I realized, too late of course, that I wanted to get out. There was nothing wrong with my life. But I couldn't live like this forever. If I was to be pushed, I might as well be pushed by the things and people I loved. There was no sense in me being controlled by things that felt no compassion.1
What fueled this? I saw an ad on youtube for free scholarship to a film school by creating a film under the theme, what matters to you? Did anyone ask me what I wanted to do? If so, I would've been taking a gap year. My parents knew what was best for me, of course, but couldn't I just, for once, do something that was spectacularly unreasonable? That was worthy of a movie, perchance?
I didn't want to spend the next four years of my life, hoping to get good classes where I enjoyed learning, because I wouldn't try to get good marks out of boring lecture halls. And I sure as hell didn't want to spend time the best years of my life in grad school, further minimizing my relation with the real world, as we all called it. My parents told me I had to invest in grad school, and I realized that I could live the rest of my life in their little monetary cocoon they weaved for all of their children. But I was ungrateful for this.
At eighteen, I had accomplished relatively little, but motivate my mom to buy a ton of unnecessary medals from my few amazing swims that she had so built up in her mind to make it seem like I was some kind of champion. When I was younger, I had always been considered intelligent, but with age, when we had to acquire knowledge, I got bored with learning about things that didn't directly concern me.
At eighteen, the only thing that made me happy, was myself. Occasionally colors would brighten my day, and I would stumble upon some infantile ecstasy. But everyday when I woke up, and proceeded through my day, utterly alone, all I had was my mind, and my eyes, which were failing through some fluke of an auto-immune disease. And my mind, oh, how I could talk about the impermanences of it. It was constantly changing its views. And one day, it would be gone.
And yet we were all happy with what was before us, weren't we? Or else we'd just quicken the trip and take our lives. There was something that was fueling me, that kept me from dying. But I had no idea what it was. Could it be the subconscious evaluation of the love people around me had for me? But I would never know, because this was an unconscious recollection. I feared it was something not as pleasant. It was probably my strong urge for a direction that kept me going. I couldn't believe that I had found it, at eighteen. Give it a couple more years, I commanded, and then, you'll see.
I was getting bored, waiting for the future, that was all. But it was coming, hopefully. And instead of wanting death, I feared it, in case it took away from me some future scene of utter happiness. I could only pray that I wasn't building it up too much.
1 Interesting side note, I felt these same things exactly four years ago in High School. I had turned in a homework assignment late for my honors english class, and instead of writing a simple explanation of why it had been late, like I was busy, or whatnot, I wrote the best essay I had ever written on how it feels to be insignificant. Did you know that there are 6.2 billion people in the world? An minute fraction of these people will probably love you, but does that even matter? What good is love for the broken dreams and egos of a young girl, who wanted to accomplish everything, and was taught that she could, only to realize that she was a failure? (I was failing physics at the time, so I was constantly bedraggled. I was also not a swimming superstar as I had envisioned, which made me feel like I was constantly being marginalized in the one thing I had been good at since I was 6).
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