Beautiful Beginnings

My life isn't what I thought it would be. I never knew what I even wanted it to be. The last time I remember making grand plans, or even dreaming about my adult life, must've been around 4th grade. Soon after that the indecisiveness that seems to define my adult life set in. The pessimism, the laziness and the general disillusionment with all the things to come.

 I don't think my life is bad. It's just not the life I would have dreamed of. I yearned for independence and to help people. Somehow, I became dependent on others and grew alarmed with the diversity of other people. Like a devil and an angel on my shoulders, my brain has arguments about the world I live in.

Can everyone else really be as idiotic as they make themselves appear? "No," the other side says, " they just have a different worldview". Is our view of the world too small or too large? Regardless of the technology and information that surrounds us every moment, it seems as though the majority of people willingly wear blinders. What is so scary about their peripheral vision? Oh, yeah, all the other people that think differently. Once, I wanted to effect changes in the world. I do remember that being a common theme throughout my coming of age. I've come to realize the fighting will never work... Not on people with tunnel vision.

When you're young the world is so small. It feels like one big, unhappy family, living in a small house. It's easy to surmise that if we put aside our differences, we could figure out a way to either expand the house or build everyone their own. Then you realize the house is Earth and you can't put an addition onto a planet. Ok, so why can't we work out the problems?

 Because Babel ain't got shit on us. There are so many different languages that make the world keep spinning. I'm speaking of culture, religion and politics. Discovering that there was so much more to those topics than I'd heard of growing up was a huge revelation when I was 11-12 years old. Then the terrorist attacks on 9/11 really showed me the extremes of the world. The religion, the politics, the change of culture, the change of media. The mere fact that someone could... That an entire group, albeit it relatively small, could hate that much... Kill thousands of innocents and that the affect would be my own people responding with such hate towards more innocents because of their religion and race and two wars...

 It was astounding, inexplicable and numbing. This was the start of my insatiable curiosity. I started reading. I started to watch the news(all wrong back then). I started to form opinions. I don't know what other 12 year olds were thinking then. What secret paths they were taking that would shape them for the rest of their lives, but I hope that whatever they were doing felt as amazing as what I went through.

At the time it felt like a slow journey. Time does move so slow when the only way to judge time is by the last 10 years of your short life and summer vacations. I don't wish to be a teenager again. The learning curve was too painful. I do wish I could feel excited again. I want to feel the rush of discovery. The feeling of being all alone in my head and the feeling of belonging when I found others like me.

 The biggest topic that confused, scared and occupied my mind the most was religion. My mother was Lutheran and my dad was just Christian. We never went to church except for baptisms and weddings, the rare Easter or Christmas. By 12 I was already debating my father about the existence of God. I found the topic dangerous and titillating. He found me arrogant and annoying. Showing this with a slap once at the dinner table. I eventually stopped debating him when I noticed him become more zealous. Nothing too extreme. He was just suddenly praying all the time before work, before bed, before supper, talking about Jesus more and watching a televangelist. Not having grown up with this, I didn't know how to act or what the boundaries were. Hence, the slap after saying "A man" instead of "amen".

Anyways, within less than a year I was agnostic. I stayed that way for a long time and turned my attention to war and politics. I grew up during the Clinton and Bush years. Bush started wars, so I couldn't be a republican. Remember, I thought we should try getting along. How can you fight for world peace? I paid attention to politics when things still seemed normal. There seemed to be some difference between the parties then. Or, actually, very little difference. That would all change soon enough with Tea Party politics. I actually went to a Tea Party rally in 2008. It was at a nice lakeside park in Syracuse, NY. We talked about less government, more freedoms, repealing the patriot act, read parts of the constitution. Good times... At that point I knew I leaned left, but I thought maybe the Tea Party was a moderate voice of reason. A side that would collaborate and listen, help make the peace I yearned for in peaceful ways. Like passing common sense laws and voting on things. I also went to see Ralph Nader speak that month. It was his last presidential run, so I guess it was a worthwhile anecdote.... Yawn.

Well, history is still unfolding for the Tea Party, but once the republicans get on board we all know the shit storm that followed. As I write this, republicans are voting for the 37th time to repeal Obamacare( and that's just the House of Representatives), attacks of civil liberties abound, the media is trying to create a scandal around(what I assume) were uncontrollable events in Libya and the IRS doing its job, and we are still wading through the floodwaters of a recession that just won't receded fast enough. It's tiring. A lot of people just don't care. No one agrees. When touchy subjects come up we speak with anger and ad libs. We use words we hear coming at us from the media and scatter tid bits of ideas we think we agree with all around. Like throwing rotted corn on the ground, hoping for a good harvest next election time. The heart, soul and faith have left us. We don't trust our government, we don't trust corporations, we don't trust our employers or peers.

 I don't have any faith in the generation after mine, either. We're only separated by a couple years, but for half my life I didn't have cable or Internet, I had to ask permission to use the house phone, I didn't have lots of video games, I typed reports for school on a Brother electric typewriter and recorded songs off the radio onto a cassette tape. TV bored me. I either read a book or went outside and jumped off things. Things weren't that much harder, but there was more accountability. I couldn't anonymously scream at strangers on the Internet, I couldn't sext my boyfriend, I didn't have all the knowledge in the world(or Wikipedia) at my fingertips, there was no autocorrect.

I am grateful for the Internet though. I did eventually find communities of people I fit in with. At the same time, those people had the potential to be so insanely different than me, outside of our common ground. Anyways, if I hadn't found those groups, I would have felt lonely and ashamed.... My curiosity might have simmered down. It has died down a bit....

I miss it... I miss all the beautiful beginnings... Those are the memory makers. Falling in love or lust with someone, finding inspiring content that actually changes your views, heartbreak, contentment, discovering your talents, discovering the band that is so you, learning to drive, getting to know your parents as an adult, losing your virginity, moving away from home, seeing the ocean for the first time and tasting the salt on your lips... Realizing that the salt tastes horrible... It all seems to die down.

Right now, all I can envision for the next 40 years is complacency and resentment at "everyone else". I hope I can make some beautiful endings too, because 40 years of complacency is a shitty dream.