Growing up, while reading the New York Times
Every day, everywhere we go, in every motivational speech, every classroom, even on cheesy-but-trying-to-be-inspirational TV shows and advertisements, we are sent the same message. "Life is what you make of it" "Only you can make a change to improve yourself" "Nothing will be fun or meaningful unless you make it fun and meaningful." Yet it is so much easier to listen to all of this and to nod our heads eagerly than it is to actually follow through with it. We make so many promises to ourselves and to others that we simply cannot and do not keep, but is there something to be said for the experiences themselves? Sometimes I want to scream: "Maybe if you'd stop yelling 'Carpe Diem' in my ear for ten seconds I'd actually get an opportunity to seize the day!" The biggest problem, however, is not that I am afraid to act or change, but that I'm not so sure which changes I really want to make. I don't want to simply jump from one category to another. I don't want to be a person who is different from the one I have been, with a different set of flaws and strengths, I want to use my existing flaws and strengths to make myself better. We are the greatest destroyers of our own minds and bodies, but my destruction ends here. After fourteen years in this place, this black whole of understanding, where we have been sheltered and coddled and, in my only slightly more eloquent version of cheesy Benke-speak "given the tools we will need to mold our places in the world," I have fifteen days left. I will make no attempt to comprehend it because it is, in so many ways, simply incomprehensible. In one week, I will be eighteen years old, but as much as I wish with every fiber of my being that it will be a day of transformation, and that suddenly the self-conciousness which seems to hold me back so much and so often will evaporate, I know that it won't. Next Saturday, March 5 2005, I will be legally capable of buying cigarettes and porn, of calling random 1-800 numbers to order things of the tv, but I don't think that I will truly be changed. The eternal optimist within me wants to delete the latter part of this entry, and perhaps it is too emo, too open, too vulnerable. I'm not sure though. In the NY times magazine for tomorrow (or maybe it was the book review?) there was a really interesting article with an amazing writer named Jonathan Safran Foer, who, at 28, is on the verge of publishing his second novel, to considerable critical acclaim. All the superficial stuff aside, he said something in the article which really touched me. "Why do I write? It's not that I want people to think I'm smart, or even that I am a good writer. I write because I want to end my loneliness." Even though my writing style, and the things that I choose to write, might not even come close to his literary ingenuity and range of emotion or understanding, I think I write for the same reason. So, to some degree, should everyone.