One of the many things they teach you in art school is the ability to let go. To let go of your art after you've created it. To let go of your attachment to your creation so you can sell it. To let go of your pride when you create a work that everyone things sucks. It translate very well into normal life, helping with the loss of love ones or jobs. But there's one area where this teaching seems to cause the most difficulty for me. It involves my data.
I'm not talking about personal data or identity data. I'm talking about computer data. Files, documents, mp3s, movies, digital downloads, games, etc. Things that take up the space in your computers hard drive that you may or may not access on a regular basis. It is the one piece of asset that can easily disappear off the face of the planet within 24 hours of you acquiring it.
Today, I experienced a hard drive failure that resulted in temporarily losing 1,000 of my files. Most of these files were music files that could be found again if I looked hard enough, but I didn't want to go through all that work again. It took me well over two years to get that big of a music collection on my hard drive, and I'll be damned if I have to search for them again. I wasn't sure what happened, but I knew it was a hardware failure. I pulled out my Mac and looked up what the signs are for a failing hard drive. Wikipedia gave me some instructions that I tried, and the 1,000 files I thought I had loss came back when a bad sector in the hard drive was fixed through an old DOS command.
However, something else happened. Apparently, something in my head snapped a bit. I wasn't able to let go and move on. Instead, I spent the following five hours trying to fix something that has already been fixed. The old saying of "if it's not broke, don't fix it" didn't apply. I was on a quest to find out if my back-up hard drive that failed still retained all the data that I put on it. I became obsessed with making sure that this data storage was okay.
While waiting for the fourth scan to come back with a positive bill of health, it dawned on me that I have trouble with letting things go that have seem to have no real attachment to it. It's just music! Some of the music I lost at the time I haven't listened to for up going on two years now, and yet I still have it. Why? Is it because that maybe one day I'll want to listen to it again? If I haven't listened to it after two years, what's going to make me listen to it now?
And then lightning struck twice. From that little thought, I realized that I never really got over what happened to me in Seattle. It gets easier to talk about it with time and trust, but I still haven't gotten over it. I've turned into Bella Swan from Twilight. I've become shallow, needy, and obsessed with trying to feel complete through selfish desires like having the best or most unique assets I can get my hands on (like my music) or attempting to become more physically appealing through working out. I don't want to be Bella Swan. She's a horrible person! I want to be better than that. I know I can be better than that.
But the hard part for me is that I don't even know who I am as a result of my experiences. The only parts that I can nail down are things that are few and far between. I grew up with Disney being in the house as a kind of safe entertainment, and as a result I can both appreciate and be critical about that company's product and how they go about business. I may not like some of their choices, but I can still like their product. I know that because of the social situations that happened shortly after I moved at the age of 10 that I like to pick and choose who I hang out with. I feel that if I offend someone once, I don't deserve to be their friend anymore, and I'm okay with being alone on a Friday night. While I prefer to be out with friends watching movies and bullshitting, I know that kind of luxury is a rarity due to factors such as mobility. I've also come to terms with the fact that I'll be working shitty jobs for the rest of my life unless I apply my education to something I want to do. And what I want to do became out of my financial reach earlier this year. I have to live with that choice, and I have to the best of my ability.
What I don't know is why I can't seem to let go of things I thought I already got over like Seattle, why I have such a hard time keeping my temper under control when people misunderstand me, and why I end up talking like Mojo Jojo when I become that upset.
I know learning about who you are is an on-going process, one that evolves with you. But the fact that there are so many different parts of my personality that are a mystery to me bothers me. It's like the issue with the hard drive. Why it failed is bothering me more than it should. It's old and I need to replace it. I am smart enough to know this, but I can't get over it. I'm smart enough to know, yes, I can be an angry person and a complete asshole if pushed to that point. But I want to find out why instead of just accepting that part of my persona. Why? Because I'm having a hard enough time as it is dealing with the unknown that I want something solid I can hold on to. Something I can get closure from.
Something that will make me stop trying to reanalyze myself and have me accept that I need to change that part of me if I want to be better as a person and better off in life. Kind of like how I need to stop doing all these diagnostic scans on my hard drive and just get a new one so that I have a back up of my back up.
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