Today was another harsh day in a rather harsh January, further certifying my theory that winter is generally quite shit. Winter is all about maintenance, which gets tiresome when you’re not particularly enthusiastic about what you’re maintaining.
In fact, a recent study found through analysing historical scripture dating all the way back to 3.000 B.C. that from an anthropological point of view, statistically speaking, nothing good has ever occurred in winter (give it a read here, it’s quick and interesting).
The older I get, the more I start appreciating the concept of optimism and pessimism.
Let’s go through an example. Today, I put the final nail in the coffin of my grand plan for this year, which was to apply (and be accepted) to a university in Great Britain and study English, or English literature, or Classics, or just about anything that would expose me to the world I watch from my little den and long to be a part of. If you’d seen my CV, this would sound a little odd, because it’s a total 180 on everything I’ve ever done (that shows up on a résumé).
I suppose I should mention why I hatched this plan in the first place, why I couldn’t, for instance, stay where I am and study here (which is a non-English speaking country, contrary to what my pseudonym would suggest). Well, I never knew what I wanted to do after finishing school. Never. I finished it with grades that would open most of the universities’ doors for me, but I didn’t know which to go through. I had advice, of course, but to say it in a columnist’s striking words:
Advice, like youth, probably just wasted on the young,
Mary Schmich
So I languished away, burning through three (!) different courses, the last of which I somehow finished and ended up getting a job through (I later broke off another MA after one semester of bleakness, maintaining an impressive ratio of exmatriculations versus semesters studied of 1:3, that’s one exmatriculation per three semesters, and that’s gotta put me in a leading position on some list Forbes puts out every year!).
People generally like a bit of complaining about the Western system (though they’re not usually able to pinpoint what that system exactly entails, apart from swinging the ol’ capitalism club and hoping it hits some sort of pain point). I don’t. I think it’s a valiant effort of stringing together a functioning society out of something as complex and delicate as a colossal bloody heap of human beings.
So I’m not blaming the system, or anyone actually, when I say that it’s impossible to design it in a way that takes care of everybody in it – a situation I’d be happily ignoring if it didn’t occur to me that somehow I ended up falling through the cracks of it. Now, the fact that people fall through the cracks is in itself no surprise, and if you, the reader, don’t happen to be pouring soup in your local homeless shelter, you, too, are happily ignoring that part of our society. The surprising part of it – to me – was that it happened to me.
It dawned on me quite early on, but I spent the first few years ignoring it because come on, some people have it genuinely bad, so to be unhappy with what I have is preposterous in contrast. It took me a while to understand that (un)happiness, while weighted with society’s mean, isn’t measured against it, it is measured only against your own desires.
It is more subtle than losing my income or the roof over my head. It is objectively much less worse than that, the problem being, unfortunately, that life is lived subjectively. I finished my degree, and I have a job where I’m genuinely valued, with a quite nice salary and colleagues I actually like, I have fantastic friends (much better than I deserve for I am a worse friend to them), I have a very healthy relationship with my family (the part that’s important, at least).
In other words, I am completely content, and deeply unhappy. It’s a slow-burning cocktail, but it burns.
So what’s eating Gilbert Grape? Where did it all go wrong?
Nowhere, really. I just never knew what to do with myself, and this place is not designed for people like that. It’s designed for people that have a sense of where they are headed after leaving the school halls at 18, or at least a year after that, or a year after that, or a year after that, with diminishing returns each cycle. I was never one of those people, with all of my fantastic grades and my promising bloody mind, as ascertained by a bunch of people along the way. It’s all shit, I’ll tell you, it doesn’t matter, none of it, if you don’t know what to do with it, and I never did, apart from knowing that I want to create something. I always admired people who know where they want to go, and admire them more with each year that passes.
Which brings me to my plan.
I’m not the first person to struggle, right? So if I can’t find the solution within myself, I thought it would be wise to approach it from another angle. I started thinking about every person that has created something that I admire and that has shaped me in the past, and I started looking up their respective paths, and without fail, almost bloody everyone of them has studied one of the above and went on to do great things.
So I thought, throw my hat in the ring, start anew across the sea, go through the sink or swim part, adapt, put in the work, meet my people and from there, something will evolve, something will come around that I couldn’t foresee today even if I tried. I don’t think it was such a bad idea, and maybe it still isn’t, but it won’t be happening, at the very least for now, adding yet another cycle of diminishing returns to an already impressively long string of pure diminishing-return-silk.
Why won’t it be happening? It’s rather simple: I can’t afford it, yet, as has become evident today after summing up all my savings and working out the numbers. It’s not too bad, really, it’s just another year.
Do you know what’s the worst kind of year? The one that’s just another one.
In fact, let me retract that last statement. The worst kind of year is probably one where nuclear war breaks out, or someone close dies, or I become terminally ill, or all of the above. Thinking it through, just another year might – as years come – be amongst the better ones that one can get.
And that brings up to the point I was trying to make. I’m very realistic about anything and everything, but the older I become, the more the concept of optimism and pessimism starts creeping in.
Some things are just what they are. This day in bloody January, for instance, was what it was. It was one that made me sad, which I can’t control. What I can control is whether it takes away from my outlook. And I would like for it not to, which is why I wrote this post. I’d like to think that, even though today it might have been delayed yet again, something will come around. I’d like to think that my job is to keep my head up, so that I spot it when it does. And I’d very much like to try and do just that.