Youth is Wasted on Me
I don't know who I am or what I'm doing. I can't pinpoint when I lost track, or if I ever knew. At the start of Fall '09, I told myself that I needed a non-egocentric life goal, one that didn't fixate on the attainment of personal happiness. Happiness might result from improving some part of the world, I thought, but it would be redundant; I should be able to carry on even if I were terribly unhappy. The rationale behind this revision of my objectives was that, if happiness were my primary goal, I'd get nothing done. My understanding of happiness was too open-minded, short-sighted, and accepting of volatility to motivate working hard.
Open-minded: In Spring '09, I wanted to leave school and work a mundane job until I died. This was a reaction to feeling like I'd lost the ability to do anything meaningful with my life. I figured I could find ways to enjoy myself even if my education went to waste.
Short-sighted: During Fall '07 and Spring '08, I was happy as long as I could get drunk with my friends on Friday and Saturday night. The misery and humiliation that filled my work-week didn't matter as long as I had a wild weekend ahead of me.
Accepting of volatility: Without a foundation of being proud of my accomplishments and/or confident in my abilities, I start to flip back and forth between excitement and depression, with little to no middle ground. I'm content enough with this oscillation that I can sit in it for months without even looking for an exit.
I managed to sidestep these traps for two semesters. Recently, though, I began doubting whether I had the ability to change anything in the world for the better. As a fallback plan, I once again started to think of my life in terms of my own happiness.
What happened then? Exactly what I predicted. My work ethic fell apart, my ambition went away, and mostly I wanted all career-related talk to leave me alone. Three years of college had been great at preparing me for (if nothing else) a fourth year, and I managed to pound out a successful semester (as far as the transcript is concerned) with bullshittery, speed writing, and a sense of fuck-you-all upperclassman arrogance. If my only tasks in Semester Seven had been to score a shitty, if-only-you-hadn't-fucked-around-quite-so-much 169 on the LSAT, half-ass my way through a bunch of easy classes, and do most of the semester's workload in a week and a half, I'd be a beaming success story. I'd be in the school newspaper and people would be wondering how the hell I found the time.
Now it's winter break. Of the past nine days, I've been completely sober for eight. The fact that I consider this a hard-earned accomplishment should horrify me.
I'm alternating between brooding and escapism. I don't know exactly when I entered this cycle, and I don't think I can figure it out. I was always bad with assigning dates to memories, and now I'm bad with memories, period. Has alcohol really destroyed my brain? It feels like something has.
I tell myself that I continue to be functional in spite of what for a lesser man would be crippling depression. I've always been half-aware that this is a fantasy. Here's why:
(1) I'm probably not depressed.
(2) I'm hardly functional.
I don't have a macro-goal. All of my prior ideas about "success" no longer seem attainable and/or appealing. I should be scrambling to find a job for next year. Instead, I'm shivering in the frozen upstairs study of my house, because I couldn't figure out how to power my laptop in my room without plunging Mike's pet snakes into icy cold (by snake standards).
How about this as a goal: not living in my parents' house next year.
More on this later.
Open-minded: In Spring '09, I wanted to leave school and work a mundane job until I died. This was a reaction to feeling like I'd lost the ability to do anything meaningful with my life. I figured I could find ways to enjoy myself even if my education went to waste.
Short-sighted: During Fall '07 and Spring '08, I was happy as long as I could get drunk with my friends on Friday and Saturday night. The misery and humiliation that filled my work-week didn't matter as long as I had a wild weekend ahead of me.
Accepting of volatility: Without a foundation of being proud of my accomplishments and/or confident in my abilities, I start to flip back and forth between excitement and depression, with little to no middle ground. I'm content enough with this oscillation that I can sit in it for months without even looking for an exit.
I managed to sidestep these traps for two semesters. Recently, though, I began doubting whether I had the ability to change anything in the world for the better. As a fallback plan, I once again started to think of my life in terms of my own happiness.
What happened then? Exactly what I predicted. My work ethic fell apart, my ambition went away, and mostly I wanted all career-related talk to leave me alone. Three years of college had been great at preparing me for (if nothing else) a fourth year, and I managed to pound out a successful semester (as far as the transcript is concerned) with bullshittery, speed writing, and a sense of fuck-you-all upperclassman arrogance. If my only tasks in Semester Seven had been to score a shitty, if-only-you-hadn't-fucked-around-quite-so-much 169 on the LSAT, half-ass my way through a bunch of easy classes, and do most of the semester's workload in a week and a half, I'd be a beaming success story. I'd be in the school newspaper and people would be wondering how the hell I found the time.
Now it's winter break. Of the past nine days, I've been completely sober for eight. The fact that I consider this a hard-earned accomplishment should horrify me.
I'm alternating between brooding and escapism. I don't know exactly when I entered this cycle, and I don't think I can figure it out. I was always bad with assigning dates to memories, and now I'm bad with memories, period. Has alcohol really destroyed my brain? It feels like something has.
I tell myself that I continue to be functional in spite of what for a lesser man would be crippling depression. I've always been half-aware that this is a fantasy. Here's why:
(1) I'm probably not depressed.
(2) I'm hardly functional.
I don't have a macro-goal. All of my prior ideas about "success" no longer seem attainable and/or appealing. I should be scrambling to find a job for next year. Instead, I'm shivering in the frozen upstairs study of my house, because I couldn't figure out how to power my laptop in my room without plunging Mike's pet snakes into icy cold (by snake standards).
How about this as a goal: not living in my parents' house next year.