Man, I haven't done something like this in a while, but March is the new November so why not?
I have to write an essay basically comparing a Mary Wollstonecraft quote about parents to my life, which is just leading to all sorts of depressing shit that I don't want to be up writing about at 2am (so I'm writing about writing about it?). And it just gets me to thinking about tons of stuff I just don't need to be thinking about at all right now. Not even logical shit like my money problems or how far behind I am in Interactivity. It gets me thinking about how happy I'm really going to be once I'm done here.
The reality is, that what I want is mediocrity, I want a relatively worry-free life where I can have kids that I can provide for and do something that isn't terribly boring to me. As long as I don't end up working in a fast food place (or designing annual reports, essentially as interesting), I'll be happy. But then I get to thinking that maybe when I'm 50 I won't be so in love with that idea. And that's what's terrifying.
I have two common daydreams that I go to recently. One of them is that I am going to just drop out of school, pick up a ton of sketchbooks, a bus ticket as far away as I can go, maybe somewhere without any snow, abandon all of my stuff, and just draw comics and cartoons all day long. I'd work in a coffee shop or a book store or a paint store or wherever I could, and when I got home at night, I'd draw until I ran out of ideas, and I'd never run out of ideas. I'd go to sleep in my tiny closet of an apartment above a convenience store, and I'd just live that way until I got tired of it, and then I'd go somewhere else.
The other is a little more impossible, involves a machine that stops time and lets me live like Bill Murray in Groundhog Day, only I wouldn't come out of my room. I'd just stay there and draw and play guitar and make things all day long. And at night, when I went to sleep, all of the drawings I did would disappear, and I would never even get to think about selling them.
But, I'll never do it. Well, not the time machine one for obvious reasons, but not even the semi-feasible one. Why? Because I don't have the balls. I grew up in an environment where I was never sure of anything, never secure, never felt at home or like things were really taken care of. I grew up wondering if my mom had paid the water bill on my way home from school, or if it had gone to alcohol or whatever the hell else it was she spent that money on. I grew up in a place where if I wasn't home from school or work by a certain time I didn't come home at all, because I knew my step-dad would be drunk by that time, and quite frankly I wasn't as strong as I am now when I was 14.
And I grew up thinking that was normal, that everyone had to deal with that. So now that I know it's not normal, now that I know exactly what normal IS, no matter how much I want to just abandon everything and live some immaterial life on my own, I know I have to prove to myself that I can succeed where my parents failed. And knowing that means that I will never be able to give up the mediocrity that I'm looking for, because without it I'm just my parents. "A slavish bond to parents cramps every faculty of the mind" alright, possibly even imagination.
1 comment:
I firmly believe that you're completely unlike them either way, too firmly for you to waste your life "proving it". I believe you know it too, but are second-guessing yourself. But you won't regress to their state come middle-age. It doesn't work that way.
To borrow from an article in The Atlantic, they never learned to employ mature adaptations. They were just drunks who were raised under the ebbs of spin doctors. In the case of my own dad, I'm sure the cocktail of psychotropics and South American traumas played no small part in his formative years, but yours probably weren't at The Doors concerts in the 60s or Chile in the 70s.
Maybe living a lifestyle closer to theirs, in mediocrity, in kids, and excelling at it—maybe that will redeem you by illustrating your differences against common denominators. But that's unnecessary, and it means being chained to their path; letting them direct the course of your life.
For me, perhaps this is immaturity, but I don't have to wait until I'm 50 to know I can't do the standard mediocre human lifestyle. But if you really do want that right now, go for it, and you'll probably find healthy coping mechanisms and creative outlets by the time you get there.
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