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Failure, Time, Tug-of-War

I seem to make so many mistakes and fail so much. I give up too easily, and I'm bad at time management - I seem to do almost everything much more slowly than other people.

Sometimes, I take on too much at once - too many projects running at once. That just leads to failure so often. I sat down and made a list today of all the projects/activities that I want and need to keep up with on a regular basis and made myself a time budget. I doubt it will work, though. I tend to be very impulsive and sometimes, when I'm online, the time just seems to fly by and before I know it ... so much time has passed and I don't have the time to do what I really wanted or needed to do the most.

I spend pretty much all my free time online. That is probably not a good thing. I waver between chucking most everything and just not going online very much at all, and being carefully, steadily active. But, I really have to start watching how much time I spend online. It's starting to bother me that that much of my time is spent in a place that does not exist in the real world. It is its own other world. Sometimes, it frightens me how much time I spend online ... I am definitely addicted to the internet ...

I start to think - I am sure there must be opportunities I would have had if I hadn't been spending so much time online - and yet, there are opportunities that exist here too. I've met some really nice people, made a few close friends even.

And on the flip side, I have responsibilities online - I own a guild (which I am trying to revive), I am a member of a role play site and just joined a new role play guild on Gaia today. I am worried that I'll fail again, and come crawling back with lame apologies, because everytime thus far that I have gone through turmoil or problems in my life, my online stuff has just dropped off the map. Sometimes, I want to not have any responsibilities tying me to the internet - nothing that I have to do, only things that I want to do. The memory of my failures resounds in my mind and heart ... and I sometimes want to run away from everything and everyone to whom I have a tie here. I just keep failing, letting people down, hurting them - and I don't like doing that. The more that happens, the worse I feel about myself as a person, the lower my self esteem. And what's worse than anything it does to me is what it does to other people - that thought torments me: someone else becoming just a little more jaded, just a little more bitter, just a little less trusting - because of me not being consistent. This is a horrible thought ... emo

Someone I know from an older generation thinks that the internet is a useless waste of precious time and that it is unhealthy to spend so much time online. I half agree, and half disagree with that opinion. There are some people I met online a few years back that I just love - they mean so much to me ... If I were to never go on MySpace, Caufar, Gaia, Facebook, or Vox again - would we no longer be friends? That just doesn't seem right ...

Well, there's always phone, email, instant messaging, etc. - but there's something kind of bonding about being on a community/game/networking site together. It becomes, for want of a physical geographical location - the place that you "live" beside them, the "town" that you both inhabit. And yet ... making friends that live too far away from you to actually see in person, isn't that emotionally unhealthy somehow? Not being able or willing to make friends in real life? There are some people who live in rural areas where there's not much to do - for them, it seems that the internet could be a good thing, maybe. But for someone like me - living in a highly populated area, for most of my friends to be people I met online who live hundreds or even thousands of miles away ... that just doesn't seem right.

I saw an anime episode about internet addiction once, and it kind of scared me. There was a woman who was neglecting her family because she was so addicted to the internet - I saw something of my situation in hers. Sometimes, I feel that I cannot live in both these two worlds at once - the real world and the internet world. I feel like I'm in a tug of war sometimes - like I'm the rope, and these two worlds are the pullers. Deep down, beyond the external chams of the internet, I long for the real, true charm of the real world and I only want to belong to that world.

I have a failure to confront tonight. Someone called me on it, and I know its true, and I wonder if I should just quit - maybe that'd be better. I have a few other failures to confront tomorrow. My seeming inability to keep my real and internet lives balanced and orderly is affecting me and I fail and then that's what I become in other people's eyes - just a stupid failure and a flake who doesn't care. Chaos ... everything in my life is disordered chaos ... everything from the room I inhabit to many other responsibilities and tasks that are in an unfinished state of disarray.

I avoid things that stress me out - I look at the disorder and think "I can't do anything about this - it's impossible" and I lie to myself and tell myself that "I'll do it once the prospect is not so scary." Scary things sometimes aren't any less scary or difficult just because time passes - sometimes they're worse later on because they were neglected. Visible, tangible signs of failure ... surround me ...