We are constantly at odds with ourselves with what exactly we want. It could be in the moment, it could be a week for now, or it could be in a hilariously unrealistic amount of time. The question always concerns the rationality of such-- whether or not they can even be considered attainable taking everything into consideration-- and the extents you're willing to go to realize it. This is how you can "choose to be great", in a way. Let it be known that often times this is not how it works at all. It's safe to say that, with the way things are in the world right now, the means at which one could realistically chase an ambitious dream have substantially shrunk. Nobody's to say that the dream in question hinges on the markets and the current geopolitical climate, but historically a society that has money (no, not in the American way) inversely leads to more free time, which then leads to more time for leisure, child-raising, or personal development. Doesn't matter where you are in the world, shit's rough.
If you're in the same stage of life as me, you must be slowly starting to feel those responsibilities piling on, if they haven't already gaped your hole wide open already. You may find a laissez faire attitude towards myriad things slowly less effective with too much being shafted as a compromise for relative freedom of action. Often times you find that you just don't have enough time anymore. Society demands a uniform, streamlined approach to labor and study. Catch the wave or fall beneath the surface. Then maybe you can find your time for your passion. If you're relatively grounded, this shouldn't be an issue. When you're as entrenched in grandeur as I am, shit hits hard. It's not like I'm a narcissist having their ego put into question, but more so a "so this is how things have to be now don't they?". Think half-hearted acceptance. There's still a part of me that wants to dream big-- not only in the current moment, but beyond-- yet things begin to warrant a rather depressing question: when do I let go of a dream?
When you think to yourself "this is fucking stupid" when you repeat it in your head is one such cue to let go for a start. It gets muddier from there, however. Trying to rid yourself of extremely irrational motivations, ones where they start to affect the way you carry yourself, is something that certainly feels inevitable. Catching yourself in a train of thought like this is kind of embarassing, but not particularly uncommon. At least from my point of view. I constantly used it as a coping mechanism for my poor behavior. Sleep, diet (mostly pertaining to chronic bloat which I never stopped complaining about), academics, this blog. I had fucked up enough. Why would it matter right now anyways? In the future all would be resolved and I would be able to function as usual. I would simply be caught in an infinite feedback loop of neglect, living in expectation of the dream that would set me free to become true.
The most embarassing part about this whole diatribe is that I don't actually know what "dream" in parrticular I was ever thinking of. I was just thinking of some event, unbeknownst to even me, that would bring me ultimate catharsis from my current expectations and worries. Death definitely fits the description. Piecing the details together, I could maybe hypothesize that this sort of hopeless "dream chasing"-- usually consisting of shithousing through everything I need (or maybe want) to do and then sleeping for 10 hours-- ties itself back to my seemingly never-ending battle with depression, although the directness of my suicidal idealation hasn't really been a thing consistently for years. Predictably, this would make this example non-applicable for a good amount of people, not so much dedicated i_ai_r blog patrons, but people nonetheless, so maybe its best I digress towards a pair of more rational goals I remember wanting myself to achieve, which I of course did not. I can ensure you that my justification as to why they never came true is absolutely not predictable and doesn't involve me wanting to sleep and masturbate to Touhou porn.
"I would be scared about what I would end up doing with a competent ability in art. I've actually tried getting into it several times. What often stopped me was not my lack of faith in my ability, but rather being embarassed because the invisible voyeur is going to see me poorly drawing anime girls and objects in front of me and shit. I may have psyched myself out of letting my creativity flow simply because I'm afraid of how others may perceive me. Of course, utilizing a medium where nobody can perceive me as my own person for all I care."
- shit i wrote a week ago
I was quite the creative boy when I was young. What I neglect to tell a lot of people is that my innate "knowledge" was never in logic and quantiation, but was always in abstract thought and language. I was never better than average at math for a good part of my young life; it frustrated me to no end that I was even as much as expected to know what this meant when the only thing on my mind was that I wanted to become an artist of some sort. At my initial psychological screening (which later led to the big surprise that I had autism [💔]), I even said that I wanted to be a game designer. I didn't know what programming was back then. In my mind the game designer did all of the cool shit like draw out the whole fucking thing by hand. Basically just being a massive "ideas guy". That was my dream. I wanted to be the ideas guy behind classics like Mario Kart Wii and Sonic Riders (I hate this one). Free time in kindergarten was dedicated to drawing. When I was at home and not working on my MATH HOMEWORK (I vividly recall having a mental breakdown trying to identify which shape was a "triangle"), I was drawing. First grade, drawing. Second grade, Drawing. Third grade, drawing. Stop. I just didn't bother past the age of 9 even though it clearly functioned as a proper creative outlet for me, no matter how crude or actually psychotic my ideas were then. I think it coincides with the development of an inferiority complex in my academics that would slowly consume more and more of my life. Coincidentally, this is about where I started to become good at math. It's like I inadvertently sacrificed a part of myself to not only understand what a triangle was, but to do long multiplication as well. I had let go of my dream without a conscious thought behind it.
Right as my adolescence started though, my interest in drawing began to return, as if I understood that it was the second best outlet I had next to writing. This actually coincided with my interest in language learning, a pursuit I can say that I was even somewhat remotely successful in-- around late 2020 it was-- although that pursuit stalled for another year and a half or so before I became actually serious. In the meantime, I wanted to be really serious about drawing right off the bat. I wanted to make my inner child happy by finally being able to say that, to an extent, that I am doing the thing that he wanted to do. So I began to plan my mode of action out. The result was a very uniform course of action: I would study the fundamentals and then do whatever the fuck I wanted to do. Simple, right?
I gave up maybe two weeks in. Now how could I justify this failure when it's something I really, really wanted?
Simply put, I wasn't thinking with passion in mind. "What's the point in study when there's no enjoyment out of it?", I still ask myself to this day as I am studying something without enjoyment. Studying something as semantical as "fundamentals" before you began to even pick up the pencil and get a feel for where you are at that point in time is a death sentence for someone coated in at least 9 different layers of rust. Inspiration fuels passion and there was a plethora out there for me, I just believed there was some "requirement" for me to become worthy of using it. It wasnt like I was paying for art school, nor was it a class I was auditing or taking for credit, nor was I trying to impress the huzz/abgs/fine shyts. A very autistic approach for a very autistic man. As a final note, I don't think my art school professors would necessarily appreciate my work consisting mostly of little anime girls in exotic uniforms, but it worked for that one CalArts guy who's really annoying on Twitter so I think I could get a grant doing the same shit myself.
Now this should be relatively quick. When I was young, I was watching David Wright tear shit up on New York Mets baseball on SNY. Logically, I wanted to become a baseball player. My parents signed me up for a youth league but I flaked because I didn't want to practice. Fucking idiot. I'd be such a saucy ass white boy on the basepaths right about now. I'm the biggest fucking second baseman to ever live. My brother, meanwhile, played baseball all the way from my age then to about 15 before he sidelined himself with chronic knee and shoulder pain. My mom locked away the Xanax he was prescribed from that surgery on a dislocated shoulder he got sliding into second. Honest to God I don't know how anyone can thug that shit out. His fault for being an outfielder though. Byron Buxton can't play 80 games in a season and you expect to put up with that shit for like your entire childhood? Yeah no way buddy.
So there went baseball. When I was about 8 years old, I was watching... Pablo Prigioni? Tear shit up for the New York Knicks, who sucked and had sucked and who would be sucking for a while. I decided wanted to play basketball. My parents signmed me up for a youth league and I was actually pretty dedicated, except there was no real practice and everyone on our team lowkey sucked and I think we didn't get a single win out of the 8 games we were able to play. My most vivid memory then was when my dad was driving me home and an Inebriated Mexican rear ended our car as we were parked. My shittiness and unwillingness to refine my craft eventually led me away from basketball. I'm not punching myself in the face as much as I did for baseball however, because I'm 5'10 now and I have some tiny ass hands compared to even the mean varsity basketball player. The fuck am I supposed to do, be the designated deep range diming white boy? The Grizzlies didn't even want to give Yuki Kawamura minutes.
I got really into running right about when I was 14. I liked the very idea of running. I was addicted to running and I still am. I reaped the rewards rather quickly. In sophmore year I got onto the varsity cross country team. I went to the early morning try-outs out of curiosity and was then lowkey pressured by my parents to join just to have something to do "houkago" (that's "after school" in eigo). Keep in mind that I was built for it then, for all intents and purposes. I was maybe 5'6 and 120 pounds at most and had been running for quite some time before then. I was good. Plain and simple. As a bonus, I was even a "model student athlete" by having a big 3.7 GPA. Big opportunity for a little man who was still lowkey thinking about wanting to be a girl. Did he capitalize? Nope. I could've worked hard enough to get an offer or two in college and free myself from the biggest financial burden of this generation and onward but I chose not to. Why? I hated the idea of competition. I didn't want to compete so I didn't bother outside of what I had to do. I was no better than mediocre at something I had been great at. Fun.
Thinking about my past failures with my own high flying long-term goals in retrospect, seeing that their undoing was almost certainly directly caused by me, I can now say that I don't think it'd be ever right to just "give up" on a dream of yours with a clear conscience. You can do as I did, and view these aspirations in retrospect to see exactly how you inadvertently gave up, but doing so directly with something you hold any modicum of passion in suggests that you don't know exactly what you have in this current moment up until you lose it. Us zoomers are in the midst of a massive identity crisis and I don't think it would be good if we eventually reduced ourselves to nothing but labor and being afraid to fuck. I still am, mind you, and nothing will change that. If I could go back in time a year every year since I was born and kill that version of me then I would. Pussy ass white boy.
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