I can’t even remember where we slept last night.
Wait… yes I can: Side of the road, just off the water, waves on one side, little unseen waterfall, er… trickle, on the other. 🙃
Couldn’t sleep much again. Culprit this time?
My heart.
It was beating a lot faster than it should for sleep time, and good gravy it was pounding. It would shake my whole body and wake me up (and keep me from being able to fall back asleep).
Stupid heart.
I guess heart issues run in the family, and I’ve already had them myself before, so… why not one more thing, right? 😶
Anyway, I got up, and once again the sandflies were brutal. I mean right on me the moment I got out of the car.
Of course, they were waiting for me. Sitting on the windows just patiently waiting for me to emerge, so they can descend upon me and try to suck me dry.
Nearly everyone in New Zealand, with some exceptions, says the South Island is the best island. “If you loved the North, just wait,” etc.
But. Holy. Crap. The sandflies! 😳
And from what i understand, it’s just gonna get worse the further South we go, at least on the west coast.
😶
With the small cloud of flies trying to make me a reproductive feast, I quickly left the vicinity of the car (as with sandflies, it helps to keep moving, so I… kept moving. 🙃).
Honestly, though, they got to the point that it was well beyond just irritation. Those things are relentless.
And per my other post from however long ago, yes, i learned they eat more than just blood–nectar being the main thing. It’s just the females that suck blood, like mosquitoes, and they only need a blood meal to get the nutrients needed to reproduce, whereas for lady mosquitoes, it’s just to be able to lay more eggs. A female mosquito with a blood meal can lay 10x as many eggs. Apparently, a female sand-fly without a blood meal can’t reproduce.
Lovely. 😬
Anyway, I was up for quite a while, spending a lot of time trying to figure out my trip home (when I am going home). I still haven’t figured that out yet. And now my brain is flooded, and I’m not doing well (I’ll get to that), so I’m not in a space to give that decision my full attention.
Moving on… I was already feeling pretty low for reasons described in my “Decisions Decisions” post. And I’ve not really been interested in traveling anymore. It could be because I’m feeling low, or it could be a combination of that, standard travel fatigue/sensory overload, the transition from novelty to normalization, or perhaps only being able to entertain myself for so long without feeling productive before I want to do things that feel like actually matter and make a difference (i.e. lift the world).
It’s a bit of each, I’m sure.
Chase and I talked a bit about it, me trying to figure things out. How the dynamics have changed with him staying. How things have changed for him while on the trip. Options for how travel could go from here on out (e.g. we could stay together, we could split up, I could go home on the 30th of December, or on the 15th or 20th of January… Or some other time.
I still don’t know what I’m doing.
We tried to have little adventures here and there, poking around at different things, but we’re both a bit… our energy is a bit lackluster right now. Personally, I’ve just got so many things on my mind…
So yeah, we poked around here, poked around there. We drove into the mountains to the end of a dead-end road and then we just talked for a while about some really important things. That was a good talk. There’s been a lot on both our minds, just about life and choices and whatnot.
My whole world is on its head, and Chase has new things he’s experiencing as well.
We drove back to the coast where, while driving, Chase saw something that caught his eye, and I’ve been saying that if he sees stuff, just stop, because most of my best adventures are on those side explorations.
So he stopped. 😊
And boy did it pay dividends today. 1000% better than planned!
He pulled over randomly, I think after seeing some cool rock formations on the coast? (i think maybe he saw the Pancake Rocks?)
So we started walking down the road a wee bit from where we parked, stopping and sitting at the top of a huge, flat, maybe 20-foot-high little clifftop overlooking the ocean waves that were rolling in a little distance away.
We talked for a little while, and then it happened. I saw what i thought might be a dolphin a good ways out. Yes! Yes it was! Dolphins again!!! And this time Chase was there to see them, too. 😊
I saw two that looked like they were headed away from shore out to sea. I figured that’s what was happening because that’s what happened last time. They’d headed in. Then back out, then down the coast and gone. This time, I didn’t see them come in, just saw them going out. Then I saw more, and I watched them turn south.
I thought they were gonna be gone and was just happy to have seen more Dolphins, though from much further away this time. But then… they weren’t gone. Either there were dozens of them, or they were just all swimming around in the same area.
I watched them and wondered. Are they feeding? I didn’t know but they just stayed there.
And stayed around still longer.
Which… gave me an idea. 💡
Maybe I could actually get out to them! 😎 I mean, I had my boogie board, my wet suit, and my fins. People talk about how fun it is to swim with dolphins. Maybe, just maybe, they’d still be there by the time I got suited up and headed out there. 🤞
So I started getting changed and getting the gear together, and Chase grabbed his waterproof GoPro, and I climbed down to the rocky shore and, a little nervous about entering the surf right where waves were crashing into the rocks, I began to paddle out (i had fins, making it much easier to get away from the rocks and past waves).
As i got further out, the waves were pretty big (size you hope you can get past before they curl, or you may end up thrown back quite a ways). And I did have to duck under some of the big ones to avoid getting thrown around.
And then it happened.
😁
🥳🥰🥳
😁😁😁😁😁😁😁
There was this really big wave that i needed to get past, and so i prepared myself for it, and just as i started to roll up the landward side of it, i saw the dolphins–catching the wave! They were inside the wave just feet from me! As I went one way, they went the other! 🙃
Man! I wish I had that on video! Staring them in the face as i passed by. It was so cool!
I turned on the GoPro, bummed that i didn’t already have it on to see that amazing sight, but I got it turned on and was ready for whatever came next.
After making it past that wave, I just started looking all around. I think i went over a couple more waves before… more!!
They were going in. they were going out. they were going left. they were going right. they were going… all over!!!
Honestly, I think they were just enjoying themselves playing in the waves. 🙂
It was so cool!
Multiple times they swam within feet of me, sometimes under me. It was the coolest! 🥰
I kept taking video. Hopefully, I got some decent footage.
It was definitely an experience I’ll never forget. 😊
To top it off, these particular dolphins an endangered species: These were rare Hector’s dolphins, so I got to spend part of my afternoon on a random day on a random beach in New Zealand with dolphins swimming all around me. 🥰
Better. Than. Planned.
So so cool. I didn’t try to touch them at first, and then by the time I’d gotten up the courage to try, they’d sort of lost interest in me and were moving on.
Still, it was super super cool. 😊
I also didn’t think to try to film them underwater until after they’d lost interest in me or needed to move on or whatever it was that got them to leave.
They are just little things, too, not big dolphins. They’re just little guys. And it was so cool to hear their deep breaths, every time they surfaced. It sounded like a person taking a quick, deep breath. 🙂
So cool. 😊
Would have been super cool to snorkel with them. I brought my swim goggles, but they’re… junk. I didn’t bring my snorkel stuff. I thought any it but didn’t.
Next time.
Yes, next time!
Though there were things I could have done to make it even more amazing, I was just thrilled to be there, even if only to see them from above. 🥰
Oh, and as always, I had a healthy dose of shark fear, especially since i was splashing about, which tends to attract sharks, but i didn’t see nary a shark nor Orca.
I made it into shore probably 40 ish minutes after i set out, playing around the dolphins for probably 20-25 minutes of that time. 🥰
That made all the heavy stuff from earlier in the day just get washed away, at least for the time being.
Chase and I chatted a bit about some things and then we headed to a little cavern that was just 100 meters or so from where we’d parked. I noticed it was there (we had no idea) while talking to a couple of families, who had seen me out with the dolphins and were super excited both for me and that there were dolphins out there. The kids especially were excited that I had been out swimming with the dolphins, and the adults recognized the species and were excited, too, I think.
So was I! 🙃
Anyway, so we poked around the cavern for a bit before pointing the nose of the car south again. We were gonna stop at the pancake rocks walk/Vista, right next to where my dolphin adventure was, but good golly it was tourist freaking central! So we didn’t even pause in the parking lot, just drove right on through and back onto the road. 😆
We drove as far south as Greymouth, where, and another better-than-planned experience (Chase missed the turn off into the mountains, which took us into Greymouth). As we came into Greymouth, the very first thing we saw was a Warehouse!!!
Which we wanted to go to anyway for a number of reasons. We bought a replacement cell phone holder. We bought a replacement storage bin (we’d totally destroyed the previous one). We bought some Christmas decorations. And I bought some other Christmas stuff to surprise Chase with–a stocking and stocking stuffers.
Then we headed up the river to find a place to sleep, finding one after a little while that worked great.
Throughout the day, I’d been texting with a friend back in the states about how much i was struggling (see the Decisions Decisions post). I think maybe he was surprised that my feelings haven’t lessened at all in the last year? Everything is still just as strong, perhaps more so.
Anyway, despite those challenges and everything that’s been weighing on me, my dolphin experience had given me a thrilling, bubbly, childlike excitement that temporarily covered the struggles.
It had gone from a down day, to an up day. 🙂 then… I sabotaged it. 😕
But then… I sabotaged it. 😕
The short of it is that a budding friendship that was important to me was harmed because my stupid insecurities caused me to misinterpret what I was experiencing in my interactions with that person, and then I’d gone and written in my blog about those misinterpretations, and my friend found and read my blog and was understandably hurt by what I’d written. The content itself was painful for probably any person to read about oneself. And then there was the fact that their experience of me in person was so much different than what I wrote in my blog–the in-person experience being uplifting and positive, but the blog describing a very different sentiment. That contradiction was both confusing, painful, and, I’m guessing (and I could be completely wrong) sewed a pretty strong seed of doubt that what I say can’t really be trusted.
To top it off, it was all completely public.
😞
Usually, I keep things pretty vague on my blog when other people are involved, and the content is sensitive, so that people’s privacy is protected, despite my desire for full transparency. And if there is a likelihood that that person is going to read my blog, I might not say much at all, if anything.
It’s a hard line to walk, wanting to be fully transparent about my life, but also wanting to respect other people’s privacy and not harm relationships.
Anyway, despite my regular efforts to preserve people’s privacy, this time, I… didn’t. I just wrote it out in gory detail without… thinking? Or maybe I thought they would never read it, and no one would ever know who they were anyway, so… it was as good as being anonymous?
Whatever my thinking was, it was poor judgment, and i screwed up…
In so many ways…
The only reason I found out what happened is that friend sent me a message after having read my blog, letting me know that they had, and letting me know some of the feelings that arose from having read it.
I was devastated, mortified…. pick your adjective. I don’t even know.
I just felt like absolute crap.
One of my hopes in life is to leave every person and every place better than I found them. I hate it when I fail, and worse, when I cause harm.
So yeah, that’s the short story.
The long story is this:
Through the course of my interactions with this person, I noticed some very distinct body language and other vibes that to me quite clearly said, “I don’t want to be around you.”
As I think most of you know, perhaps the single biggest obstacle that I face in my personal development is overcoming my fear of what people think of me, always wanting everyone to like me, and always wanting everyone to want to be around me and what not.
I’m not even close to overcoming that.
When I feel like people don’t like me, but I value their opinion of me, when I’m around them, I often clam up.
And I make things really awkward (but really only in my own mind–a self-created prison carefully crafted by horriblizing the circumstances). Those around me might not notice any difference whatsoever (though they also might). But inside I’m churning with anxiety, discomfort, fear, discouragement, pain, etc… All of my own creation.
Clearly, i make myself super uncomfortable, and in that state, dominated by fear, I no longer am able to just be me.
I mean, of course I’m still me: I just lose the unguarded, open, comfortable, confident me. I turn into Mr. Serious B. Clam. I couldn’t make a joke if my life depended on it, just serious conversation (though often that serious conversation is still quite meaningful [at least that’s something, right?]).
In that state, silence is deafening, and any conversation that feels one-sided (always or nearly always being I who initiates/continues the conversation [at least from my perspective])…
Those things, in my super self-conscious state just reinforce in my mind how much I’m not wanted, as “there’s clearly nothing to say to me” (at least, that’s what my brain tells me).
And that’s… what happened. I saw what seemed like clear rejection. I clammed up, lost myself, and became super uncomfortable nearly all the time.
What i didn’t know at the time was that my interpretations were dead wrong.
So I began to feel uncomfortable. And then it got worse. And every interaction that elicited the same reactions in my friend reinforced my interpretations.
I’ve always been so good at reading people, but… not with this. Not even a little bit. I had it all wrong. I just didn’t know it yet.
But then I had an interaction that didn’t support my initial interpretation, and I had hope that maybe I was wrong.
It was actually a really positive interaction.
But I had this problem: Every time I had an interaction that seemed the “I don’t want to be around you” type, at least according to my interpreting brain, I couldn’t hold on to the less common experiences that called into question my interpretations.
So instead of following the hopeful interaction, and instead of just directly asking if they were uncomfortable with me, I let myself slip back further and further into worry that I wasn’t wanted, which kept me all clammed up and being Mr Serious.
I was able to have meaningful conversations. I was able to show that I actually truly did care about them, but I couldn’t get myself to be comfortable and to just be me, so to speak. So what they got was serious, uncomfortable, clammed-up Stephen.
When I let myself get into that kind of a situation, it quickly spreads. I start to worry that the other people, if there are any, in the group feel the same way. Then I clam up even more, and I just want to run away, feeling like an annoyance, a tolerated evil, so to speak.
In those situations, I revert to the only thing I have left that’s so fundamentally me that it can’t get fully warped and twisted–I just do my best to show people that they are important, valuable, and cared about. Those things I can generally still do even if all the rest of me is paralyzed and I feel unwanted. Even when I’m so uncomfortable that I just want to run away, I can still do those things.
But there was something else in this circumstance. Though I was uncomfortable, terribly so (and I again want to emphasize that it was of my own making and not because of the other person), I actually didn’t really want to leave. As weird as it might sound, I wanted to stay doing things together. I don’t know that I could tell you exactly why. That’s probably something I need to explore within myself more to better understand.
Over time, there were more evidences that my interpretations had been incorrect. And when we weren’t together, I thrived on our electronic communications. Those gave me a safe distance from my own insecurities to be myself, if that makes sense. Instead of having the pressures right there right now in front of me, I was able to breathe and think and just be me. I was able to let go more and more of the interpretations I’d made in person and focus more on the hopeful experiences that seemed to show that my interpretations were wrong.
The more electronic communications we shared, the more I started feeling like I was uncovering the fact that I’d been wrong about my interpretations.
And they I got that message.
It was heartbreaking for me to receive the text that they had read my blog, mostly because of the hurt that I had caused them. It was also hard because I was just barely starting to feel like maybe I could get past those previous interpretations.
There was still, and remains still, so much that I don’t understand but truly want to understand about my friend and our experiences together.
There’s also a lot I want to understand better about myself in all this as well.
One of the deepest desires of my heart in this world is to truly be able to understand people, what they feel, why they feel it, etc. I truly want to know people, not just know about them or know a few things. I want to really really understand.
I know that’s a pipe dream in a lot of ways, but it’s still my dream, my hope.
It’s taken me I don’t know how many days now, four maybe, to write this post. I keep coming back to it and not making any progress. It’s Christmas today, at least in New Zealand, and at least using the US calendar, as I know it’s not on the 25th and other countries.
I don’t know if that friend will ever read this, and I’m worried that there’s so much that I’m forgetting. I’m worried that somehow I could make things worse, but I’m going to share nonetheless and hope that it’s for the best.
It’s also likely that I’m making it bigger than it even was for them. I just hate to cause pain. And especially when that pain has nothing to do with any deficiency in the other person but everything to do with my own inadequacies and insecurities.
The reality is that all of my suffering was self-caused.
Like Emerson wrote, “Some of your hurts you have cured, and the sharpest you still have survived; but what toils of grief you’ve endured, from evils which never arrived.”
But then also there’s the question of congruency. Why did I not share how I was feeling when I’m the one who’s always saying that we should be open and talk about everything?
And why would I say I enjoyed being together when inside I was twisted up and knots, uncomfortable, and wanting to run away?
I think there are a couple reasons why I didn’t share how I was feeling. One of them was that I felt like my friend was already dealing with some challenges, and i didn’t want to add another one that I personally thought would be a huge weight. I didn’t want to saddle someone else with that weight, not when things were already challenging. And maybe they weren’t challenging, but that’s one thing I was thinking.
Another was that I’m a really really slow learner when it comes to emotional progress, as evidenced by the last multiple years of my online journal. These have easily been, as y’all know, the hardest years of my life, and I’m extremely self-conscious about the fact that I don’t seem to be making much progress in my personal growth. I keep trying, but I keep… not succeeding, though trying in and of itself is succeeding: I think you know what I’m trying to express.
Anyway, the point of my second comment is that if someone is trying to help me through something, it’s going to take a long time. And I’m probably going to be worried about the same thing over and over and over and over and over again.
Poor Chase has had to deal with that on this trip with me. We’ll talk about something that I’m struggling with, and it’ll seem like it’s resolved, but then hours later, or the next day, or a few days later, there I am back against struggling with the same stupid thing.
Like a merry-go-round. Round and round and round I go.
When that happens, I stop sharing because I feel like an idiot who can’t ever seem to get out of his own way or grow, and I feel like a burden, and I don’t want to be a burden or an annoyance for someone else.
So I don’t bring it up, because I don’t want to burden someone else with continual reprisals of the same stupid problems, and I don’t want to feel like an idiot like I do so often. Just writing in my journal, knowing that so many of you out there are reading and seeing that I’m not really making progress but am repeating the same mistakes and struggling with the same issues over and over and over again.
I’m extremely self-conscious about that, and think about it every single time I put fingers to keys or to screen to write in my journal.
Of course, you’ve all been caring and supportive, but my brain just reverts to me feeling like an idiot when I just don’t seem to be able to make progress.
So anyway, that’s another reason why I didn’t talk about how I was feeling, for good or for ill.
There’s a part of me that really wants to, especially now (talk about absolutely everything from top to bottom, inside and out). But I’m always worried that I’m just going to end up being a burden, the guy who keeps falling back into the same trap and can’t ever get out of it, and drags everyone else down with him.
“Good crap, why doesn’t he just get over it?!?!”
It would be funny, if it weren’t so painful, but it’s definitely ironic that my insecurities actually create the very circumstances that I am afraid of in the first place. Who wants to be around somebody who’s serious all the time?
Anyway, that other question, why would I say that I enjoyed spending time with that person if inside I was so uncomfortable so frequently?
That’s a tough one.
First off, there were plenty of good times, and despite my discomfort, I was disappointed when we split up, and I was excited again when we reunited. I wanted to stay together. I wanted to share with my friend (and all of them) the adventures we were having and the places that we found that we loved. They (all my friends) were (and still are) important to me.
Anyway, I’m also just not very good at writing the good times in my journal sometimes, especially when there’s a lot of heaviness on my mind. So there’s often already an imbalance in the substance of my journal, often weighted more toward the heavy, challenging things I’m facing, and with these being the hardest years of my life, sometimes it’s hard to get out of the heavy almost ever, so that puts a negative on a lot of things to begin with.
Maybe I’m not making sense. Or maybe I’m overcompensating out of fear trying to make things better. I don’t know. I have a lot more thinking to do to even understand myself in all this.
But it’s true that i wanted to stay together, despite the struggles and pain I felt. And my friends, each, are important to me.
So that’s one reason I think I might have said that.
To be transparent, I’m pretty sure I also said that because I didn’t want to hurt anyone’s feelings. I didn’t want to say, “well actually, I’m uncomfortable most of the time.” It was a painful battle for me, but it was a battle I wanted to keep fighting.
That’s not a fun thing to hear.
And yet, it got “heard” anyway.
😞
I hate that my insecurities can cause other people pain. I wish I could just snap my fingers and overcome.
At the very least, I think I will learn a valuable lesson from this experience, likely several lessons. It’s my hope that I’ll be able to apply them in the future so that I don’t cause other people and do pain because of my own weakness. And hopefully, I’ll finally grow and actually overcome.
That’s my pledge to you if you read this, and to myself, to just be better than I have been.
…
On a lighter note, I’ve noticed that there are pretty much no broken down cars in New zealand. After having driven the roads of New Zealand for well over a month, I have seen a broken down car a total of once. No broken down cars on the side of the road anywhere. It’s crazy.
One thing that might explain it, however, is that it appears that probably 90% or more of the cars on the roads in New Zealand are from Japan. 🙃
There are a gazillion Toyotas on the road in New zealand. And not just new ones. I think New Zealand imports a whole crap ton of used cars from Japan, and that’s what people drive here.
Shout out to Japanese engineering and Japanese quality.
Love and hugs. 😊
Lift the World
~ stephen
Lift the World 