To Feel More Alive (From 15 - 19)
Around 15 to 17 was a peculiar age for me. It was in this era that I truly felt alive. I had opened up to self-reflection, ambitious thoughts about the future, sincere thoughts about the present. I guess my bildungsroman years really came to fruition between 15 and 17; it perhaps was the pinnacle of my adolescence.
I'm 19 now and I can feel my adolescence waning away, and with it a sense of being alive, and this worries me. My worry is that I no longer feel the way I did between the ages of 15 and 17. I don't mean to say I'm worried because I feel like a different person; that would be ridiculous. I'm perfectly aware that people change. What I mean to say is, I'm simply feeling less. About things, towards things, towards people. I have thoughts and emotions and opinions, but they feel like simulations; I feel an awful lot like a robot character, traipsing through life, watching, consuming input, ejecting output. I have a very good life. I have friends; I go to university; there's the beginnings of something with a girl. I'm not ill. I'm fairly intelligent - perhaps not genius, but certainly not negligibly dull. And yet here I am, not sad, not depressed, just... disconnected.
I try to think of what was so different about those years, and I guess the main feature is change. It was the move from secondary school to college and then from college to university. There was a very obvious sense of progress. Perhaps this is what I'm lacking now, a sense of progress or general direction. I lack a next step.
I'm still very much against the cult of expectation, but it should have been obvious to me that expectation is something different to ... direction. Expectation is having direction and feeling entitled to that direction, but having direction is merely having ambition, goals, things towards which you strive. That's what 15 year old me had, and as he took each step up the stairwell towards his goals, he felt growth. He felt. He felt his place in the world, his movement in it.
What's more is that things move very fast and I often feel as though I'm trying to keep my thoughts up with the way others consider things, and perhaps I need to stop doing that. Perhaps I need to take a step out and stop wondering what X thinks of Thing Y, or what G thinks of Fact F, and just let myself think what I want of these things. Slowly and without genius, without extraordinariness, but with my fair intelligence that isn't negligibly dull.
Let myself come to conclusions and turn them over in my mind, feel them fastidiously, grasp the deepest handles of my own thoughts. And try to think of graspable goals, direction that I can feel myself moving through.
Yeah. I'll try that.
I'm 19 now and I can feel my adolescence waning away, and with it a sense of being alive, and this worries me. My worry is that I no longer feel the way I did between the ages of 15 and 17. I don't mean to say I'm worried because I feel like a different person; that would be ridiculous. I'm perfectly aware that people change. What I mean to say is, I'm simply feeling less. About things, towards things, towards people. I have thoughts and emotions and opinions, but they feel like simulations; I feel an awful lot like a robot character, traipsing through life, watching, consuming input, ejecting output. I have a very good life. I have friends; I go to university; there's the beginnings of something with a girl. I'm not ill. I'm fairly intelligent - perhaps not genius, but certainly not negligibly dull. And yet here I am, not sad, not depressed, just... disconnected.
I try to think of what was so different about those years, and I guess the main feature is change. It was the move from secondary school to college and then from college to university. There was a very obvious sense of progress. Perhaps this is what I'm lacking now, a sense of progress or general direction. I lack a next step.
I'm still very much against the cult of expectation, but it should have been obvious to me that expectation is something different to ... direction. Expectation is having direction and feeling entitled to that direction, but having direction is merely having ambition, goals, things towards which you strive. That's what 15 year old me had, and as he took each step up the stairwell towards his goals, he felt growth. He felt. He felt his place in the world, his movement in it.
What's more is that things move very fast and I often feel as though I'm trying to keep my thoughts up with the way others consider things, and perhaps I need to stop doing that. Perhaps I need to take a step out and stop wondering what X thinks of Thing Y, or what G thinks of Fact F, and just let myself think what I want of these things. Slowly and without genius, without extraordinariness, but with my fair intelligence that isn't negligibly dull.
Let myself come to conclusions and turn them over in my mind, feel them fastidiously, grasp the deepest handles of my own thoughts. And try to think of graspable goals, direction that I can feel myself moving through.
Yeah. I'll try that.
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