Let's break the ice.
I am jobless, and am currently not attending school. I cannot remember how many times I've expressed this in my writing since January, but here I go expressing it again.
Despite being free, despite not carrying what some people might consider "the burden" of maintaining a job or pursuing my education, I am still occupied. I catch myself thinking about the future, often times feeling devastated or hopeless. I catch myself thinking that my aspirations and my personal journey towards being something more, simply does not exist. I try not to hate myself for putting myself in this situation, but most days I do.
I miss a lot about my time being consumed with things that I did not want it to be. I did not want to be forced to go to school. I thought about everything besides what I really should have been chasing: my education. Kicking myself in the back for not being in particular mindsets doing oddly specific moments in my past is a regular thought process.
I am free, and yet I have not felt more chained down.
I'm starting to learn that I am that type of person that would rather occupy myself with bettering at least some part of the world, outside the walls of my home. I am not saying I'm the only person that has these preferences, but the ungratefulness that I see in some of my colleagues, or more distantly people that have walked out of my life, is most of the time prevalent. The uncertainty of the future is too much for them to handle. They do not want to push themselves, and somehow they are completely unaware of their reluctance to do so. They're completely unaware of the fact that they're not only not taking the advantages of where they are in society, but they're not taking advantage of the fact that they could be happy. And they could be occupied; and not just mentally occupied, physically as well.
In no way am I trying to introduce a pessimistic viewpoint, and then neglect to find a way to solve it. Habitually, that is how most people are. I want to affect the way I look at things. I want to avoid having that dead end thought in my mind, and manifest the thought into a thousand maybes. But not the kind where the people I care about are unhappy.
I'm not free. I'm not free to lounge, free to live off of a parent far beyond the age that I should, I am not free to goof off and consume all of these pathways that people are taking, whether or not they contain notoriety or an insane amount of money through social media. I am not free to disconnect myself from a world that is constantly moving around me.
I am still connected. I am still burdened. I am still determined to conjure up a person who isn't drowning in all the terrible, finite, mischievous maybes. I am happy, or at least the happiest that I can be in a situation that I remind myself is TEMPORARY. That's the best word on my bad days.
I am not always going to be physically unoccupied. I am not always going to be dependent on my family. I will have people in my future who are dependent on me and I will do everything in my power to not make them feel bad for the temporary circumstance that they find themselves in.
I love like there is a tomorrow, a bigger and brighter one at that. I don't care if there's detours to my journey in life, I am still deciding to keep on moving, regardless of the speed that I am moving in.
So, I am busy. Just not conventionally busy.
I am just as focused and ambitious and hardworking as you are.
Same mindset, different journey.
[ https://www.flickr.com/photos/28326190@N08/32151445560
I looked up candid on Google. I did not know what I would see, but it did not surprise me that the first result I got was an advertising of a company called Candid. Haven't got the slightest clue what they stand for, but I was aware I needed an image for this entry. Before I proceeded to click on the Images page on Google, I looked at the two definitions that the website offers. One discussed how candid, taken into a communication standpoint, is the motion of someone being honest, and assertive, and "frank". The next was the photo phenomenon. How a candid is a photo of someone when they are not paying attention and is snapped in the moment as opposed to having thought to them. I love candids. Of myself and of my loved ones. So I decided to see what the Images page offered. On the top of all of the images of people I did not recognize, are tags to deepen one's search. What surprised me to an extent was the fact that Carrie Fisher had been the third suggestion. I imagined her, and what I have always liked to believe is that the woman was a representation of both definitions of candid and I fell in love with the idea to include a picture of her in my entry. Majority of her candids were black and white, and of her youth, and it was a hard decision to choose which one I would utilize. I went with this one, because it is of her. Solely her. Solely her captured beauty. Her authenticity showed more in other photos, but I just had to choose this one. A rare, truly beautiful soul wrapped in an idea of a perfect woman that has been sought out for for years.]