I’m always amazed at how my life is turning out.
I remember being a proper medical student all about the pursuit of knowledge of the human body. Reading big books with pictures that make people around you ‘ooh’ and ‘aah’. Pretty ladies faking a marvel when you tell them you’re in medical school, because “you don’t look like you’re in medical school” – a persona you’re purposely creating because pretty ladies will call you artsy and smart – and you love that.
Then a stint with the guys today known as ‘tech bros’. Talking about the next best thing, products, and apps. Changing the world, making a ton of money. Saying education is a scam but studying late into the night to pass exams. Joking with one another about dropping out of school, knowing we’ll never go through with it. Meetings and pitch decks and idea designs. Drooling on the successes of those before us. Slaving and hoping to create the next big thing.
I remember graduating and turning away into medical practice, the journey towards self-discovery, the evolution of personal philosophies and the thrill of experiencing young life and new money. Ward coats turned into late nights with empty bottles and peppered fingers. The question about the meaning of life gradually surfacing during periods of innermost thought. Getting absorbed into a community of writers at a time when sapiosexuals or a perverted form of it became a thing. Slaving away over digital screens and tapping at keys like a maniac, amused by the process of my own ideation because of the likes, the comments, the ‘permit me to share this’ that followed in good numbers. Playing God; creating universes and multiverses, telling stories that weren’t but could be. Fascinated by the fascination of those that believed me because it meant that they believed in me. Glorious. It was easier to wake up in the mornings. Soliloquising, dreaming of lazy vacations to remote generally desirable undesired places because it added to the mystique of a creator creating.
Then finally living a part of the dream. A slow town life, driving an antique, waking up to the chirping of birds at dawn to be replaced by crickets at dusk. Enjoying people substituting the tag ‘weird’ for ‘crazy’, all the while being conscious of my beautiful sanity and enjoying some of the attention that mortals pay to those who they think are smart. Haggling with atheists and agnostics who believe that true intellectuals only existed in the world of the non-theist; convincing them that idiots exist on both sides. Making art, making beautiful art in its purest form because we weren’t doing it for the money, except when we did it for the money.
Then the hustle. The need to feed. The need for a roof. The need to not feel left behind by peers or by those who in their own evaluation had prophesied that your mind might change the world. Finally finding food and a roof and realising that the hustle would never end. Realising how untrue you have been to your dreams and fearing that your new dreams may suffer the same fate. This hustle. This flipping hustle. Looking for an adult to talk to and realising that you’re an adult people want to talk to.
You finally get it.
You’re in the prime of your youth and the stories you’ll tell your sons and daughter’s daughters are currently being written. You finally get it. You’re living through what would become history; tales that will surely be rewritten from the perspective of everyone else that is not you. You finally get it. The most indelible mark of man would eventually be eroded by the sands of time. You finally get it, so you ask. ‘Is the pursuit of success a trap?’ and hope that the true answer is in the negative. You finally get it that there is no end to this journey, that the journey itself is its own end.
And littered across this experience there is love and there is heartbreak.
Maybe all this is just me, but I finally get it. When they mess with my heart, all I have left is my art.
So yes, let’s do this one more time.
