My biggest dream as a young kid was to be a cashier, or as I
called it, “a storekeeper”. So I guess you could say I’ve fulfilled my dream.
And I have to admit, at first it was really fun making the “beepy” noise when
scanning items like I always loved, and talking super nice to customers like I
always pretended, and seeing all the random items people bring to the counter. It’s
starting to get a little boring now, though. I guess being a cashier wasn’t as
satisfying as I thought it would be when I was a child.
At around age ten or twelve, I said that I wanted to be an artist
and a musical composer. I also remember stating that if I could be famous for
anything, I would want to be famous for writing a book. My friend Trinity and I
decided we’d open a store together where we’d sell our art, musical
compositions and books. We’d have a stage where we held our musical
performances. We’d give art lessons. I’d teach piano and singing and she’d
teach violin and dancing. The arts were my passion at the time.
Clearly none of the above has happened. Trinity is off
taking courses about rocks or something at a university cause she’s all smart
and stuff! (Sorry, Trinity, I can’t remember what your program is called. You
do study rocks right? I’m not meaning to unromanticize your dream.) And I’m
here, still a cashier. I do have a blog as you can see, so I write a little. I
hardly ever create works of art anymore. And I hardly ever play piano. I sing
in the shower or in the car, on my way to work. I guess that store dream never
happened, and I’m trying to decide if I want it to. It still sounds cool, but
having a store requires devotion to a long-term routine, and that would
suck.
By High School (maybe even Jr. High), I became really
depressed and started to lose my interest in the things I loved. I loved
drawing, but usually only did it in class at school. My favorite drawing from
that time in my life was the following oil pastel cheeseburger.
It was so weirdly
good that it earned my teacher’s deep approval, and I framed it and hung it on
my wall. It’s the only piece of art I couldn’t bear to leave behind when I came
to Canada. I wouldn’t part with this baby for a million dollars...maybe. See,
this is a problem. I get emotionally attached to the things I create, so I don’t
want to be an professional artist and actually sell my stuff.
Though I was good at writing, I often just found myself
drawing in English class. I don’t think I’ve ever taken an English class where
I’ve learned very much. I tend to like using my own punctuation and style. I
have problems with people grading and critiquing me based on their subjective
opinions about what sounds better style-wise. At least that’s what it has
always seemed like to me. I loved piano, but around age sixteen, after about
eleven years of playing, I quit taking lessons. I went from practicing several
hours a day to feeling pained every time I sat down to practice. This was all
around the time I discovered that boys were attractive. And that’s basically all
I thought about. I obsessed over specific dudes who I swore I would marry one
day. “I will make him love me” was my motto. Ya…that never happened. This was
the dawn of a new dream for me: marriage and kids. Up until then, I swore that would never happen. And from the
looks of things so far, maybe it won’t.
By mid high school, I was claiming that I was gonna get
married and have kids, but I would never
ever have sex. “Good luck with that”
was all I ever heard in response to that idea. I always said I’d make it work
somehow. There had to be some other way to get pregnant without having sex. I
mean, until I was 17, I thought there were drugs that people messed around with
that made them pregnant. I guess I could just be artificially inseminated, but
I didn’t know about that option at the time. Plus, how many husbands would
agree to that without attempting conception in the normal, easy way first?
Reality and I have always had a rocky friendship. Eventually, I decided that
sex would have to be part of the deal, and began to get over being disgusted by
the thought.
Somehow, I knew I was going to have a degree and be married
by age twenty-two. And by twenty-six, I knew I’d have at least a couple kids. I
had something against an even number of kids, and I didn’t want just one in
case the kid would be lonely, so I decided I had to have at least three at
minimum. And if I ended up having another, I would have to have five. And if another,
then seven. And if I ended up with eight, it was time to stop being compulsive. Or adopt. I always liked that idea too. I hoped for two boys and a girl. I even had the names all picked out: Cassidy
Octavius, Samantha Alison, and Kennedy Satchel. I still had my man all picked
out, he just had to start noticing me and get on the pursuing. Ya…that never
happened. And none of the men I obsessed over after that liked me either. Since high school, I've thought more practically about how much effort kids are and so I've gone back and forth between saying that I want kids and that I don't want kids. Either way, I probably wouldn't call any poor child Satchel...well, maybe. Ugh, it really just does sound cool, even if it means "bag".
On the first day of summer this year, I turned twenty-two.
Since then, I’ve felt like my life has just been passing me by and I’ve gotten
nowhere. I am a college dropout, nowhere near a degree, and I have yet to even
date one guy. I’ve basically just hopped from obsessive crush to obsessive
crush, each time saying that the current man was destined to love me. Each of them clearly didn’t think so. I guess
you can’t force love, and avoiding the very person you’re trying to
attract doesn’t help a whole lot either. Life just doesn’t pan out the way you
want it to sometimes. Sometimes, a particular dream (in my case marriage) can
be so all-consuming that you forget your other dreams and passions. And in my
particular case, when the dream you’re fighting for is not really something you
can fight to gain, it feels like
you’re always losing, always a loser.
Several months ago, I remembered and read a list of goals I
had for my life that I had written sometime between the ages of ten and
thirteen. I had some high hopes for myself. Some of my goals included “Run a mile in 5 minutes, become as good as a
concert pianist, compose a beautiful piano work, learn to play at least twenty different instruments,
write and publish a novel, create a CD of me singing and playing piano, never
say a swearword, read the whole encyclopedia, never become fat and stay healthy
until I die, learn to paint like Thomas Kinkaid, learn at least five languages
fluently, learn to cook and bake as well as mom, act in a play, go one whole
day without making one mistake, and (my personal favorite) learn to do the
splits both ways (cause that’s incredibly important). Almost all the rest of
the goals were travel related. I especially wanted to go to New Zealand to see
the Shire they constructed and filmed for the Lord of the Rings films. And what
happened to these goals? It seems like in the heat of my passionate love for
those guys I wanted and my sad disappointment at their not returning that love,
my other dreams just evaporated into the air in the form of a depressive cloud
that has been raining on me for years, blocking the sunlight. I ended up giving
it all up for a dream that I can’t even really work towards. It is not
guaranteed that I will get married. I can’t force someone I love to love me.
I guess this is one instance where my persistent personality
needs to let go. I’m the type of person who will fight to the death for
something that I’m passionate about. If I love you to pieces, think you’re just
the bees knees, if I’m pretty dang sure you’d love me too if you’d just get to
know me better, and if you refuse the privilege of getting to know me, by golly
I’ma harass you until you give in even if at a moment or two it’s just to feel
even and not give you what you want, which is for me to go away. ‘Cept
sometimes other people are just as stubborn as I am or moreso, so none of my
efforts work. Then I go park my car in front of a railroad track when a train
is going by, scream at the top of my lungs, bawl my eyes out, and legitimately
mourn the loss. Literally. Because what I feel in my heart is all very true and
genuine, even if my actions seemed to point to pure insanity.
And now what? Getting “nowhere’ in my life has, to a large
degree, been my own fault as I haven’t really been aiming for much that I can
work towards, and I haven’t been putting much effort into deciding what it is I
want to do as a career. I haven’t even been paying attention to what I want to do just for fun. Everyone wants
me to do something. The career test I took in high school said that there
really wasn’t any career that fit my personality and that I should just try
being a window painter since that was what a similar personality to mine should
be. Despite that, everyone else still has their own idea about what I should do
because I’m good at a lot of things. I’ve been told time and time again by all
sorts of people that I should be a writer, an artist, an actress, or that I
should go on American Idol. I was told by my previous math professor at a
community college that I was gifted and should be a math teacher. (I know. I
was like, “what?!”) I’ve been told to be an architect, a graphic designer, a
model, a makeup artist, a fashion designer, a musician, a piano teacher, a
speech pathologist, a philosophy professor, a language interpreter, a
photographer, a lawyer, a landscape designer, a journalist, etc. I’ve been told
I should do something with kids, or that I’d be a good business entrepreneur.
(You know what I say to the entrepreneur one? Lies. Ha!) I complained to my
Canadian history professor that I didn’t know what the heck I was doing. He
disagreed. It was the same with basically every other subject I’ve ever taken.
I can’t say that I’ve ever performed badly in any given subject when I’ve
actually tried. I usually do fairly well, even when I don’t try all that hard.
But it’s funny, no one ever told me to be psychologist. When I went to a
university, however, that’s what I was studying to be. I like psychology. But
no one’s ever told me I had any talent in that subject. That might be partially
why I quit. People just tell me to stop analyzing things so much. I don’t have
a lot of knowledge in psychology, but I would consider myself a natural
psychologist in the sense that I’m always looking for explanations for human behavior
and thought. Not that I’ve come to any brilliant conclusions…I don’t think?
Anyway, it drives people crazy. Including me. I can’t turn it off. It sucks.
Especially if I suck at it. Do I? I’ve always wondered.
Do you see where my problem lies? There are way too many options for me! My
frustration has gotten to the point where I wish I was only good at one thing.
Then I’d at least know what I should try making money doing and I could wash my
hands of all this nonsense.
In theory, as I’ve been told many times, I could just choose
something and go for it. But I’m too idealistic for that, and it’s frustrating.
I’m just waiting for something to jump out at me and grab my attention, or a
sign from Heaven to show me my purpose, my destiny. What am I made for?! Sure, people tell me I’m
gifted and intelligent, but out of all those things, what will give me meaning
and purpose? I just don’t want to spend a heck of a lot of time and money in
school to become something that I will find out afterwards that I won’t like.
Plus, I really hate routine! I’m like a slow-cooking dinner that everyone’s waiting on with high
expectations, but I’m still waiting for someone to come turn on the oven. I
don’t feel capable of turning it on myself and no one’s really helping all that
much. I guess they can’t force me to be motivated. Especially when I feel that my only two options are to come out burnt or be eaten.
And through all of this, I always seem to come back to the
whole missionary idea. I keep threatening to just run away and be a missionary.
But I was told once that I either needed money or some sort of skill like nursing to
do that. Sometimes I feel like I just want to drop everything, sell all my
crap, and get the heck out of this society and its expectations. I just want to
fight for some noble purpose. Somehow fight for other people. I want both
justice and mercy for the world if that is possible, and I’d like to be the one
to make it happen. I want adventure. Today I spent a bunch of birthday money on
some new clothes, and I love
them. Agh, I just LOVE clothing! Especially pants…I fear pants will always be
my weakness. I especially love clothes when I’ve gone for about half a year
without being able to buy any for lack of funds. But I’m kind of sick of all this materialism
and consumerism! I want out of here! That is my dream. To live selflessly and
with integrity. Do I have to choose something that will make me rich and
“successful” according to worldly standards? I feel pressured to. I wish there
would be a world-wide pact where everyone would just
STOP
Drop and roll. Just
kidding! Hehe.
We should all just
STOP
what we’re doing
right now and not stop stopping until we’ve started really solving the big
problems in the world like world hunger and prejudice, and violence and all that. I want peace
for the world and happiness, and a whole lot of love. And I just want everyone
else to want it too and be willing to drop everything for it. So yes, actually, we should stop, drop everything if needed, and roll along to a better future for everyone! But I feel like
that’s my idealism talking. And it’s never going to happen.
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