so many things (sometimes so strange, sometimes so sweet, sometimes so lonely)

[ontology]

I think that every year around my birthday, I say something to the effect of, every year around my birthday, I fall headlong into a roiling pit of existential angst. Which is true, and seems to get truer with every passing year. You know how I say I miss being excited? I really miss being excited right now. My eighteenth birthday's in six days and I haven't got plans, I haven't got the nice bats-in-the-stomach shutting-the-door-so-I-can-wring-my-hands-in-excitement feeling that I always used to have. Though really it's the lack of plans that bothers me most, because as I have said many, many times, I am deeply ritualistic by nature. I like things to be Just So, and I like to arrange them, and surround significant days with significant rituals large and small. Last year Dad and I went to the city, and the art museum, and it was glorious, and I can't think of anything other than that, or anything more significant than that, and you know maybe I just want to get lost in some city somewhere and ride the subway without any destination in mind and take photographs of graffiti and people waiting for buses and lamp-posts and buildings with vines growing all over them and trees growing out of the pavement. I want to do something quiet that I won't have to recover from afterwards, something that has the flavour of watching the night sky at Grey Fox last year, or on the picnic table of the cabin in October, or walking through the art museum last birthday, or the walk I took by accident when there was almost rain and the sun was setting, or running through Pittsburgh at night with Dad trying to find a suitable place to eat before going to a concert sort of in a library, or watching Abigail Washburn & the Sparrow Quartet perform songs so strange and beautiful that my soul rose straight out of my body and fluttered birdlike over the amphitheatre.

(Maybe I should just say, Mum, Dad, can we just go driving around in the city for my birthday? And then we could come home and rent Once or something, and I could lie out on the roof and listen to something beautiful while the sun sets. Except, gas prices, reality, argh.)

And you can't create those incandescent moments; they come unbidden. I try to arrange them and they don't come; they're not like pigeons, you can't leave them crumbs and hope they'll come in flocks to collect them.

Furthermore it bothers me that I'm about to be eighteen, that I'm on the threshold of legal adulthood, and I haven't got much of anything to show for it. I don't like meeting people I haven't seen in a long, long time, because there is always the question, so, what have you been doing? And I have to fumble for things. What have I done in the past several years, besides little things? Sometimes the little things were lovely ones, but they were still little things, and I think, I'm the least grown-up person I know, and possibly the dullest. Other people go out and have adventures, or find adventures; I tell stories and make adventures out of the things that weren't. I haven't got a job and I haven't got any hobbies that get me out of the house, and even the hobbies I do have -- writing, photography, music -- I haven't exactly done much with. I think about going busking sometime, and then I think I'm too shy, and this city is too small anyway. I write a few words or a few sentences in the same story every two days or so. Sometimes I remember to take pictures of things. I don't work hard at it. I'm awkward in my own skin. I don't know whether I'm meant to grow into it, or take it in to fit.

And none of the people I am or pretend to be are the person I want to be, and they don't match up very well. I feel like a patchwork quilt sewn over another patchwork quilt with thick, black, awkward stitches.

Of course because I am too ritualistic I think that eighteen should be some sort of gateway, that I'll start solving my own puzzles and stop standing so crookedly and make something out of myself but things never turn out the way the patterns work. (Sometimes I wonder if there's an alternate universe in which I actually love mathematics, because all of the patterns and progressions and lists and arrangements don't mesh with me, haphazard and clumsy and messy and thoroughly literary, seeing and tasting in colours and emotion and intuition and photographs.)

Maybe I'll get a job, and finish a story, and find a college, and a major, and a purpose, and learn how to be excited again, how to love people, how to be optimistic. I don't know. I don't know.

Comments

[spockodile.livejournal.com]

Your ideas of getting lost in a city, riding the subway aimlessly, photographing citylife, doing quiet non-recovery-requiring things... sounds _really_ fun. Wish I could come up and do that sort of thing with you. Cept I'm the one that lives in the city. So...

"And you can't create those incandescent moments; they come unbidden. I try to arrange them and they don't come; they're not like pigeons, you can't leave them crumbs and hope they'll come in flocks to collect them."
I love that paragraph. It echoes within me and resonates.

When I was eighteen, I loathed conversations with people who were out of touch with me, because of the inevitable "What are you doing these days?" or worse, "What school are you going to?" Of course, I could reply with "You mean, 'to what school do I go,' or rather, 'what school do I attend?'" But I hated those questions, and there was a growing discomfort with myself, a growing discomfort with my empty sheet of accomplishments. Equally discouraging to me was the same set of hobbies, photography music and writing, laying around and doing nobody any good aside from some entertainment and stress relief.

But let's go busking, small as the city is. Let's go on photography sessions. Long live the Q&IS!

Eighteen is no gateway unless you want it to be. It certainly wasn't for me, and that was okay - for a while. I passed through a gateway of my own when I was 19.5, and that worked just fine.

Life is an adventure. There are chapters where things don't move quickly, and you don't know what will come next or even how the protagonist could possibly even get to the better part of the story from where they are. But they always do, eventually. And the best is yet to come.

[faeriemaiden.livejournal.com]

and doing nobody any good aside from some entertainment and stress relief.

Yeah, that's exactly it. I feel very self-serving and useless. Well, I am rather self-serving. But I'm not comfortable with it. (Complacent and comfortable aren't entirely the same thing. Bah.)

Thank you. You are very good at talking sense. :)

[spockodile.livejournal.com]

Art is often not immediately useful in a practical way.

Have you tried investigating volunteer opportunities around town? It might take a bit of time and follow-through and trouble, but having a regular volunteer position can do wonders for the feeling of uselessness and self-servingness.

[tsunamisama.livejournal.com]

Jonathan, as usual, dispenses good advice.

It's important to recognize that God usually gives us the power to determine our destinies, for better or for worse. This is somewhat gloomy, because so often we elect for a rather wasteful end; but it's also hopeful, because it means that no matter how bad things get, we are capable of rising to meet the occasion.

Suffice it to say, there are myriad Very Cool Things one can do with one's life if one is ambitious and hardworking. If it bothers you that you have no good reply when folks ask what you've been doing, ask yourself what you'd rather reply. Visualize what you'd rather have been doing.

And then set goals! This little element of bettering one's life is probably the most neglected. You oughtn't run through life like a chicken with your head cut off, flailing this way and that as impulse takes you and ending up squarely in the middle of the road, having gone nowhere. You need direction; short-term, midterm (pardon the pun), and long-term. (An oft-used formula is: One year, five years, ten years, twenty years.) And don't worry if your goals shift from time to time, even dramatically. If you have the clarity to set them in the first place and the ambition to work (hard!) toward them, you'll be in great shape.

I don't know if you ever saw The Prestige, but there's a great scene with Nikola Tesla. He says:

You're familiar with the phrase "man's reach exceeds his grasp"? It's a lie: man's grasp exceeds his nerve.

This is one of the truest statements I've ever come across. There's a Mexican proverb: "Querer es poder." That is, the will is power; if you want something enough, you have the power to accomplish it.

The general problem is that we have too many dreamers and too few visionaries. There are many people with great ideas and/or ambition, but very few people who are willing to put in the work and sacrifices to realize their vision.

We're all personally responsible for what we do with what God gives us (parable of the talents, anyone?). So I'm glad to see that you want to do more; with focus and sweat equity, the mysteries of the universe are within your grasp. :)

[faeriemaiden.livejournal.com]

One of the problems with me that bothers me a lot is my utter lack of drive in anything, including things I actually want to do (such as writing, or even setting up a tripod outside). I get this sort of mental fatigue and suddenly want to curl up and go to sleep for a while. I wish there were exercises to improve this, or maybe there are, and I haven't found them yet. Right now I feel all charged up and ready to Go Do Stuff, but by the time I'm actually in a position to Do Stuff the feeling will probably have gone away. Bah, this all sounds very whiny and excuse-y, doesn't it?

I suppose I should put this on my list of Things On Which To Improve This Year. I've said before that I feel like a character in a bad novel: being acted upon rather than acting. I'm also helping therapy sheds a little bit of light on this -- I certainly don't believe that Therapy Will Fix All Of My Problems Ever, Even Nail-Biting And Clumsiness, but I'm beginning to think that my really abnormal lack of drive is similar to my recent inability to concentrate on anything for very long (two-hour films suddenly seem impossibly long to me, and I bought all of the LotR Extended Editions :p), which is decidedly not natural.

Thankee. It's nice having you blokes around to dispense alien concepts such as logic. ;)

[tsunamisama.livejournal.com]

I know exactly what you mean about lack of drive. In my experience, it's usually been my psyche playing tricks on me to try and reduce me to the lowest common denominator. :P

The only cure I've found for it thus far is to just grit my teeth a little and start *doing* instead of imagining how lovely it would be to do something. :P It's usually highly taxing and wearing and annoying at first, and then suddenly lifts up just a little and at the end of the day, I actually feel accomplished. :P

[bornofstars.livejournal.com]

Jolene, you write so beautifully. ♥ You are beautiful. I hope your birthday is magical.

Just...remember that you are the only person in charge of making your life what you want it to be. I have a lot of trouble with that, but it's very important to realize it.

[faeriemaiden.livejournal.com]

This is true. I can moan about circumstances knocking me into a corner, but they don't necessarily keep me there.

Augh, it's all so much easier said than done.

[tobie-rosemary.livejournal.com]

Well, Jonathan and Roberto having commented before me, there isn't much for me to say. Only that, I don't think many people have much to show for the first 18 years of their life. Those years are spent growing, not *doing*, so you don't really have something to "show" for it.

I don't think we notice our real gateway years until we're on the other side of them.

Remember that now (and all its shadows) doesn't last forever.

[faeriemaiden.livejournal.com]

But man, I can't even drive, and I don't know where I'm going to school yet, or what exciting impressive thing I'm going to do in the next year that I specifically set aside to do exciting impressive-to-colleges things in (well, and to figure out what direction I want to take the rest of my life in). I don't have a job. I look at my friends, who are all out there accomplishing, and organising things, and going places, and deciding to do things, and until I had people to bother me into doing things or arranging things (like the Quill & Ink Society!) for me, I barely did anything at all.

Bleh, my replies all seem to be degenerating into whiny denial. This stops now. *stomps on own foot* :)

[tobie-rosemary.livejournal.com]

Well, driving isn't that big of a dealt for it's convenience. One of my dearest ones is nearly 21, and she doesn't drive yet. And a significantly higher percentage are jobless.

I think it's normal to feel restless about such things about now, but it's certainly not abnormal to not have already done them. :) I think, at this point in life, it's less about accomplishing and more about becoming.

You look at your friends and see those talents and accomplishments, but I think we are unable to look at ourselves and see how our friends see *us*. If you could do that, I think (with as much certainty as knowing) that you would feel much less "unaccomplished."

Have patience with yourself. All things happen in their own time, and if they haven't happened yet, it may just be that the time isn't yet. :)

[tobie-rosemary.livejournal.com]

"...isn't that big of a deal except for it's convenience" is what I meant to say. Heh.

[barefoottomboy.livejournal.com]

I can't drive, and I'm twenty-four. So there you go.

Other than that, I can only concur with others' advice given in the comments, and offer lots of *hugs*

[take-a-sadsong.livejournal.com]

Oh dear, it's almost scary to read your blog because everytime I see a new post of your's on my f-page, I can't help but ask myself, "What fragment of myself is she going to dive into today?"

:D I thought I was the only one who was awfully ritual. It always seems the best moments are the ones that aren't ritual; those that pop out of nowhere and surprise me, and just happen to be the best moments I can remember. And whenever I plan things, they feel terribly artifical, and I can't enjoy it, because the magic is gone.

I feel the same about my 16th, but I really don't plan to do anything special. My birthday is almost painful though because I want it to be special, and if I just sit around and do nothing I'll waste it, but if I try to do something amazing then it'll become fake-feeling. I think the best thing to do is just do something wonderful you love. If it's going out and taking photography, do that. I might spend my 16th reading actually, or watching a movie I really like, or going out for ice cream. I think having a quaint birthday would be wonderful. My mom really wanted to do something special, but just as you said gas is so expensive, and I really wanted to go to Key West and see Hemingway's house with his six-toed cats, but it's so long a drive down there.

I do believe your birthday will be delightful, because it is your birthday. ^_^ And birthdays are usually good just because of the people, and the maturing, and God looking down on us and laughing because He's so apart from time, and it's all so great. :]

I actually think I finally found a college I want to go to. It's big and beautiful and has a film major and I really do think I can get in, hopefully.

But everything in your post I can relate to, I think it might be a natural thing for teenagers. And I always feel awfully silly when replying to posts. XD

I hope your birthday is wonderful. :)