A Familiar Pattern
When I was at school I had this strange jumble of interests. I’d be good at creative writing, but then I’d discover a talent for writing music. But I was also better than average at maths and I loved computers. An especially good teacher would ignite a love of physics which seems to have endured.
By the time I got going to university I really didn’t know for sure what I wanted to do. Music and Philosophy was my course of choice. Music because I was really getting into the composing and Philosophy because it tied together a lot of my other interests. Somehow University managed to kill off my lust for composing. Not completely, but I no longer saw it as a thing that I had to do, the impulse had gone. I now saw it as a hobby, not a career path.
But I still had so many interests to choose from. I’ve got time, I’ll work it out, I told myself. You’ve got time, you’ll work it out, people told me. That was six years ago. I’m 28 next week, which is no great age, but I’m getting increasingly conscious there are only so many more years that I can keep believing that I’ve got time, that I’ll work it out.
I’ve wasted a lot of time, but I think it’s important to say what I mean by that. The time I spend with my friends doing nothing in particular or playing the games I enjoy I don’t consider a waste of time. I’m talking about too many bored evenings pottering around with no particular plan in mind. Weekends wasted in oversleeping and under-motivation.
And motivation’s the problem. Oh, many times I have said ‘right, it’s time to do something productive.’ I’m full of ideas. A book, a song, a text adventure, a whole game, there’s more than enough rattling around my head and occasionally I’ll rally myself into action and it’ll work - for a little way. But something will trip me, distract me. Perhaps I’ll persuade myself that it wasn’t something I wanted to do after all. I’ll lose interest, or stop working on it without even realising. It’s happened enough times now for me to see the pattern clearly.
That’s a hell of a thing to realise about yourself. If I was the type of person to get extremely despondent then I would despair at knowing that all my big ideas were doomed never to come into fruition, that my plans will come to nothing because I just don’t have what it takes to follow through on them. I can’t do it though.
It needs to be different, next time. At some point I need to stop putting up with this and start being something. I don’t know what it will take. Perhaps I’m the sort of person that needs collaborators to keep them afloat, that’s one theory I’ve had lately. Perhaps I need a change of routine. Whatever it is, I don’t know, I’m fed up with the pattern. The pattern has to die. Fuck the pattern.
Or, as xkcd put it:
