and reality is fixing to get sucker-punched right back, because leigh doesn’t take kindly to such affronts.

after…

sixteen years i barely survived.

then two years of scraping by on nothing, home being where i made it, before reaching the age of majority.

three years of college, self-supported (with the gracious help of the fixer).

and finally five heavily punishing years of graduate school, the last two of which i returned the gracious help of the fixer by putting him through college too.

…all this followed by finding a suitable job in the worst job market of my life and a pretty ugly funding climate as well.

here i stand, on the top of that mountain of accomplishments. i did it! twenty-six years spent in total- the ones i remember spent telling myself i just had to make it through to [next step] and man, things were gonna be alright. though i looked before i lept every time, i kept on adding steps. racking up shit to do.

but you know what? things aren’t magically alright just because i crossed all those finish lines. i was telling myself this to get through all the challenges i faced. but i’m not home free just because i did all this shit. the accomplishments mean nothing if i don’t chase down the underlying reason for all these accomplishments. i didn’t do them just to do them. i did them so that my life would be better somehow.

the problem? all these things i’ve done haven’t given me the chance to figure out what that life is like, the theoretical and nonspecifically defined “better” one i’ve been chasing down. i can’t keep being this high-performance achievement machine, neglecting myself and things that are important. i realize i have no idea what this life looks like, where it is, or how to get there.

to some extent, we all are just making shit up as we go along. i get that. but the only example i had is a strict what not to do. so um… where do we go from here?