, at least for now, I truly want to continue on the trajectory of growth I’m currently on for as long as my mortal life will allow.
And despite my intentions to be good, I will still make mistakes. I will hurt others unintentionally, and I will also unknowingly hurt myself. I’ll find joy in surprisingly mundane places, and I’ll find sorrow at the most unexpected crossroads. But the one thing that will always hold true is that it all depends on what I do with all that joy and sorrow that comes my way.
I could live in an infinite expanse of my own deformed imagination, where pain and solitude feed on my fear, where I accept the flawed version of me that the world rejects. But I can also tear down those walls and break free of my miserable mind, and I can accept that the battered and bruised part of me isn’t all that I am, and that the world can still accept me and even help me become a better me if I let it.
It’s a lot of work, and it’s a job that doesn’t offer a lot of time off—in fact, it often demands strenuous overtime—but even so, it’s the kind of work that’s the most rewarding in the end.