Loserdom

For most of my life, I've wanted desperately to be anywhere else, doing anything other than what I was doing. When I was younger, this meant that I rarely got to enjoy what I was doing, as my head was always thinking of the life I'd have once I'd gotten where I wanted to be. In recent years, that's also been combined with wondering how my life might be different, better, "if only," if only I had stuck out that college, that job, that relationship. I always knew intellectually that most people went through this to some extent, but I'd never had someone really confirm it until I talked to a friend tonight.

I fell in love with Buddhism mostly because it was centered on the one thing I found so difficult - being completely present in my everyday life.

It seems to me that sometimes when you really want to be something, fit, intelligent, kind, prestigious, you might start out working really hard but you don't realize that you've made it until well past when you've actually made it, until you realize that the thing you worked so hard but still couldn't get quite right has now become second nature. A big reason I kept wanting to reach out to Sir was because I had started to realize that I had become many of the things he and I had wanted me to become. I didn't really know when it happened or exactly how it happened and I know it hasn't really lead to the life we/I had imagined it would, but, nevertheless, I was molded that way, it seems, when I wasn't paying attention.

This week, I am staying with my uncle, at his place in Podunk Midwest Mapdot. Someone has to give him two large syringes of antibiotics three times a day for six days. Seems silly to stay in a hospital with beds that only torture his weakened back and fractured ribs just to make sure he gets this medication three times a day.

So I'm here this week. And, depending on... well, a great many things, I might be moving out here, to my uncle's or someplace cheap and close. Yes, it's be because it is what is needed an what fits best for my family. But it would also be what I want. For all I might not have followed through on or achieved, getting up at 4am to hook my uncle up to a pump that delivers antibiotics through the chemo port in his chest seems to erase all that loserdom. I could be a bestselling, critically-acclaimed writer of literary novels, but if I didn't do this, I'd be a fucking loser. And, just like that, where I'm needed and where I am are the only place I want to be. And I truly don't care about where else I could be or who with or anything about where my decisions and actions might have led me because, while I wish it wasn't needed and I wouldn't choose why it's needed, there's no place else I want to be, probably for the first time in my life.