Brutal Honesty
Sometimes I’ll be writing, just a free write or something simlar, and i’ll stumble upon some feeling on which I want to hold. To grip with a vice, exhaust, and then further refine my own process to extricate every last little ounce of raw, unmined emotion from. Strip mining my soul can lead to some interesting things, however, and one of which I’d like to avoid- failure.
Not in the typical sense, however, of that doing poorly on a test, or letting down my friends- those are all terrible failures in their own right- but I’m talking about something which I find increasingly common amongst my friends: the idea of a 5 year plan for our lives.
While some of them differ, they generally consist of a career goal and a personal goal. Most often this personal goal is marriage, although not always. Mine, when I was young and more naive, was to be married at 26, and start a family soon afterwards. Not that same year, but soon after- maybe by the time I was 30. Professionally I wanted to be done with schooling by the age of 30 in order to pursue my career full time.
It doesn’t look like any of these two things are going to happen in the allotted time frames, unfortunately. While talking to a friend who recently got engaged, I realized that I was still far away from such a feat. It’s not that I’m not crazy about my girlfriend- I am, it’s the fact that you need to know that you can grow with a person, that you are excited to see the evolution of a relationship, and to know it’s a very Zen like experience, it’s not about the end of the relationship- it’s about the process of communication and sharing of emotion.
I know I’m not ready for that giant step simply by the mechanical way in which I describe it. I want to understand it, feel it, pursue it. I don’t know how to learn it. There are no books or manuals. There are no romantic comedies that point you in the right direction except for the general, “follow your heart” line that gets tossed out there so much.
Wow there is a lot I still have to learn.
About my education, I have a Masters, but I want another one. As much as I like the tech side of things, I feel my people skills and emotional intelligence are fine tuned enough to do much, much more with my life. I don’t take my other skills for granted, they serve me well for now, but I want to deal more with the people side of things, the big picture, and that will require more education. Getting another master’s within the next 5 years might be tough, but I’m willing to try.
Where failure comes in, sadly, is that I am not sure what the next step for either of them is. It’s taken me a while, even though I knew in the back of my head that it was true, to acknowledge these things. It’s a lot easier to live in denial of your true feelings, to shut off emotionally for one reason or another, or to try and convince yourself that it’s not what you want. I’ve definitely been there before, and that’s something that I’m already paying for and trying to deal with. I’d rather know my shortcomings, wants, desires, and fears and move forward.