I know that I haven't been blogging much, lately, and I'm not totally sure why. I have some ideas and I know that part of it has to do with Twitter (demon). Micro-blogging is way more efficient, I guess. But I hate being limited to 160 characters, shortening my words and sentences so that I can fit whatever is on my mind into that tiny little box. It just means that I'm succumbing to our generation's weaknesses- doing things the quickest way possible, using the least amount of time and energy.
Hm.
Lately, the future scares me. Doesn't it scare everyone a little though? I'd like to look forward to it, but I guess it's the fact that I'm not sure what I'm looking forward to exactly. I don't know what my long term plans are. I don't even know what I'll be doing tomorrow, but I feel... pressured to know what my purpose in life is going to be. Everything that I want is broad and abstract. I'm not able to come to any conclusions. All I can do is prepare for what might happen, I guess.
... Which is partially why I have tattoos on both of my arms. What I know is that I don't want an ordinary job- tattoos and piercings almost guarantee that I won't be able to have an ordinary job. I want vibrancy and variety. I refuse to sit behind a desk for the rest of my life, unless it is because I am the editor-in-chief of Cosmopolitan (seriously). But any occupation that requires me to wear a (oh my god) pantsuit or really, any kind of suit, is one that I want to stay as far away from it as possible.
All my life, my parents kept me from dreaming big unless my big dreams were "realistic". For example, going to med school and becoming a doctor is more realistic than wanting to play music, for thousands of people, in a hundred venues all over the world. Maybe growing up in war-time Vietnam kind of shattered any dreams that they had. I can tell that they are only shells of who they really are, but I doubt that I would ever be brave enough to want to know what goes on in their minds. You know how you can sort of tell when someone is haunted by their pasts? That's what it's like with my parents. They've seen a lot of things that people should never see that many times in their lives, and as a result, they've become 100x more protective over my brother and I. It's been more detrimental to our well-beings than it has been helpful.
I never dreamt about med school. Or law school. Or whatever school my mom prays that God will lead me to. I don't even remember the last time I went to church. I broke my mother's heart when I told her that I never wanted to step into a church again. I feel almost as if my life is better without religion. God and I aren't exactly BFF, but I doubt that he would put me in med school (ha, I probably just jinxed it and I'll end up being a neurosurgeon or something).
So, here I am, eighteen years old, with my feet planted firmly on the ground because I've never really been allowed to have my head in the clouds when it comes to these kinds of things. And I'm stuck. I'm stuck because whenever I allow my aspirations to go past the border between "realistic" and "unrealistic", a little voice inside of me says, "That probably won't work out." Even when I want it to work out so bad, I have to go back to the fact that I am one person in a billion other people who want the same thing, and no matter how hard I wish or work for something, it might not work out.
I need to stop doing that.
