I came across some old pictures today - or rather, I conveniently happened across them in that voyeuristic way that the internet allows so easily, right alongside the guilt that somehow people will know you're looking or the people in those photos will know you looked and make assumptions about why you were looking at them. The new pictures didn't interest me so much as the old ones, the ones I had a more direct personal connection to, some kind of possession over that time, as if my being around with that person at that point in time somehow gave me ownership of those memories. Possessive - very much a good word to describe that relationship, though at the same time it was ostentatiously the most I have given of myself, or at least pretended to. But pretended to whom? Even I knew it was all about me - the plans I had made, the things I wanted, the edification of myself by pretending to be a saint with all I'd pretended to give... and some of which had given. It was entirely selfish, but I invested so much emotion in it. I was in love with me right then. And it was horrible.
During that time I invested heavily emotionally in the future, in my teenage ignorance of what I thought was planning for forever, in a very passionate, if naive, way. And even after it was over, that passionate planning was a security for me because I always had a plan, even if it were to change entirely. I was in control. But when those plans were changed, there was a real heartache involved because I had invested so much into the idea that those things would come to be. Only teenagers can save the world; I knew I could.
What changed is the passion I put towards planning, the obsessive planning, though even many of those plans weren't very detailed. I went into school thinking I'd become an engineer, and all I had to do was go into autopilot for 4 years and come out on the other side making $70,000 a year with my chemical engineering degree. Currently my plans only run through the next seven or eight months, with little planned ahead of that in the way of specifics.
Recently, I've considered my lack of passion and emotional investment mostly to repeated academic failure. My time in community college effectively killed my ambition. But ambition is the manifestation of planning for the future; ambition is the drive to get you to where you see yourself in the future.
In giving up planning, dreaming, I let myself succumb to this "Let It Be" passive attitude that just fatalistically expected things to happen rather than going out and creating them. If I created something, it was subject to change, and my emotional investment was liable to turn into pain. By not investing, I was less open to disappointment, hurt, and the panic of realizing I was losing control.
I've become somewhat disconnected, disengaged, and I usually considered myself "calmed down," or less of an impulsive teenager, even if less passionate. I began to think of passion as something youthful, something that had led me to do things, very ambitious things for me then, that later would be monuments to my naivete and things that part of me considers embarrassing failures while the other half tries to look back from the perspective of an older wiser me and say, "You tried. Good for you!"
How can you get anywhere worth going without the ambition to go there? I've resigned myself to this fatalistic, somewhat predestined, idea that wherever I'm supposed to end up, I'll be. It's not to say I don't try to work hard, but I definitely do so from my safety zone. I obviously can't know the future, but I don't even try to actively influence it anymore.
I must reengage.
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