It's difficult, being a nerdy young person, and running a blog.
Your relationships and your attitude, as well as other specifics of your life, keep changing so rapidly over such small periods of time that it's sometimes difficult to keep up with which way is up at any given moment. It sometimes feels like a majority of my day is spent trying to figure out what I'm doing and how I'm doing it rather than actually doing whatever seemingly superficial thing it is that I should be doing. The easy solution to that, the one that plenty of adults keep on trying to feed us, is the ages-old carpe diem: you don't have to always have what you're doing figured out; if you enjoy it, just keep doing it, it'll work itself out in the end.
As always, since I can barely speak for myself out of the dimensional confusion I was talking about earlier (I'm moderately convinced that "up" is where my ceiling is), I most certainly can't speak for any other generalised category of people, but I'm guessing this is another one of those things where we don't benefit for being this specific breed of nerdy. We relish, as we always have, with facing the world in the morning and asking "why". This is something I benefit from in my endeavor to become a scientist, since not only does it make studying easier by limiting the need for rote memorisation due to a deeper understanding of certain concepts, but it also deepens my delight in whatever I learn, since it gains a context, and thus does not remain a disjointed concept I am learning for the sake of good grades. However, in my personal life, it's something that consistently brings me down.
In the end, it's my definition of myself that cops the biggest blow. I still hazily remember a time when I was able to confidently and proudly describe myself in a few lines, mostly by the things that I enjoyed, the activities I partook in, the people I knew. I've never had this much trouble describing myself in my entire life, not even when I hit my teens. From ten to fifteen, any change that I underwent was a sort of linear event: it was clear what circumstance changed and how it changed me.
Since fifteen, I can confidently state that everything in my life has changed. I live in a different country and culture, I am surrounded by different people, my hobbies have been forgotten, my attitude to my education has changed, and even my family is in a different role in my life than ever before. All of this is not the product of a single, simple change, but instead a culmination of at least three major events in my life in the last few years. And this magnitude of change has left me, and my concept of self reeling.
I'm not sure this would be as much of a problem if my obsession with asking "why" weren't so well established. I've been uprooted, tossed around and plugged back into the ground, and instead of accepting and adjusting, my inner self is constantly attempting to analyse what has changed. The only issue with this is that the change is so complete that I have completely lost touch with any reference point -- there is literally no way for me to tell how I was before and therefore how I am now different. There is no way for me to trace back the reasons for certain emotions and certain behaviors. In other words, there is no way for me to quantify and qualify the change. And as a budding scientist, that drives me mad.
As always, the easy solution, the solution that so many people in my life advocate, is to sit back and enjoy and let life figure itself out. But if I know one single thing about myself, it is that this is something I simply can't do. It manifests itself in this blog. If you've read even one or two of my previous posts, you would discover that there's some half-hearted purpose and connectivity behind some of them. Writing, perhaps, or science, or reading. But a majority of the posts are less like a conceptual discussion and more like a diary: concerned only with what is happening at any given time in my life, if only to give reason for not posting more about anything else. Whenever I post one of these posts, I think that I'm simply too busy to write anything else, and that I want to apologise for not being able to. On hindsight, I look at the proportion of these posts compared to any with actual content (not to mention the generally poor quality of the content), and I wonder whether those posts are only motivated by the lack of time. Perhaps some of them are motivated by the fact that a majority of my life is now concerned with trying to find purpose in being busy: concentrating so fully on each task so as to make it the purpose of my life for that fleeting instant. This, too, is why I become so very stressed, throwing myself 110% at a task, devastated if it does not work out as planned, or never content with it, since everything may always be in need of improvement.
Either way, I don't win. Either I can sit down and constantly question myself who I am and what I'm doing here and what I want out of life and how I view my relationships and what I like doing, driving myself mad in the need of any sort of reference point, or I can throw myself at meaningless tasks and let that make me stressed and unhappy.
I feel caught in an endless race, where every now and then the location of the goal changes, except that no announcement is made, and you can never be sure whether you're running toward it or away.
No comments:
Post a Comment