Mic Check

“The regular early morning yell of horror was the sound of Arthur Dent waking up and suddenly remembering where he was.
It wasn’t just that the cave was cold, it wasn’t just that it was damp and smelly. It was the fact that the cave was in the middle of Islington and there wasn’t a bus due for two million years.
Time is the worst place, so to speak, to get lost in, as Arthur Dent could testify, having been lost in both time and space a good deal. At least being lost in space kept you busy.
He was stranded in prehistoric Earth as the result of a complex sequence of events which had involved him being alternately blown up and insulted in more bizarre regions of the Galaxy than he ever dreamt existed, and though his life had now turned very, very, very quiet, he was still feeling jumpy.”

 -- Life the Universe and Everything, Douglas Adams

Lately, it's been hard to explain what's going on in my head without sounding like I'm crazy.  I've been through some serious changes in identity recently, and it feels in many ways like I'm still adjusting to it all.  To paraphrase the quote above, even though my life has calmed down from some craziness, I'm still feeling pretty jumpy.  As much I would love to be instantly adaptable, my brain and body suffer from the same limitations and programming defects as the rest of you mortals and it keeps wanting to return to old habits and resists new ways of thinking.  But, as mentioned in my last post, it seems a little gross, or at least self-indulgent, to talk about it anymore.  This becomes increasingly clear the more I read OTHER writers droning on and on and on about becoming who they are.  Sometimes I think personal development is like that dream you had last night.  Fascinating to you, less fascinating to someone who wasn't there to feel it all with you.

This was most recently brought home to me in a review mentioned in passing for the book How Should a Person Be.  The work in question is an auto-biographical pseudo-novel about a young artist exploring the question written in the title.  The reviews seem to indicate it's something you're going to love or you're going to hate, but the extreme antipathy in the negative reviews is interesting to me.  I've been seeing a lot of grumbling about 20-somethings droning on about who they are, and what they're going to be, and to just shut up and pick something already.  And to some degree, I get that.  Who cares what you decide to be?  All people really care about is if you're going to be a dick about it to the people around you in the process.

On the other hand, this is a pretty interesting topic.  Haven't we been asking this question in one form or another since we gained sentience when we found that Monolith?  Isn't the appeal of religion that it answers that question simply and lets you get on with life?  Anyway, however tedious the individual stories of personal growth may seem from time to time, I am, in general, happy that people are at least self-aware enough to ask the question, even if they must drone on about it.  And I feel that people asking it at a younger and younger age can only be a good thing.  Because in general, I think most people are going to come back to, basically:  I want to feel accomplished, and I want to feel like a good person who has friends.  Not necessarily in that order.  

Which is a long way of saying, one of the things I've been thinking about is who I want to be, and I understand if this question is really of no particular interest to anyone but me.  And of course, for me it came back to:  I want to feel accomplished and I want to be a good person, in my own definition of those things.  What defines a good person we can leave for later, but "how do I feel accomplished?" has been weighing on me.  What is the perfect intersection of my potential and my passion?  I initially thought it was science (physics/astronomy), but have been seriously second-guessing that decision of late.  That feels more like the career I was expected to take, than the career I was really passionate about.  I regret nothing about the degree itself, and the critical thinking and problem-solving skills gained from it, but I can't believe I never noticed how little passion I actually have for the nuts and bolts of science until just recently.

So, if what I've done hasn't been working out for me as well as I'd like, what should I do instead?  I feel like a teenager all over again trying to figure it out.  And my thoughts return to the grandiose delusions I never completely left behind in my teenage years, just let slumber all those years I was in the closet.  And now, waking them up and looking at them in the light of day, it astounds me how much of an artistic sensibility  I seem to have.  I am good with numbers, and occasionally employ logic to good use, but most of the things I seem to want to MAKE are artistic in nature.  I want to write poems, and novels, write music to make men weep, draw faces, paint portals to other worlds, to share what I've learned about life, the universe and everything the best I know how.  I want to make something beautiful and share it with you.  Of course, I have no idea how to monetize any of that in a way that would enable me to live comfortably, although I assume it's unlikely, whatever grandiouse delusions may briefly cloud my view.  I think it's enough, for now, to recognize that I want to do it, even if I never share it with more than a few people.

Neil Gaiman once said, more or less, that we owe it to each other to tell each other stories and I really agree with him.  So, for the time being, I have contented myself, more or less, that I will continue to plug away at the day job, but will start trying to develop my artistic skills in my off-time.  And while I have vague plans to take an acting class, a drawing class and possibly a dance class at sometime in the next year and see how they feel, what I REALLY want to do artistically right now is play piano and write.  There are days when all I hear in my head is piano music.  And mornings I wake up and sit on the couch reveling in ideas for a new or existing story.  I have stories to write and songs to play that give me a rush of emotion just thinking about them.  I feel, as I think about how they would go, what I would want the reader/listener to feel as they experience it and I have no idea if I can ever actually make that happen.  But I badly want to try.

So, for the time being and as long as it suits me, I am going to work on developing the skills necessary to translate my feelings into a song or a story that might be worth sharing with someone else.  It's going to be boring for a while while I work through the basics of the forms, and lord knows I'm going to have to keep the grandiose delusions and corresponding ego in check, but I think it will ultimately be rewarding if I keep at it.  I am just really very curious to find out if I am capable of  playing a song worth listening to or writing a story worth reading.  And honestly, I think it's time I found out.

So, who do I want to be?  Among some other things I hope to be a musician and a writer.  And somewhere in there, a good person, with friends.