nothing feels quite like rejection

...

lately i’ve been confused about what value i am providing to the world. it seems that i am in possession of a rare set of legos, and i am just a few steps away from building something shiny, but for one reason or another i keep assembling the legos in incoherent arrangements and nothing beautiful ever gets created?

what i mean is something like - i have a lot of useful skills and strengths, enough to be a decent engineer or researcher or coworker, but empirically not enough to be a great one; people generally enjoy spending time with me, enough to want to be friends, but not enough to want to indulge in my craziest ideas or spend the rest of our lives together. when i think about people my age whom i deeply respect, it doesn’t seem like they have better or more numerous tools than me, but somehow they’re able to put everything to use in a way that i haven’t been able to yet. it feels like the difference between linear and compounding returns

sometimes i wonder if i will ever (by my standards) do truly good work or create anything of value? that’s quite important to me. everything i’ve worked on so far has been an unserious demo or a one-off research prototype; nothing with staying power. i thought one of my projects earlier this year might get there, but i was quite ineffective while working on it, to the point that someone had to tell me banging your head against a wall doesn’t help anyone and make me relocate to something else

multiple events occurred recently, each of which upset me deeply, that i’m unable to elaborate on. they have been top of mind for a few days now, and i have become quite anxious; my stomach is constantly in a state of churn and it is taking me from 12:30 until 2:30 to finish lunch each day

yesterday one of my friends casually mentioned things are going really well for T right now. and then i went home and thought for a bit and realized that the most recent time i would’ve agreed things were “going really well” for me was… spring 2022? i’ve been happy many times since then of course, but that was the last time i felt like nothing important was missing

today i attained a full eight hours of sleep for the first time in weeks. i got up a few times in the middle of the night to use the bathroom; each time i woke up there would be a few seconds of bliss - before i regained full consciousness, before i could recall all the events that had just taken place, before the aching in my heart resumed. i slept all night just to experience those sweet twenty seconds where everything was normal again

yeah, tell me again / how it fills the chest, fills the head, fills the lungs