I get angry thinking about all these unwritten, unspoken rules that I'm just now finding out about, things that are second nature to most, but things I would have never known if I didn't find out somewhere. I feel like I have to think more about what I'm doing, I have to be more careful, more conscious than most people, because I don't have all this stuff instinctively. It's no one's fault, I don't blame anyone for it, but I feel like an animal that was raised in a zoo. Sure, the zoo was safe, and it was even fun, but I don't have the instincts of a wild animal. I'm having to learn them manually. Growing up, I didn't just KNOW how to ward off predators and fight for my place in the pecking order, and why it's important. And now I don't just KNOW how to do the mating dance, how it works and why. I just took the rules I'd been told about life at face value, and I just did whatever instead of finding a way to get a competitive advantage in life. But the more I live, the more I feel like life is all about competition, whether you want it to be or not. Even in the first world. I naively believed that us humans would want to choose to be above the law of the jungle, since the way life used to be was cold and harsh but now we were more free to choose something nicer and better. But I find that's not the case. Most people it seems, embrace the law of the jungle, survival of the fittest, because they think they are the fittest. Again, I naively thought I could opt out of competition since I didn't think I could compete, but also because I didn't think that's what life should be about. I thought confidence meant doing your own thing, doing what you wanted and felt was right, being yourself and I thought I was fine because that's what I was doing. But it didn't occur to me that I had to live up to others' standards at the same time, especially as it relates to attraction. I wish I knew all this a long time ago, because I would have known more about why people are the way they are, and how to respond to it. And also because I'm starting to feel like to really get somewhere in life, you have to do a lot of things right for a long time. And time is something I no longer have a lot of - at least, not time to learn, grow, figure out what I'm doing. I should be well on my way to somewhere by now. Instead I find myself well on my way to exactly where I don't want to go. I only hope it's not too late to change my trajectory and catch up, somehow.
