The older I get, the more I feel like my life is made up of big moments separated by spans of time spent either recovering from the last big moment or preparing for the next one. Time passage is hard for me to gauge over long spans despite the fact that I’m really good at tracking it over short spans. Over a six-hour period, I can usually guess the time within five minutes. Beyond that, it gets trickier. I routinely have weeks that feel long or days that feel short. Variation in the perception of the passage of time is a common thing for most people, sure, but I feel especially bad at the larger-scale stuff. Until I actually think about it, I’d swear that I was just recently in college. At the same time, I feel like high school and the problems of my childhood are so old that they might as well have happened to someone else.
This isn’t earth-shattering or super special. People feel like this all the time. I’m just focusing on it a lot right now because I’m at this point in my life were things are starting to come together, but the one thing I want more than anything is still going to take a while. I’d give up almost anything to be a writer full-time, but I can’t throw aside my debt obligations for that super-useful degree I got in English Literature (that sounds way more bitter than I feel, but I have my moments where that feels absolutely true) because that’d hurt my dad, who co-signed some of my loans. I need to keep working and making payments in the hope of one day being free of this mountain of debt. Having a wonderful girlfriend is amazing. Having two roommates who respect me, whose company I enjoy, and who share my interests enough to at least nod along while I talk at them is the best living situation I’ve ever had. Being able to support myself AND start paying down some debts by working 45 hours a week is something I thought wasn’t possible a year and a half ago. I have so much to be thankful for that I feel horrible that I can’t stop thinking about how disappointed I am that I can’t write all the time.
I’m in my mid-to-late twenties. It is possible that only a quarter of my life has passed so far. A huge chunk of my favorite creators, including all of the ones who influenced me the most, didn’t get their start until, sometimes, as much as a decade after they were my age. There is still so much I can do. Even if it takes me another ten years to get to the point where I can write full-time, I’ll still have so much time to write and create. I just feel like part of me is missing when I’m at work, testing software, and trying to stay focused so that ideas of what I want to be writing don’t cause me to run the same test case multiple times without once actually seeing the results.
If you start discussing romance or relationships with someone, the idea of soulmates is going to come up at some point. Generally speaking, people fall into one of two camps. Either soulmates are bullshit and love is about building something with someone you’ve picked or soulmates are a thing and you’re destined for someone. While I’m not willing to rule anything out and I generally don’t call people out for relatively harmless beliefs, I get frustrated when the soulmate idea is expressed as the idea that people are incomplete without their soulmate. There’s tons of philosophy and even some religious teachings that supports this idea. I don’t think that’s true and I feel like the idea of needing another person to be complete places a lot of responsibility and emotional labor for your well-being on someone else’s shoulders. I don’t need another person to feel complete. When I get lost in my writing, no where I am or what I’m writing about, I feel whole.
That is all I need. All I want. Just this little thing. Just this enormous, seemingly impossible achievement.
I’m working toward it. Updating this blog every day, working a few extra hours a week to reach a state of financial stability, and trying to make time to work on my novels in between it all. This all helps. Writing every day makes time feel a little more real. I can count the days between November 1st, 2017, and today. I can remember most of my posts. I’ve got a record of living all of those days and the act of sitting down to write each night helps me feel like I’m going to eventually get where I want to be. Hopefully, by the time I’m done with my year and a month of daily posts, I’ll be able to see how much closer I’ve gotten.