Anyways, Birthdays are always a time for looking back on the past, certainly for me anyway; it is a marking of the anniversary a past event, after all. So, as I sat in that office this morning I reflected for a period on the last few years of being me (they're never ready to see you when you walk in so you always have time to spend ruminating on something or other). I had been in the vicinity of my old school last night so leaving school ten years ago stuck out as a natural place to start my look back.
The period between my 16th and the end of school was exam time and it was bloody awesome. I never revised but a lot of lessons were cancelled to make way for study sessions, which me and the boys translated to mean "go to the park down the road and kick a football around for four or five hours." (Still aced my exams, btw, at least the ones I cared about.)
If you'd asked me then where I'd be in ten years time I'd have had no idea but I would never have said I'd end that decade sat in a near-deserted office preparing to defend my use of my time this week - they want you to be doing work-search related activity for 35 hours every week, more than some full time jobs for about a quarter of the money - and feeling like shit.
I've said before I don't plan for the future. It's a mistake, I'm aware, but there you are. My somewhat nebulous ideas at that time revolved around working with kids in some capacity (an idea based mainly on my excellent rapport with my younger relatives) and doing something creative in my spare time, hoping for the latter to become professional at some point.
It was five years later that my career "plans" (for desperate want of a better word) were dashed when I unhelpfully realised that I hate
In those ten years I've changed a lot, though maybe not as much as I'd have liked and probably not always for the better.
So, what's the solution?
That's the right question to ask: identify the goal, identify what you need to do to get there, do the things, give no fucks if anyone or anything tries to stop you. That's what successful people do. Me on the other hand, I like to identify the goal, identify what I need to do, identify the failings in my character that will stop me doing the things, identify the reasons I can't escape these failings, identify my need for an alcoholic beverage of some kind, remember I don't like alcohol, die a little inside, write a blog post, get angry, suppress my emotions, buy something I don't need, act like a miserable bastard for 3 to 33 days, repeat from step one. Well, when I say I like to do that...
It's worse this time. I've always joked about getting old on my birthday but increasingly I get the sense that time really is running out. Is there too much pressure on the young these days? Probably so. Look at those SATs for five-year-olds or whatever: if that isn't symptomatic of a system that seeks to put everyone on a path to something from as early as possible, I'm the Easter Bunny. But does the fact that our obsession with early achievement is possibly needless change the fact that at 26 I am pretty much beyond hope of ever achieving what I want? No matter how I cast around for any excuse to disbelieve that I have missed the boat on everything I have to conclude that no, it doesn't change it. There is no court of appeal on this stuff either, anyone who accomplishes anything in the modern world has that ten-year plan when they leave school and they may not get all the way through it but they have made plenty of progress by the time they reach my age. Anyone who failed to make plans is left by the wayside. All my competition is from people so much younger than me now that I genuinely look like an old man next to some of them, but without the benefits of age such as experience and wisdom.
Regardless of whether I'm right in what I'm saying here, it has to be a sad state of affairs that a 26 year old can feel like life has passed him by. I take full responsibility for this; it's naught but my own stupidity and lack of foresight that led me here. It's naught but my own stupidity and lack of self-belief that stops me trying seriously to catch up with what I feel I've missed out on.
I keep hoping that one day something inside me will snap and I'll suddenly feel like I can do what I need to do to get where I want to be, but I feel like - if it will ever give at all - whatever it is that has to snap requires weighting down with many more years of dispiritedness and despondency before it will finally yield, meaning I will have to be even further behind before I can start to get my run-up going. I'm terrified of not being able to move forward but it seems the only way I can see to do so is to fall further behind, which - of course - I'm terrified of.
I laughed when I first read the term "quarter-life crisis," partially from the poor-sounding grammar, mostly from the feeling that it was all part of that joke we twenty-somethings do where we pretend to be old. But it is said that all jokes contain the kernel of truth and is there any more fitting term for what I'm going through now?
I could go on like this all night. There's nothing stopping me, really. But what was supposed to be catharsis has only made me feel worse and honestly, I've barely found any joy in this. Secretly, or probably not-so-secretly, this blog has been my favourite thing for a while now. I may be here infrequently, I may be embarrassed about what I end up posting and I may wish I was a million times better at this but the pounding of the keys, the construction of the sentences and paragraphs - however clumsy - and possibly even the knowledge that I've made some contribution to the world, even if it is pointless and unworthy, never fails to lift my spirits. Except tonight.
Tonight I may be finally admitting defeat in the quest to become a decent writer, because tonight I feel like it was early-twenties me who cherished that dream and though he had no better chance of realising it than I do, he had the license to dream that comes from youth. Late-twenties me has no such license, late-twenties me has to grow up and settle into the despair that is the true destiny of humanity, some future me may be able to harness the weight of that despair to some creative end but first I need to be crushed and battered by the world, probably need to actively seek out dejection and heavy-heartedness to break that dam and fire that furnace. Late-twenties me needs to go back to the job centre in two weeks (or preferably get a job, though that currently seems as fanciful as any other dream from my youth) and every week hence until something breaks; either me or that thing within me that is blocking my progress.
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