ADULTING
I Buried My Ambitious Self
Twenty is about the deaths of several versions of myself. One of that deaths is the death of my ambitious self.
Its passing came naturally and passively. I guess I killed it slowly. I just woke up one day and realized that I’m not ambitious anymore without understanding why. I think life flew so fast I didn’t have time to understand why it needed to die. To help me make sense, I decided to write a letter for it. Perhaps, I’m looking for some kind of closure.
Here is my letter for my ambitious self.
“The meaning of life is just to be alive. It is so plain and so obvious and so simple. And yet, everybody rushes around in a great panic as if it were necessary to achieve something beyond themselves.”
-Allan Watts
When I was way younger than I was today, several people asked the ever-cliche question: What do you want to be someday?
Back then, I had a lot of unsure but lofty answers. I said that I wanted to be an astronaut. Later, I said I wanted to be a psychologist. Much later, I said I wanted to be a lawyer.
It took years to say that I just wanted to feel alive.
Fortunately, this is exactly what my life is all about now: trying to feel alive. This is the only thing I’m sure about.
To my ambitious self,
I think murdering you comes with the realization that my life is mine to live. It is the realization that being ambitious is a version of myself handed by society ever since I was a child. It is the realization that I’m stupid to accept that being ambitious is for me without thinking.
It’s not wrong to be ambitious. But I wasn’t ambitious, at least ambitious by society’s standards.
In you, I felt like a mediocre cog in this grand factory called life. Waking didn’t feel miraculous. It felt like an auto-pilot response to my alarm. My studies aren’t fulfilling. They’re more like grinding for a path I’m not even sure I like.
It’s hard to keep you alive. You need to be dying for me to start living.
I’m not sorry for killing you and replacing your void with nihilism. I’m contented with my nihilistic self. I think it’s because when social ideals such as academic and corporate success are uncertain I have learned to appreciate little moments.
All the music that I listened to in empty days. The films that made me laugh and cry. All the travels, all the memories, and all the versions of myself at those places. I am tethered to these things and more.
These things won’t probably matter in the face of success and triumph. But, does it even matter if they don’t?
I’m a failure by the standards of today’s ideals. I have no plans, simply sketches. No directions, simply guts. I have no dreams. I am simply coasting through life. I don’t live for anything greater than myself.
I will not apologize to you, my ambitious self. You need to be murdered and you need to be buried. Goodbye to you. Rest in peace.
