02:
I’m not an ambitious person. I don’t think I ever have been. In my younger days, I had my moments, but I’d more likely describe them as bouts of extreme motivation, and delusion, than serious ambition. And they typically didn’t last very long.
And though I know I’m not a naturally ambitious person, I feel self-conscious about not being so. I feel bad about it, ashamed about it, morning-after-a-night-of-hard-drinking about it. I see or read about other people’s achievements, and I know that all that separates me from them is that essential ambition.
Maybe I grew up too comfortably, but I know plenty of people who came from similar situations and are still hungrier for success than I am. Plus, I feel as if that is one of those too general social theories that offers less analysis and more criticism. Growing up comfortable insulates you against the intense desire to be admired by your peers! If the middle-class teenage closet shows us anything, it’s that this cannot be true.
So what should I do when I honestly care very little about being CEO, or owning my own business, or making millions?
(Happiness rates as number one for me, so I chase that. I don’t chase things that I think will make me happy, but things that actually make me happy, which is different.)
This year, the day before my twenty-seventh birthday, I have promised to run 13.1 miles. A little over two weeks ago, I started training again. My runs right now are short but steady. I know I can get my mileage up, but, like all things, I need to do so incrementally. Some days I don’t feel like training at all. But I stay patient and I keep running.
And I guess, that’s currently how I feel about ambition and success. I may not have that fire naturally, but I can get a few good results by being steady. One of them being running for two hours straight.
Who knows, maybe one day something will trigger my pilot light to be lit and I’ll take off down the runway with a destination in mind as specific as a point on a map. Until then, I guess I will stay patient. I will stay steady. I will continue to do thing things that make me happy.
16:
5,000+ dollars of medications dispensed
1,000 +/- villagers served
38 volunteers
16 hours on the plane
8 cold showers
6 bottles of Chilean wine
5 tooth extractions witnessed
4 beautiful roommates
3 steroid shots witnessed
2 nicknames
1 baby kissed
0 mosquito bites!
04:
“What can you do in only a week?”
[After boarding my flight tonight, I am going to be in Honduras until next Monday with a group of thirty-plus volunteers from Global Medical Brigades flying down to provide basic health care, supplies, and education to Honduran villagers.]
I got asked this question after talking excitedly about participating in GMB’s efforts. Volunteering abroad has been something that I’ve been interested in doing for a while, in part to contribute to worthwhile causes, but mainly to learn. I look at these experiences as great learning opportunities, and so when I got asked that question, I couldn’t help but feel a little guilty, thinking that maybe I wasn’t doing enough. Instead of staying one week, I should stay ten. Or twenty. Or, hell, just stay for years.
I told one of my good friends about this question and its potency on me. Her response: “Everything we do has to be for ourselves first. If you can help someone else in the process, that’s even better.”
I went home thinking about the nature of volunteerism and when a volunteer can consider their contribution enough (or I suppose, not too deeply lacking). Most of the time, I feel as if it’s never enough. But at the same time, I have myself to work on as well.
Currently, I serve as a volunteer medic at the Berkeley Free Clinic one to two nights a week. I’ve joined groups to build houses in Mexico. I’ve served sandwiches on Skid Row. Each experience has taught me something about compassion and simplicity and giving and frustration and inequality and insufficience.
I am grateful that I’ve had the opportunity to participate in each; I’m glad I was a part of each.
This year, I am devoting 1 week to Honduran villagers and 51 to myself, but I hope that my contribution is still worthwhile.
23:
My brother was born with a large birthmark over his left eye that occurs in 0.005% of the population. Subsequent surgeries improved its appearance, though, in my brother’s own words, he has “long since given up on looking normal.”
Growing up together, I never really gave much thought to it or how he must have felt about it, in part, due to the beauty of childish obliviousness, but mostly because that wasn’t part of his identity to me. He was my brother and that’s how I thought of him first. The birthmark? I honestly have to remind myself that it’s there.
My mother doesn’t feel the same way.
From the start, it pained her that my brother endured ignorant and hurtful comments. It pained her when it pained him. She blamed herself. She blamed my dad. She blamed everyone and she blamed no one.
My mother was determined to do as much as she could to make up for the black spot my brother was born with.
And she was fantastic. She was loving and supportive and encouraging and constructive. But there wasn’t enough of that in her to go around. She was unhappy in her own marriage, drained by work and home duties, and so the small amount of optimism and positivity she procured, she gave it all to my brother.
And I became the unwitting figure to help her shoulder the rest.
I didn’t understand that as a child, though I do now. It used to confuse and frustrate me that my brother and I grew up in the same household but saw two very different people when we looked at our mom.
Back then, my mom had not yet learned how to have enough love in her own heart to be able to build my brother up without pushing me down in the process. Years and years later, I now think I see that lesson begin to take hold, though it is too late. Decades of old habits and old scars pollute the landscape of our relationship and crushing insults fly out of her mouth on their own accord, the easy path lubricated by twenty-seven years of routine.
She was my original heartbreak.
17:
Here’s a bit of truth: I don’t feel ready to start the day until I’ve had my cup of coffee and my make-up applied. That’s my morning routine, and it makes me feel ready for the rest of the world.
But some days I don’t get to this step until noon or later.
On days like today, I wake up early but lounge around my room with my laptop on and my hair unbrushed. I putter around my kitchen making tea and looking for something to eat. I think about how I don’t feel like going outside.
On days like today, I am relaxed, but full of yearning. With the accessibility into other people’s lives made by the convenience of le internet, I spend an ungodly number of hours clicking around strangers’ journals, cv’s, interviews, websites, profiles, photos, and on and on and on. I think about all the things that they are doing. I think about all the things they have accomplished.
Then, naturally, I think about all the things I am not doing and all the things I haven’t accomplished, and am not taking steps to accomplish, and maybe am not really interested in accomplishing but would be moderately pleased if I did so just for the right to say I did so.
And time and time again my career friends reassure me that no one our age knows what they want to do with their lives (as my unemployed friends reassure me that now is my opportunity to figure out what I want to do with my life). Though, knowing that feeling this way is not unique to my situation is poor consolation.
For me, it’s not so much finding purpose. I have purpose. And it’s not so much achieving my potential. I have potential (ha).
It’s that I want more than what I was given. I want to be smarter than I am, more productive than I can, taller than I grew. I want to be me without being me.
But where is this coming from? Who is telling me that I should be more of someone else? My immigrant parents? My academic educators? The television?
Is it just my genetic disposition to be slightly dissatisfied with all that I have? Doubtful.
On days like today, when I can feel the slow start rolling out from under my comforter, I know that I will be spending the morning yearning.
I know that it’s not good for me. And I know that I can’t help it. I don’t smoke. I don’t diet. I yearn.
Maybe I don’t know what I want. But I know that I want it.
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