Some random thoughts on my life-situation

I find it tricky to talk seriously about life with written-down words. I hate the fact they may come across as tacky, melodramatic, and over-blown. Maybe that’s the Irishness in me…A habit to shy away from soppy emotions unless you’re drunk and uninhibited.

But that’s not to say that I don’t try to make sense of things. I cling to a nonchalant hope that circumstances eventually become easier to understand. With more experience in life, let’s say. It almost seems futile to try to figure out why things happen. I feel this thing pulsing in my chest and I don’t know what it is. I know it’s some emotion or other, although I wouldn’t be able to say which one. It could be a sensitivity of sorts, particularly for useless things that I see in people and the world in which I find myself in. I wouldn’t call myself a writer if it was any different. I like watching people go about their daily business; thinking of minds separate from my own that’s peppered with thoughts I’ve never had. I know they entertain elements which are entirely unique and peculiar to them. That fascinates me; that although people share similarities there’s always at least one thing, particular to them, maybe even something that they’ve never shared with anyone. I wouldn’t say that everyone’s special; some people, I think, are quite mundane. But I do think of special people out there. I imagine what they might be thinking. And it’s all got a kind of great beauty to it that I can’t get my head round. What they want out of life is likely to be different from me. Maybe they go through periods of little pre-occupation when they’re going about their business, thinking about only where they’re headed from point A to B. They live in the moment, sort of like a dog does, and they’re happy all the more for it because they’re not constantly self-aware.

Then there's ambition. You have it or you don't. Throw that into the mix. This is something that on occasion threatens to overwhelm me. A lot of people seem to be pulling in a certain direction in their life, they know exactly where they’re headed and they’re bounding for it. Me, I’m not so sure. When I finish university in a couple of weeks I’ll be thrown into the same hodgepodge of expectations as everyone else: get a job, whatever it is, and get on with the business of working for a living. But what job?

There's doing what I love, reading and writing, but that’s hardly a comforting indicator of financial security. If anything it’s a sure-fire ticket to poverty. It’s an old conflict that I know I’ll have to deal with in the course of my life. I can see it, it's ominous. I’ll have to “grow up”, as they say. And so the pressures come to act in a cycle: I may go with the flow, like other people, accept the fate which lies before me. I get the job, whatever that job is, and fit myself into the mechanized routine of life, like everyone else.

But then I think of all those people, past and present, who’ve had the conviction to do what they wanted. To take it. Grab it. That leaves me with a choice: do I become one of those people who had the guts to pursue something that they love; something which makes them happy. Or am I one of those people who will placidly accept a beaten path, one pre-determined, one which makes them unfulfilled, underachieved, unthinking; ultimately…unhappy? I worry about a job that’ll sap my soul so that when I come home in the evenings I don’t have the energy to do what I love: that is, to write and read. I could live that life...but what would be the point?

I'm no different from anyone in that I've some important choices to make.