I'm just going to lay it all out for everyone to see and hope something like a thesis takes shape along the way.
I couldn't say exactly when I started to notice it, but I know that by late 2012 I could no longer ignore the troubling reality that I was turning into a bitter, temperamental egomaniac. Now, arrogance has always been the heaviest of my personal crosses, but bitterness? A short temper? That wasn't who I had been, and definitely didn't look like anything I wanted to be.
Like many people taken by surprise by life in their 20s, I reacted by casting about for solutions: I tried making more friends, taking up new pursuits, various approaches to exercise, I tried to think less, I tried to think more, I wrote up over one-hundred different concepts for daily and weekly schedules of activity to achieve everything I felt I needed to achieve, and committed to none of them. All that I really achieved at that time was putting pressure on myself with deadlines and goals that were outlandish and arbitrary. Upon admitting to myself that such was the case, I thought about throwing aside all but the barest essential goals for me to live the way I believe I'm supposed to. That, in turn, made me turn against myself in despair and frustration.
I broke down and cried plenty of hot, angry tears. I found myself wondering over and over again, how had this happened? How had I found myself at age 24 having failed to make of my life what I had once expected to by age 18?
When I was young, I had been something of a child prodigy. I lacked any sense of athleticism, but matters of the mind came exceedingly easy to me. Mathematics and physics were especially strong areas for me, and when I was five years old, people--myself included--were convinced that I'd find my way to MIT very young, blaze through to a PhD and be endlessly successful as a researcher. I don't think it needs to be said that it didn't work out that way.
Unlike a real genius, I had no motivation to leverage my advantages and excel further. I grew bored with my schooling, seeing no point in exerting myself when I could go through the motions effortlessly. I gravitated towards things that I found fun and more engaging--video games and writing came to encompass nearly all of my deliberately-spent free time, but even more of that time was spent entirely idly. Now, thankfully, writing ended up becoming the great love of my life, but the price of all the other hours I had scattered to the wind was heavy. I still coasted by through my education, but I had never let go of thinking of myself as that boy prodigy, so when I thumbed through a friend's advanced Calculus textbook and realized I had forgotten most of what I knew, and couldn't even begin to decipher the rest, rather than feeling motivated to try harder, I just started to resent others for their success.
I let years pass me by before I really started trying to live my life, and when I did, I spent additional years trying to treat everything I wanted to do as though the universe owed it to me to make them come easily. My sense of entitlement ran deep: when fitness did not simply 'happen' for me, I got frustrated and stopped even trying to exercise; when some artistic or academic discipline presented any sort of challenge, I quickly wearied of it and turned away. I started treating my friendships like burdens, and even my writing fell into stagnation because I figured I was 'already good enough' and the rest would just come to me with time. Even worse, I was insincere enough to describe every half-hearted, one-off effort as 'trying to ____' or 'learning ____.' Increasingly paralyzed by a sense of shame at my failures and struggles, I stopped even trying most things, consigning my interests to an endless purgatory of planning and re-planning my approach, always creating more busywork to postpone actually attempting anything.
At some point, I intellectually accepted two facts: first off, that I am not gifted with some surpassing intellect to which all understanding must reveal itself; I have to work for the things I want, just as I worked to amass my modest skills as a writer. Secondly, as it was with writing, that work requires focus. Years spent casting my energies about in fifty different directions every day had only resulted in lots of wasted hours, time I don't even remember. When one has truly ingrained a skill into their mind and body, it's often true that maintaining it requires less time investment than building the fundamentals, but who am I to pretend that I even have those fundamentals in most cases? I had to clear away every last assumption of existing ability and start my life over from first principles.
It was at that point that I got the idea for an 'accountability blog,' but a part of me still resisted, craving some sort of confirmation that hard work would payoff, and that I could actually stick to it. Now that I think about it, it's actually quite amusing that this last push came in the area I have always been weakest and most resigned about: fitness. Though I am far from the goals I have set for myself in this area, after eight weeks of effort, I have seen consistent, measurable progress both in my performance and in the shape of my body. Faced with concentrated effort's tangible reward, I no longer had any excuse.
So, here we are. At age 24, I'm not where I thought I'd be, but there have also been lots of great things and people that have passed through my life that I never would have imagined either. If I set my will to it, this could be the start of something much greater than I had ever imagined. If I'm really doing it right, maybe this will even inspire others who feel lost or scattered to take charge, start their life over and build on the strong foundation only first principles can provide.
Still learning,
~L
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