Should we say should?
What makes a man change? Each of us are on our own individual path, but the beauty and complexity of life is that we don't know where this path we’re taking is going to leave us. We have aspirations, expectations, plans, but we are also prisoners to circumstance. You may have it in you to be so many different types of people, but as life’s tests are thrown at you, with every decision that’s made, the options slowly narrow down to make the precise version of yourself that exists today. Did these experiences make you who you are, or simply reveal who you were all along? These things, they should happen, but next to nobody has the vices to make their dreams a reality with the tools at their disposal.
It is fools gold to recognize that young adults in highschool must probe such an existential question— the human desire to fulfill some special purpose has existed throughout history—-but the clash between intense personal ambition and existential questioning stamp a paralyzing dissonance from reality itself, etched in the ink of denial. These so-called revelations, that everything is a lie, is self-deception of course, but the powerful because slinging out the thread of order from the tapestry will have allowed him, by decision alone, to have taken charge of the world that he’ll effect a way to dictate the terms of his own fate. Though, of course, you don’t WANT to change your life because you’re so busy being 17 that it’s easier to act like you’ve seen through the world than to actually engage it. Hence, you wear disillusionment like armor: convinced that being unimpressed equals enlightenment; you scoff at meaning before it disappoints you; you reject purpose because it demands something of you. There is born a quiet denial—that good things should come to you simply for existing, that the universe owes you clarity without effort, meaning without cost. Good things should happen to me. I should have a plan. I should be excited for college. I should be happy. But what if I don’t feel any of those things?
The truth is, the word should divide what I feel and what I’m supposed to feel, creating a standard that’s more expectation than reality, between what is and what should be, make my feel more confusing and painful than it really is, but, then again, denial serves as a temporary buffer that protects my mind from overwhelming and unconventional truths because it’s forcing me to confront pain before I’m ready. It’s a double edged sword. But just as denial dulls pain, it dulls clarity. My cruel irony is that the longer I wait for certainty, the further I drift from it, because, if I don’t, my life will be unfathomably more miserable than what it is now: working at a dead-end job that I hate simply because I couldn’t distinguish wanting to having should’ve received a better life.
I am a victim of my own comfort. When it’s late at night I lie awake thinking of how I’m stuck in me thinking I should do these things, but instead of thinking about such things one at a time, I think of them all at once, like a rising black tar that consumes my mind and I fall into a paralysis of self-awareness, but yet, by the time I wake up, it all seems to fade, and it happens more than I’m willing to admit. The slow decay of potential eats away at my insides, so my first instinct when I wake up is to deny it; that I’m entitled to meaning and happiness but yet I choose in that same denial to do anything about it. I live in a paradox of disillusionment as a defense mechanism every night. It keeps me up a night but detracts me from actually doing anything about it because I am so tired in the morning from staying up all night thinking about the disillusionment. I suppose that, eventually, unless I make the unconscious conscious, it will direct my life and I will call it fate.
