what do you see when you look at me?

sometimes i look at myself and all i see is mess.

if you knew me from my blog or my twitter or my instagram, im sure that is what you might see.

however, if you knew me in real life, you might have quite a different picture.

i am not sure how to clearly imagine the image of myself that i present to the public. i try to appear calm and collected and cool. i try not to do anything too stupid. sometimes, my tempers flares out and you may see glimpses of it. sometimes, my softness and my humor flares out and you may see me smile or giggle.

sometimes i am honest and vulnerable. sometimes i am quiet and say nothing because i am anxious or i have nothing to say to you. sometimes i am polite. sometimes i am loud and obnoxious.

to some people, it seems i have my life together. to some people, they see a student. they see a worker. they see a success. to some people, they see a friend, a daughter, or a lover. to some people, they see a loner, a weirdo, a stranger.

but whoever you see, it is only ever a facet of who i am

i am a mess and i am also everything else that you might perceive

but if whatever facet you have seen seems to have intrigued you … if you are not afraid of my mess … then i welcome you to explore more closely and see the other parts of me so that, with your leave, i can become more than a word …

i can become a person

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work

so … like any other university student, im working a part time job in retail to pay for my rent and keep me alive while i study because student loans are not enough and besides i would prefer not to be in debt for the rest of my life …

i dont enjoy it. not at all. im working in a supermarket. sometimes packing salads and pricing meat has a certain satisfying monotony to it. greeting customers on loop? not so much. i remember my excitement during my first job but i think that was just the novelty of actually being paid to do something and the fact that my (future) boyfriend at the time worked there too.

im parttime. i work two days a week. its very manageable. but i cant help but admire every full timer who gets through 40 hours a week of this.

its funny how central a job is to a persons life. we spend five days a week working so we can live the other two days. it floors me how much time of our lives is spent … not really living.

or maybe not. maybe im wrong. maybe forty hours a week is not such a big price to pay to live. living is a pretty big thing, after all.

perhaps a better way to look at it is that our job is our way of contributing to society. which it indeed is. maybe its more a case of five days of living for someone other than yourself.

i suppose i just think that idealistic as it sounds, id like to work a job that i truly enjoy and truly feel passion for. i dont want to spend most of my waking hours not really feeling alive. i know there are always unpleasant jobs that someone will have to do but the goal is to make them take as little time as possible, right? With the advent of technology, we can do that more and more. and again though this may seem idealistic, wouldnt it be wonderful to have a world where we can all find a career path that sparks at least a little passion in us and dont have to work a soul sucking job?

when you describe who you are, you typically mention your name, your age, and your job. but if your career is so central to who you are, i think it should have your spirit

fear and ambition

I’ve talked about struggling with a lack of motivation and a desire for greatness. It’s a terrible combination.

But I’m here today to talk about a different aspect of ambition … it’s partly linked to my previous post. I’m talking about fear and ambition.

I have many goals I want to achieve and possible career paths to follow and knowledge I want to attain and ideas I want to realize. But so many of them require a huge amount of hard work, knowledge, talent, creativity, and effort.

And I think, I can’t possibly expect that I can gain that knowledge and that I have that talent and creativity and that I’ll be able to put in that hard work and effort.

I’ll leave it to someone else to do it … someone better, more qualified than I am.

And it’s partly motivated by laziness, this impulse, but it’s also motivated by fear.

Because … what if I can’t EVEN if I try?

Wouldn’t that be the most demoralizing? So it’s better to just not try.

Excuses. They’re all excuses.

I find it very hard to believe in myself. I am afraid … fucking terrified … that I can’t achieve anything that I wish. I know I won’t achieve everything because there simply isn’t enough time. But I’m terrified that I won’t be able to achieve just one. I’m terrified of the confirmation of my own incompetence.

But you know what? Fuck that fear. It’s pride. I don’t want to see how lousy I can be. But trying will do nothing for my goals other than bring me closer to them. Maybe I still won’t reach them but what’s the harm in that if I wasn’t even going to try in the first place?

I want to shoot for the stars. Goddamit I really do. I always have. But I shy away from it because I’m a coward and I’m proud and yes, I’m really fucking lazy and I lack resilience and I lack willpower.

But I’m still here and I’m still dreaming … in the rare moments when I forget myself and let myself dream.

So today I make the resolve to stop letting realism dictate my actions. I’ve always been a rather practical realistic person. It’s always been about what is possible and what is probable and what I can expect. And I really thought, I’m just being realistic and that’s a good thing because it saves me from disappointment.

No, it doesn’t. Because I’m disappointed. I’m disappointed at how much I think I need to limit myself and at how much I let myself be limited.

I can be a bit of an all or nothing girl. So if I’m going to have a goal … I want to have confidence in it or I simply won’t do it. Because I don’t have confidence, I need something else to put all into … I need some other 100 percent. For me, that has to be determination. That means putting my all into it. I don’t want to put in all and receive nothing to show for it.

If I choose a smaller goal, I could put in all and be sure to receive something to show for it.

At the end of the day, we all have one life. We can choose how we spend it. And yet, I think that if we’re going to die anyway, maybe it doesn’t really matter so much if we don’t reap rewards.

I would rather risk it and know that I chanced that my all was enough.

braindead

Im rather appalled when I think of it at how dead my brain has become

It feels like it’s been far too long since I’ve used it at all

I can feel it’s definitely worse for lack of use. It’s essentially like a muscle that needs to be worked or it gets weak

The other day I was having trouble getting my brain to absorb information from my psychology homework. But I decided that if I was going to procrastinate, I might as well procrastinate in a “productive” way. So I opened up my folder full of my novel drafts – finished and unfinished – and plans, with the goal of finding something to work on.

I was – and I can’t find a better word for this – rather amazed by what I’d done. Don’t get me wrong. My work is nothing to shout about and needs much improvement. But … I had written novels. I had written multiple novels. There were a lot of words and a lot of effort put into them.

I couldn’t imagine doing that now. I struggle to write a paragraph of fiction … how am I supposed to write 50,000 words? And yet I did it and I can only imagine the focus and determination that went into it.

I was inspired to brush up on my French language (pretty much non existent at this point) and I remembered how I passed three years worth of French … how I completed Duolingo and was attempting to read classic French stories like Sylvie.

I can introduce myself and order food now (badly). That’s about it. And every time I resolve to learn it for real this time, the resolve lasts a week at most.

I could go on with these examples … how I listen to my old songs from 2015 and haven’t written a full one for months … how I was learning the piano and reached Grade 3 and would sit there for hours learning new pop songs but I can barely muster up the effort to remember how to play my own songs now … how I used to write fricking English essays for fun and I haven’t put a word to my essay for my upcoming exam.

In short, I’ve stopped trying. I give up so so easily. At the slightest sign of difficulty, at the slightest blank of my mind, at the slightest suggestion that my brain will have to work, I run. I shut my laptop. I switch to facebook. I go to bed. I. Give. Up.

I’ve lost resilience and my brain is losing strength. I’m terrible at focusing. You don’t understand how huge the temptation is to switch the tab from this post and go to social media instead, or watch a video.

Yes, social media plays a huge part. I can’t deny it any longer. It does. I still can find a million ways to procrastinate without it … but it gets boring much faster. And there comes a point when my own thoughts interest me more than no thoughts at all … when working my brain becomes entertainment. But with social media, I am constantly entertained by a barrage of …. stuff … that I have little incentive to use any form of entertainment that would require effort. It’s too easy now.

That said, eventually social media too can become rather repetitive and I do feel the urge for something different. I long to stretch my brain … even as I panic because it’s hard and it makes my brain hurt.

Mostly, I need to learn to stop giving up and that’s more a case of willpower than anything else. It’s a mentality that if you start something, you goddamn finish it. No excuses. Because that’s how you progress.