Having been a gifted kid growing up really wrecked my brain for adulthood. Like, I’m in a pretty good place for my age. I’m a professional with a full time job who can pay my bills and have some money leftover to enjoy my hobbies. Life is objectively good.
But when I was a kid I was like… a super genius and everyone told me how much potential I had. I used to get so bored in school so they’d give me more stuff to do to actually keep me some level of mentally stimulated. And that was great but it really makes you internalize some weird shit about the kind of adult you’re supposed to be.
When I was 8 I came up with this dumb plan to fill Antarctica with lightning rods attached to super thick cables that we would run under the ocean to connect them to the mainlands because I read in one of my textbooks that we were gonna run out of fossil fuels in fifty years and not have anymore electricity. And like… I thought my job should be single handed my solving the global energy crisis?
I was really good at science and thought I was supposed to become some kind of doctor/researcher and find the cure for cancer by myself because I had no idea how medical research or companies worked and thought all scientific discoveries were by some individual trying really hard and being smart and reading books and experimenting. I wanted to go to med school but then in college I was bad at math and then didn’t find out until I was in my thirties that I apparently have ADHD. Go figure.
At one point as a kid I was convinced I had to become President because otherwise I was a failure and not living up to my potential. And like…
What the fuck, tiny me?
It’s not like any adults in my life put weird pressure on me. I think all the comments about my potential and how smart I was just went to my head and my ego couldn’t deal with the idea of not living up to all that.
But the shitty thing is that all that is still in my head. I’m not president or even a measly congressperson. Failure. I haven’t found the cure for cancer. Failure. I haven’t single-handedly negotiated a successful solution to the conflict in Israel and Palestine like my 9 year old self decided I was supposed to do for some reason??? What was I smoking???
Like, law school was kind of terrifying because it was a real reckoning with mortality in the sense of “oh shit, I chose a path. I did this. All the other doors are closed to me” when the thing that had defined so much of my view of myself growing up was this idea that I could be “anything.”
And I hate that I’m not.
I’m thirty-something and tired and hate the days I have to work more than eight hours (except that I also love them because there’s something mentally gratifying about knowing that I have an excuse to be tired). I volunteer for too many community service things and go to the gym and cook and go out of my way to learn skills like house to paint houses and build shelves and shit. And I write fucking novels that I don’t publish because they aren’t good enough for the standard I set for them in my mind. And I’m always studying some language trying to learn more and just…
I don’t know. Those things were all just this summer. And it still feels like I didn’t do enough
I need the constant stimulation, but it’s never enough and I think I really just need to accept at some point that it will never be enough. The books I write will never be good enough for me because they will always read like I wrote them. I could probably be a goddamned CEO and I would feel like I hadn’t worked hard enough or advanced far enough in my career.
I might just be going a little crazy and restless right now because I fucked up my ankle a few weeks ago and my normal stress relief is going for walks and I literally can’t without risking damaging it more.
I think I just wanted to rant about how I’ll never cure cancer in my secret presidential science lab at the White House and how my own existential dread about the ever-dawning realizations of human mortality are fucking with me.
It’s like… fuck. Time just keeps going faster as I get older. I’m gonna die at some point. More than a third of life expectancy is behind me. 2013 doesn’t feel like 10 years ago and if the next decade goes faster and the one after that and the one after that—
I don’t want to be content. I want to squeeze in as much life as possible before I go back to being earth. Because at the end of the day I’m a weird little piece of the universe that woke up to observe itself for what accounts for probably a nanosecond in the scope of deep time and I just wanna like… wanna get all I can put of that nanosecond.
2 notes
·
View notes
Without warning, the creature bites down hard onto his index finger, and Boba grinds his molars together to keep from reacting.
“I leave you for two minutes,” Fennec sighs from across the room.
“Thirty-two,” Boba replies evenly through gritted teeth.
“Same difference.”
“We’re bonding.”
“I can see that. Going well, is it?”
OR: What's a Daimyo to do, when presented an Eevee?
I am so so happy that @saltsprite commissioned me to do this pair of drawings for their fic curiouser and curiouser - which is an absolute delight and I cannot recommend it enough! Boba getting fierce little Baya to love on, and be lovingly bullied by to take better care of himself is the most precious thing ever and you definitely need it in your life too!
508 notes
·
View notes
Sometimes you just wake up and you’re like “I wanna be a sexy demon prince today” and so you do that because demon princes don’t listen to people telling them not to do shit.
0 notes