Never forget who you always wanted to be.

Last week,  I was sitting at my desk at my new job thinking to myself, “What ever happened to my dreams and goals?’  You know, those things that I had set for myself when I was younger. I was supposed to be a diplomat, or a scientist or traveling abroad attempting to unravel strange and ancient languages. Instead, I was sitting in front of a laptop at my desk connecting bunnies with wavy pencil lines.  At what point do people just give up on their dreams for the practicality AND reality of life?  When did I trade in my dreams and goals for just existing?  There was unfinished business in my life: goals to accomplish, a checklist to finish, places to visit, degrees to obtain, and last but not least, self-worth to realize.

If I had “it” to do all over again, would I have done things differently? Yes.  I was a very different person in my adolescence.  I was motivated to accomplish my goals and tasks that I had set out for myself in my youth, however somewhere during college while I was “discovering” myself I fell into the dangerous cycle of complacency.  I had lost my drive to accomplish, I had lost my desire to become what I had always wanted to be.  I was just happy… existing. What the fuck happened?

As I started my first job after school I was too busy discovering my “gayness” to even care about the future and what it held.  There will always be tomorrow to finish the next thing on my life’s “to do” list or next year to obtain that PhD that I had always wanted to get.  I was drowning in a sea of apathy and too complacent to care…  If you would have asked me how I was doing back then, I would have sat you down and looked you in the eyes and described the water enveloping me and how I was thrashing about to keep my head afloat, all the while having a smile on my face.  Before I knew it, my 20′s were gone.

Birthdays are a good reality checks.  This May, I will be turning 34.  Where the FUCK did the first third of my life go? I am entering the “middle ages” and my checklist is far from complete.  I have been complacent for too long.  My halcyon days were my 20′s, therefore I will have to make up for my lack of discipline with my 30′s.  Will I ever accomplish my dreams and goals? Perhaps not, but if I don’t even try then a big chunk of my life would have been in vain.

Perhaps I subconsciously lit a fire under my own ass, perhaps I had had enough.  Whatever the reason, after completing my last page of arithmetic at work, I stood up at my desk, placed my work cell phone next to my laptop and walked out of work… for good. I was scared to death and it was one of the hardest things I have had to do, but it was the right thing to do for myself.  For the first time in a long time, I am finally doing what I want to do again and it felt good.  With my actions I have set wheels in motion and this time they are even in the right direction. I have a plan… a vague one, but a plan nonetheless. The husband was telling me about his work and that he has to take a “back to basics” class.  I smiled inside; It seems that I’m not the only one realizing that “this is not where I had intended to be.”