(no subject)
Man, I’m slacking with my updates. Work has gotten busier, which I guess is a good thing. That’s not entirely why I’ve been quiet. I’m simply feeling unmotivated of late. With everything. I can’t seem to bring myself to do anything, things I must nor things I like. Everywhere I go and all I do feels so forced. I tend to withdraw when I’m not feeling myself. Probably it’s a guy thing, though I’ve always thought nobody wants to hear me whinge. So I hold out and then seem to dump it here in one massive post.
My daughter’s graduation from high school on Wednesday evening set me to thinking.
It was a nice ceremony. Student speeches were better and less contrived than those I remember back in the day. Some kids sang, others played instruments. Unlike my graduation, this one was for the students. Faculty and administration had their moments, but they didn’t go on endlessly for the sole purpose of impressing themselves, as was the case when I was there. Or is it only my perspective has changed?
I hated every moment of school when I attended. My only memory from graduation is cutting it up on the back riser while one of the students droned on in some idiotic speech. I couldn’t get out of there fast enough. I wasn’t leaving anything behind I didn’t want behind me. I wouldn’t miss any of my classmates, after all, I hated them all, save maybe three or four.
My daughter has been completely opposite. She didn’t want to graduate! I watched her cry almost the entire night, and when it was all over, she cried more. In the weeks leading up to graduation she became increasingly unbearable. Nasty, rude, disrespectful, you name it. I couldn’t stand to be in the same room with her. While I certainly never felt the anxiety she has experienced leaving her friends, I do understand how she feels as she does. Still, she made it nearly impossible to be compassionate.
So yeah, the whole thing set me to thinking. All the key moments of my life have seemed enormously surreal as I experienced them. Graduation was nearly an out-of-body experience. Ha! I’d waited so impatiently, for so long, I don’t think I accepted it was really happening. Watching my daughter graduate twenty-one years later was similar. Now, I know time accelerates as one ages, and though I must admit those years have gone by much quicker than I could have ever imagined, that is not of what I speak.
I feel no different from the moment I stood on that same stage to receive my diploma. Something should have happened to me over twenty-one years. I can’t tell you what it is. Something. I should feel older, wiser, experienced, more self-assured. Something. I feel exactly as I did then. I feel terribly unqualified, on every level, to have a child at that point in her life.
In some ways, I feel as if I am still standing on that stage, waiting to receive my diploma, sealed in a time capsule while time flows all around me. Everything that has happened since seems almost unreal, a dream. And I sometimes wonder if I’ll awake at some point to the dreaded alarm telling me to get up for school. Seventeen year-old Mike had silly thoughts like that. His thirty-eight year-old version thinks no differently, so it would seem.
I get up every morning, grind away another day of my life expectancy, and go to bed only to do it all over again. Suddenly one wakes up twenty-one years later and realizes the only thing to show for it is the dust from nearly half of one’s life. I should feel differently as a result of those years. I should be smarter, accomplished, evolved, or something more than I was at seventeen. Something. Like seventeen year-old Mike, I still have no clue what that something should be. Not long ago I joked about midlife crisis and now I wonder if I’m actually having one. Midlife? Wait! I haven’t started yet.
And I feel guilty for feeling this way, for feeling dissatisfied with my life. There. I said it. I am immensely more successful than most of my classmates. I can’t honestly say I’m lacking anything. Without exaggeration, I can say my wife is straight out of a fairy tale. I have three healthy, good (for the most part) children. I have hobbies and interests to pursue. I most definitely do not have less than anyone around me, and I feel as if I have absolutely no justification for feeling as I do. Yet I do and it won’t go away no matter how much I tell myself I’m thinking irrationally. And as uncomfortable as I feel right now, I haven’t the motivation to get myself up and do something about it. Even if I did, I haven’t a clue what that should be. I am as confused and misguided as I was at seventeen. See? Nothing has changed.
My daughter’s graduation from high school on Wednesday evening set me to thinking.
It was a nice ceremony. Student speeches were better and less contrived than those I remember back in the day. Some kids sang, others played instruments. Unlike my graduation, this one was for the students. Faculty and administration had their moments, but they didn’t go on endlessly for the sole purpose of impressing themselves, as was the case when I was there. Or is it only my perspective has changed?
I hated every moment of school when I attended. My only memory from graduation is cutting it up on the back riser while one of the students droned on in some idiotic speech. I couldn’t get out of there fast enough. I wasn’t leaving anything behind I didn’t want behind me. I wouldn’t miss any of my classmates, after all, I hated them all, save maybe three or four.
My daughter has been completely opposite. She didn’t want to graduate! I watched her cry almost the entire night, and when it was all over, she cried more. In the weeks leading up to graduation she became increasingly unbearable. Nasty, rude, disrespectful, you name it. I couldn’t stand to be in the same room with her. While I certainly never felt the anxiety she has experienced leaving her friends, I do understand how she feels as she does. Still, she made it nearly impossible to be compassionate.
So yeah, the whole thing set me to thinking. All the key moments of my life have seemed enormously surreal as I experienced them. Graduation was nearly an out-of-body experience. Ha! I’d waited so impatiently, for so long, I don’t think I accepted it was really happening. Watching my daughter graduate twenty-one years later was similar. Now, I know time accelerates as one ages, and though I must admit those years have gone by much quicker than I could have ever imagined, that is not of what I speak.
I feel no different from the moment I stood on that same stage to receive my diploma. Something should have happened to me over twenty-one years. I can’t tell you what it is. Something. I should feel older, wiser, experienced, more self-assured. Something. I feel exactly as I did then. I feel terribly unqualified, on every level, to have a child at that point in her life.
In some ways, I feel as if I am still standing on that stage, waiting to receive my diploma, sealed in a time capsule while time flows all around me. Everything that has happened since seems almost unreal, a dream. And I sometimes wonder if I’ll awake at some point to the dreaded alarm telling me to get up for school. Seventeen year-old Mike had silly thoughts like that. His thirty-eight year-old version thinks no differently, so it would seem.
I get up every morning, grind away another day of my life expectancy, and go to bed only to do it all over again. Suddenly one wakes up twenty-one years later and realizes the only thing to show for it is the dust from nearly half of one’s life. I should feel differently as a result of those years. I should be smarter, accomplished, evolved, or something more than I was at seventeen. Something. Like seventeen year-old Mike, I still have no clue what that something should be. Not long ago I joked about midlife crisis and now I wonder if I’m actually having one. Midlife? Wait! I haven’t started yet.
And I feel guilty for feeling this way, for feeling dissatisfied with my life. There. I said it. I am immensely more successful than most of my classmates. I can’t honestly say I’m lacking anything. Without exaggeration, I can say my wife is straight out of a fairy tale. I have three healthy, good (for the most part) children. I have hobbies and interests to pursue. I most definitely do not have less than anyone around me, and I feel as if I have absolutely no justification for feeling as I do. Yet I do and it won’t go away no matter how much I tell myself I’m thinking irrationally. And as uncomfortable as I feel right now, I haven’t the motivation to get myself up and do something about it. Even if I did, I haven’t a clue what that should be. I am as confused and misguided as I was at seventeen. See? Nothing has changed.