When you're a total cliche.

So I read this today.

It's kind of a smack-in-the-face moment when you realize you're enough of a cliche that the vast majority of items on a generically directed emo blog post written for the masses apply to sad, lonely little you.

Number 1. Duh.

"7. You are constantly doing the things that make you feel like shit and going into a shame spiral about it. There’s no learning curve… yet."

Well then.

When's it time for the learning curve?

"12. You find yourself complaining about the same things you were a year ago."

God, I don't even want to look back at this time last year in my blog.

But let's do it, shall we? It'll be fun.

Sound familiar? And this?

Oh hi, this.

Everything has been stagnant for so long. I feel like so much about me has changed but at the same time I feel like I'm the same as I was at 22 when I moved to LA. I need change. I need something. A new job, a new city, a new perspective, a new brain. Something has to change. I can't keep cycling like this, spiraling, year after year. It doesn't make me happy. And if I'm not happy, why keep living like this? Simple, right? It should be so simple.

I've managed to convince myself I've had periods of health, that I've been getting better, but it's not true. I've been two steps forward, two back. I've been suppressing these bad periods, and they just continually resurface. This is not healthy, it's not the way I want to be. I haven't moved forward at all.

I don't want to just exist, unfulfilled. I want to do more than that, I don't want to just be. I want to be more. Be a better person friend, daughter, employee, maybe girlfriend. Be a better friend to myself.  I don't want to constantly beat myself up and tear myself down and shred my mind and insides up. I don't want to live the way I've been living. I just want peace.

This all sounds like everything I've ever said before. I know this. Believe me, I know this.

I don't know what I'm getting at.

Except that maybe, just maybe, I'm finally hitting fucking bottom. Isn't that what I need? Isn't that what they always say? You can't make changes, true changes, until you really hit bottom. Until you have nothing left.

Maybe I'm there.

Because I'm fucking sick of this. Feeling lost. Feeling helpless. Finding the day to day a constant battle. Struggling against a torrent of loathing directed at moments of total normalcy, because that normalcy isn't what I want. Seeing seconds of happiness as precious and translucent because behind them is a dark emptiness that threatens to swallow them up if I blink too long. Sitting still for hours, paralyzed by complete failure to understand what it is I really want out of myself and my life.

My mind works in strange ways. My thinking goes dark at the oddest of times. I can't stop myself from criticizing my way into corners, worrying my way behind walls. And I just can't figure out how to stop myself from repeating these same patterns. Clearly, I can't solve my own problems while still wandering the same mazes.

A brilliant man, that Einstein. Did you know we share a birthday? Well, we do. So maybe, just maybe, if there's any sort of spiritual magic in this world, I absorbed some of his wisdom through our shared anniversary.

Now: how to change my level of thinking?

Suggestions?