Goals. Sometimes you forget that they are meant to be something more than just an aspiration. You set all these goals for yourself. You tell yourself that you’re going to start from a clean slate. You wipe everything clean. You’ve got nothing to lose, and all to gain. You take yourself and shred it into pieces and throw it on the ground, and you make a puzzle out of it. Construct yourself several years from now. You tell yourself what you want to do with your career. You decide you want to be a serial entrepreneur, whatever that means; carve out your own destiny. You nod assuredly, and it’s set. You tell yourself you need to move back to the city. You give another nod, and it’s set. You want to rebuild your eroded social life. Another goal. You tell yourself you have no time for love, well, no time for a relationship, in that sense, you set another goal.
Piece by piece, you create a mosaic of what you want to look like in the near future. One day at a time, you chip away. You move any little thing in your life that you’re able to in order to come closer to becoming that mosaic. Most of the time, the only thing you can do is strengthen a mindset. You know that goals take time. They are abstractions, and you have no idea how or when they will shift from the ethereal to the corporeal. You have to be patient, but you hate being patient. You have no choice. And because you have no other choice, you are patient.
One day, you catch yourself in the mirror, and you pick up on the striking resemblance of that collage; that goal-completed self. You’ve done it, but now what?
I can never be satisfied, it seems. There’s a void between feeling ungrateful and staying hungry in order to advance. On the very first day of 2011, I found myself at ground zero. No more girlfriend. No job. No school. No degree. No connection with friends. Just myself, my room, and my computers. I don’t know how long I wallowed before I carved out a path, but at some point I formed the resolve to get rid of all the absence in my life.
I failed a lot of times. Finding an actual job didn’t really happen for me until August, and it was the ultimate means to an end type of deal. I spent all sorts of lonely nights, feeling depressed, useless, and guilty over breaking a love ones heart, and also because I was still isolated from my friends, with no means of making any new ones. Fifty thousand dollars of debt slowly swayed over my head like an anvil hoisted by a thread, as one semester left of school sat in storage somewhere. What a mess.
Somehow, through all those failed efforts, the torment, the anxiety and angst, the complete unknowing of how I am going to get from where I was to where I want to be, somehow, I made it out of the hole, piece by piece.
It wasn’t so much that I needed all these tangible things. I mean, I did, but it was more that their disarray was a reflection of how much of a mess I was. There was a reason I knew that I would not try to get into another relationship for at least a couple years after I broke up with Kara, and that was because I knew that I was so broken, so far from where I needed to be that I couldn’t go and poison someone else so selfishly. I have to come correct, or come not at all.
And then Monday hit. A week removed from my former job, which was a place that proved that I had completed my social and personal comeback. The career was the only thing I was really missing, and here it was. As of this week, I know, I know, I know that I am at the place that is truly sending me down the path I need to be as far as my career goals. For someone with some intense goals in that regard, it was the piece that I never felt would come. Yet, there I was, in an unfamiliar place, and, once again, with unfamiliar people, not exactly sure how each day is going to look. I gave up the security of having a solid expectation for each day in order to finally get that properly vectored momentum.
Now what?
Crap.
Now that my entire life is finally in sync and in motion, I find myself having to figure out what stars to shoot for next. The culmination, actually, the graduation was complete. I know that I am whole again. I’m rehabilitated and more stable and complete than ever, and now I have to look to those distant things I didn’t dare mess with, as well as identify the rest on the horizon.
This is the exact downside to achieving goals. I have to identify new goals and begin the process of achievement all over again.
It sucks.
The clear one is that I need to re-open my love life again, so I’ll just use it for short example. Granted, I stopped my concerted effort to shut it off after a year, but I never really committed to it. This doesn’t mean I become one of those starting-to-get-a-little-older guys who just exudes desperation, not by any means, but I also realize, after spending time with several acquaintances between 28-35 a few weekends ago that I don’t want to be those guys, sitting at a bar looking for the next thing to pass the night, or next crazy woman to waste a couple months with, or just be starting something that might get serious. That was probably when the goal started to form, like the clouds and the winds gradually starting to condense until the giant vortex that is now a hurricane formed. I won’t be those guys. Absolutely not.
So now I have to acknowledge it. No idea how or when, and probably not of my own efforts will that goal, which is, basically, seriously dating someone again, be reached. And all the uncertainty, all the doubt, all the stress, it will come back to me, just in a different package. Where on earth am I going to meet someone? I’m too picky. Or did I already meet someone, and now I have to wait in this endless chasm of uncertainty and hope that I’m still interested when the time comes? Am I really that eager to welcome back the pains that come with the gains of being bound to someone?
And so on, and so on.
WHAT A PAIN
This is just one goal.
Slowly, the rest of the clouds start to form. The thunder meets the rain and it begins to storm. And after a time, the monsoon ends as the sun splits the clouds, and there I’ll look up at the sky blue. What do I do now? Once again, I’ll have no clue.
It feels great to finally get to where you wanted to go, but there is always further to press on, and new decisions to make. Always being careful to make sure you press on in the right direction so you don’t waste years of your life backtracking.
Really, sometimes I forget that goals actually get completed, and that can really suck.
But at least I sleep easier knowing that I’m set. I basically spent all this time powerleveling, now I’m one properly equipped mofo for the journey.
P.S. – I don’t know how or why I broke out into some nursery rhyme near the end there. I guess the spirit caught me, and then I fell down.