“The lust for comfort destroys the passion of the soul.”  Melody Gardot, interviewed here.

So someone read some of the archive stuff I posted here recently and described it as “mewling.”   People sometimes leave comments here about “missing the old Spike.”  Someone whom I know IRL sent me an email that contained this (and I hope he doesn’t mind my sharing it publicly):  “I think you have a gift for communicating but there seems to be a block on communicating your feelings about somethings. The bit about the ‘hide tide; feeling alive’ was one time the angst actually came out and read far more powerfully. But it still left the feeling ‘..this bloke has something passionate to say.’ It’s like you have a block on letting people in. Which of course is understandable.”

Sure, three years ago I was in the habit of exposing myself, of blogging my inner-most thoughts.  And I stopped doing that, for the most part, because where did it get me?  I got some small measure of fame, I suppose, but little else.   If my life was an emotional roller coaster back then, perhaps even a series of manic depressive mood swings, it’s different now.

And now more than ever, it’s difficult for me to find the reasons to publish all that internal stuff here.   I keep censoring myself, back-spacing, hitting “save as draft” and never “publish.” I’ve only got a few hundred steady readers – what do I gain from exposing myself?  A few more readers?

People never used to know who “Spike” was in real life – I told very few people about the blog and refused a lot of invitations to meet.  Now a lot of people do.  So there’s that as well.

Okay, first of all, I’m in a steady, monogamous relationship, one that’s going well.  I sometimes have the urge to step outside a bit but always manage to remember what I risk losing by doing so, so I don’t do it.  So there’s nothing to be  blogged about there.

And quite frankly, while I pretend otherwise, losing my job has been a tremendous blow to my confidence and my ego.  Oh sure, I wasn’t singled out – almost a thousand of us got the boot at the same time.  More fool me for thinking that the company might reward my accomplishments and decide that I should be one of the very few who got to stay.  More fool me for not caring more about my job to try to do an end run around what I’m sure was a devious manager who built himself up at my expense.  If you think I sublimated my passion on the blog, I did it 100 times more at work in an abortive attempt to “fit in.”  You can’t undo what’s been done, merely learn from it and try to remember it the next time.

So now I’m in this position of being where I am and trying to figure out where I want to go next.  Sometimes I feel overwhelmed by the number of options in front of me, sometimes I feel depressed by the lack of options.   Well, I suppose that everyone goes through that.  For me, it’s also a bit of this weird feeling because in the past, most of my jobs have come to me rather than me seeking them.  For what I’ve accomplished (and for having what I’m told is a really strong CV detailing my business experiences and accomplishments), I’m very frustrated that more isn’t coming my way now that the word is out that I’m “available for sale or rent.”

Maybe I’m flying under the radar (albeit in a vaguely public fashion) and perhaps that old fire will ignite these pages once again once the job thing is sorted and I’m feeling a bit more myself.   I definitely haven’t been myself, whoever that is, for several months now, not just on the blog but in life.  Ask almost anyone who knows me.   For now, I’m feeling a bit beaten down.

There’s no point to any of this and this is very unfinished and rough but for once I’ll hit “publish” instead of “save draft.”

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