Happy New Year?
Saturday, 31 December 2005 09:36 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
rosiedoesThis time of year always depresses me. I'm sure it stems from many childhood years of my mother proclaiming how awful Christmas was and how much she hated it. And New Year - like my birthdays - only serves to make me feel like I'm wasting time and should have achieved so much more than this.
I should have. To supposedly have as much 'talent' and such a 'brilliant' mind as I was always assured in my youth, and instead to waste it in an office where I am unappreciated seems shameful. I suppose I should be a successful writer or artist or something equally obvious, unstable and befitting of a Sagittarian. I should be Michael Palin. So charming and intelligent and well-travelled.
Instead I'm a lost and lonely middle-aged-twenty-something-child-at-heart. I feel twenty-years ahead of myself and five years behind. I should be at a stage where I've recently left university and am looking forward to exploring the world. I'm stuck in a trap of one day/next year/if... and I can't honestly see myself breaking it.
My aunt once said to my nan, "That's what I love about Rosie, she just decides she wants to do something and does it." I'm yet to find something I've 'just done'. My family never support me in these decisions. They're always too busy being 'realistic' while their own planning applications are turned down and turned down by the council or they never quite sell that house and move away. I've been a grown up since I was a child, raising my mother and brothers, dragging the family onward through other people's problems, until I couldn't carry on any more. I like to think that made me strong, but I'm sure it didn't really. I've just lived my youth backwards, so that now I'm in my twenties I'm really a nervous youngster wondering how long I can keep up the pretense of adulthood. Sometimes I just wish I could give it all up and pass it on to someone else to deal with.
I have dreams I wish I could follow, and I tell myself categorically I will, but at the end of the day I always see myself no closer to achieving them than I was when I made the decisions. On the one hand I see myself as I want to be, in ten years time: happy, attached, settled - probably in Vancouver - in a career I enjoy, successful at what I do. And then the realistic side of me snorts and notes that the truth will be that in ten years time I will still be single, probably still living in rented accommodation, in a dead-end job where I am always convinced I will be sacked at any moment. So exactly where I am now, to be honest.
Someone has already said to me once, tonight, that I need to think positively or I won't achieve anything anyway. But thinking positively really is just lining up a neat little row of disapointments, isn't it?
But I want to look back on 2006 and be able to say, "Yes, I did something meaningful. Something that affected my life, if not someone else's."
Truthfully? I just want to be happy, but there's nothing in my life at the moment which offers more than passing amusement. I need to change that, I know. But I can't fathom out where to begin.
I should have. To supposedly have as much 'talent' and such a 'brilliant' mind as I was always assured in my youth, and instead to waste it in an office where I am unappreciated seems shameful. I suppose I should be a successful writer or artist or something equally obvious, unstable and befitting of a Sagittarian. I should be Michael Palin. So charming and intelligent and well-travelled.
Instead I'm a lost and lonely middle-aged-twenty-something-child-at-heart. I feel twenty-years ahead of myself and five years behind. I should be at a stage where I've recently left university and am looking forward to exploring the world. I'm stuck in a trap of one day/next year/if... and I can't honestly see myself breaking it.
My aunt once said to my nan, "That's what I love about Rosie, she just decides she wants to do something and does it." I'm yet to find something I've 'just done'. My family never support me in these decisions. They're always too busy being 'realistic' while their own planning applications are turned down and turned down by the council or they never quite sell that house and move away. I've been a grown up since I was a child, raising my mother and brothers, dragging the family onward through other people's problems, until I couldn't carry on any more. I like to think that made me strong, but I'm sure it didn't really. I've just lived my youth backwards, so that now I'm in my twenties I'm really a nervous youngster wondering how long I can keep up the pretense of adulthood. Sometimes I just wish I could give it all up and pass it on to someone else to deal with.
I have dreams I wish I could follow, and I tell myself categorically I will, but at the end of the day I always see myself no closer to achieving them than I was when I made the decisions. On the one hand I see myself as I want to be, in ten years time: happy, attached, settled - probably in Vancouver - in a career I enjoy, successful at what I do. And then the realistic side of me snorts and notes that the truth will be that in ten years time I will still be single, probably still living in rented accommodation, in a dead-end job where I am always convinced I will be sacked at any moment. So exactly where I am now, to be honest.
Someone has already said to me once, tonight, that I need to think positively or I won't achieve anything anyway. But thinking positively really is just lining up a neat little row of disapointments, isn't it?
But I want to look back on 2006 and be able to say, "Yes, I did something meaningful. Something that affected my life, if not someone else's."
Truthfully? I just want to be happy, but there's nothing in my life at the moment which offers more than passing amusement. I need to change that, I know. But I can't fathom out where to begin.
