My Frustrated Fear
Saturday, Jul. 14, 2007 6:42 PM

"You don't chance thinking that far ahead," he answered. "You think from day to day. If you allow yourself to think of the future - any personal future - you lose your nerve. And suddenly you recall all the senseless time-wasting things you've done... the wasted minutes you'll never recover. And you realize that time is the most precious thing. Because time is life. It's the only thing you can never get back. You can lose a girl and perhaps win her back - or find another. But a second - this second - when it goes, it's irrevocably gone." - Valley of the Dolls

I feel, strangely, like I'm wasting away, that I'm somehow caught between two moments. I can box up my life into "this was then" and "this is what will be." It's as if this moment that I'm living in right now has no meaning. It serves no purpose. It gets me nowhere.

I'm not moving forward. I don't feel like I'm getting anywhere. I'm deathly afraid that I'm going to wake up ten years from now and find that I'm still living the same life and I'm still working the same job - or the same kind of job.

I don't know what I want. I don't know what or who I want to be. I don't know where to go from here. I just know that I don't want things to stay the same: stagnant. And the closer that I get to reaching the inevitable milestone of my life... turning 30... the bigger this fear grows. It's nestled inside of me, needling and burrowing it's way deep into my gut.

It makes me want to scream. It makes me want to run away from everything that I hold familar and dear. It makes me want to... as Pink would say... "run, just as fast as I can, to the middle of nowhere, to the middle of my frustrated fears..."

Don't get me wrong. I appreciate my life and the opportunities it provides me. I don't take for granted the house that I own, the cars sitting inside my garage, the furniture I utilize, the clothes on my back, and the travelling I get to do. Most of this would not be possible if I wasn't living in Wichita or if I wasn't working for my dad.

But I don't want this to become my life. I don't want this to be where I am 5, 10, or 15 years from now. I want to grow as an individual. I want to continuously stimulate my mind. I want to do things that most people don't do. I want to be able to look back in 20 years and say, "Look at what I accomplished. Look at what I did with my life. Look at what I experienced."

And right now, I don't feel like I'm doing any of these things. I feel like I'm caught in a no action zone. I feel trapped in place, handcuffed to my present being whose been trying so hard to let go of my past so that I can have a future. I just wish life's seconds weren't passing me by... because every wasted second is irrevocably gone the next.