I'm self-obsessed with my life-story

[WonderSeeker]

I'm 28. I am deeply conscious of my life-story, going back to when I was about 6 years old.

I'm an INFP, I have imaginative overexcitibility, and I'm good at weaving meaning together.

There are a high number of events in my life that in the moment, or in retrospect due to the trajectory they sent me on, carry deep visual and emotional significance for me.

As a result, I attribute a lot of meaning to these things and often review them in my mind. They are what made me who I am now, and new things and events still are sending me on new paths to hit my dreams and desires.

I sometimes wonder: Does anyone else feel the same way? I find in general, people don't share deep things about themselves, in favor of social manipulations to make themselves look cool, or, wierdly, to keep playing small in life. So I don't know what it's like for others.

Either way, there's a nuance to this way of being. I think you have to consciously choose to love your life-story; and, YOU must be the one that loads it with meaning (especially AFTER some awakenings when you learn your life is inherently meaningless).

See, for almost my entire life I never understood celebrity worship. I found it to the most respulsive thing ever; because what is it, but loving another's life story while ignoring yours. "Wouldn't you rather ongoingly create something more beautiful out of the one life you have?" That's what I thought, even in my early teens.

When I was about 14, I was at a scary low in my life. I got bullied at school daily, received dog-shit grades at school, and had no purpose, or even hobbies. At taht early age, I knew something have to change (imagine having a half-quarter life crisis). Instead of looking to celebrities, I found my first ever self-help videos, by a Lebanese dating coach of all people, and got to work. After sone time, I got a girlfriend, started getting A's in school, and became a talented athlete.

Then all of that fell apart and new life events, which I'm very fond of that bring me on the verge of tears, unfolded to save me from chasing success forever. I started using psychoactive substances and spending more time with new friends, which led me into college post-modernism. I recall specific missions I set for myself that felt enlivening and made life this great adventure.

Then things began to feel dull and drab. I began deep psychedelic research; and, that's when I found Leo. He broke my paradigms about life and I binged every video he ever made over a span of 6 months in 2020.I remember Covid hitting and escaping to the mountains in Upstate NY. Without telling my parents I left home and slept in my car deep in the forest. I was so scared of the cops or some crazy person finding me I barely slept loger than an hour. Also, my underdeveloped brain was trying to swallow the latest video I'd listened to by Leo about "you not existing as a self," and trying to use my hyper-logical brain to understand it. That plus Covid all made me depressed and lost at the time (and yet I'm so in love with that story and the pivot it represented -- me dipping my toes into something scary at the time, but something that seemed important nonetheless).

The above 3 paragraphs are little snippits from certain chapters of my life. They all feel so real and significant. I think part of what makes life beautiful is falling in love with your imaginary past. It's so unique to you. And in your world, YOU are the celebrity. Not Bieber, not Taylor Swift, not Obama. Who cares, your story is so unique, and it's all yours.

Cheers~

 

Edited 4 hours ago by WonderSeeker

[LordFall]

Thank you for sharing friend. I agree with it, people should embrace themselves as the hero of their lives and not give so much importance to celebrities apart from learning mechanisms of success from them.

For me the most interesting part of looking at my life as a story is looking at today as mid chapter of it and looking back at the early chapters to hypothesize where the later chapters end up.

I've recently moved back to my childhood neighbourhood and house after living away since being 10 years old and it's been trippy exploring my old neighbourhood and old city after being away for about 20 years. I both feel a sense of failure since I've moved away to different cities in my 20s and worked hard on business and still had to move back but also a sense of safety and profound looping.

I read the book Mastery by Robert Greene a few years ago and he talks about going back to the basics to things that you enjoyed in your childhood in order to inspire your masterpieces as an adult. I've been keeping that in mind and thinking about which part of my life are desperate overreaches for things that are not really important to me and which parts are authentically beautiful that I resonate with without needing to derive an outcome from them. I'm working on making my own video game and anime and that's the most fun I've been having these past couple of years so perhaps that will be part of my life purpose in the end. 

It's still a work in progress and I'm thankful for the deep introspection that's common on this forum and the opportunity to get to know myself deeper by getting to know you guys deeper. 

[Hojo]

Finding meaning is insanity. You notice when people go into psychosis they see meaning everywhere and in everything?

Its not an accident that they are related.

Edited 12 minutes ago by Hojo