This is my third time starting to write this entry.
It has been such a long time since I wrote public blog that I find myself tripping over my words in an awkward dance on the line between formality and personal expression. Clearly I should not have belabored updating UM for so long, but what’s done is done, I suppose. Actually, I would likely have gone another five months without an update had I not stumbled across the blog of Jake Hurwitz, a comedian who is also a surprisingly talented writer. In fact, talented to the extent that reading his (sadly rarely updated tumblr) tonight made me feel a lot less alone than I have in a long, long time. In one of his blog posts he sort of casually touches on the fact that he failed out of one college and dropped out of another and then sort of leads into his life having sort of come full circle; the fact that he could do so with such humility and without any smack of self deprecation made a really big impact on me and drove home the point that I’m not the only imperfect person in the world and, perhaps more importantly, made me realize that just because my past doesn’t look the way I’d like it to doesn’t mean my future is entirely bleak.
I realize that it sounds pretty fucking stupid to be 23-years-old and not realize that no one is perfect and that the fact that my life hasn’t gone completely to plan doesn’t mean it may as well be over, so elaboration and clarification are in order here. In high school and early college, I was close friends with some pretty amazing people and, as the young and stupid so often do, I constantly compared myself to them and, in my own eyes, always fell short. Even though I now realize that it is far from logical to use other people as a ruler with which to measure one’s own success, I haven’t been able to completely shake the mindset that I have to keep up with my peer group or risk being left behind to be swallowed up by a sea of misery. Given that a lot of things in my life haven’t followed my meticulously-calculated plans (I feel like no one plans on a boredom-induced career change in their early 20s, honestly), I have been a lot less gentle with myself than I should be, especially this past year. I’m so eager to catch up to where I feel as though I’m expected to be in life that I haven’t taken the time to stop, breathe, enjoy where I am right now, and congratulate myself on how far I’ve come since I graduated from high school six years ago, detours, setbacks, mistakes, and all.
Given all of this, seeing someone who I perceive as being successful and sort of the pinnacle of “going after what you want and making it work for you” be able to mention what could only be called failures in his past and not tear himself up over it, made me realize that I’m not a lost cause and I really owe to myself to stop acting like I am. There’s no reason for me to keep putting off things that I know will make me happier right now until I’ve “accomplished enough to deserve them” and there’s no reason for me to ever feel like I won’t ever find my little niche in this life, because fuck it, I will make my niche if I have to.
For brevity’s sake (as if it’s not too late for that, ha!), I will end this post here, but, in the next few days, I will follow this entry up with one about the what the hell I’ve spent the past five months doing. But for now, I am going to clean off my desk, and then play with Java or Rails for awhile. Writing publicly was good to me tonight. I missed this.