I gave my editor a bunch of topics I wanted to write on; things that float around in my head that could be posts if I thought about them long enough. The whole idea was to have a constant pool of ideas to pull from and right about. Yeah… in retrospect it now seems like a bad idea because now he’s given me a post topic that I’m just not sure how to express though it’s my own.
If you’ve been a regular reader of my blog, and I hope most of you are, you know the situation in my family. My parents separated like 5 years back, and it was a little sudden for me. I came home from boarding school and I had a step mother! My dad is an extremely difficult person to deal with; he conned us into staying with him and really mistreated my mother (in my opinion of course) through the whole thing. We were not spared. Not that he beat us up or whatever but still mistreatment in other ways.
Anyway, through all that it’s become horribly clear to me that I’m the first born. I have responsibilities, implied and stated. I have to find a way to take care of my sisters and brother who follow me. You see, I want a certain lifestyle for my siblings, especially the last born who hasn’t really ever enjoyed the stability we did. She was born when we didn’t quite have money, then we did but my parents then started fighting ending with my parents’ separation.
So while I know that my sister and bro who follow me can, and probably will, be able to take care themselves, it’s the last born I really want to provide the very best for. She’s bright, brilliant even, and extremely talented. I don’t want that talent to go to waste, and that requires the best schools money can get. And sometimes I look to the future and the pressure to do so gets to me.
If there’s one thing I’ve always been sure of in my life, is that I’ll be rich, really really rich. It’s something that I’ve know, that’s been a part of me for almost as long as I remember. There are a few people who know me who see this in my future and most people I meet and talk to mention my boundless ambition and drive. I’ve never doubted I’d make it, until now.
I’m in my junior year of college, the future is beckoning its imminent arrival and I wonder if I’ll make it. I look at the challenges people have finding jobs or how poor those starting salaries are and I feel like that I may not make it. And if I don’t make it I’ll have let my baby sis down and she more than anyone deserves everything good this world has to offer. I can’t let her down.
Finally there are my own plans. Lofty ones, so lofty if you saw them you may laugh – perhaps one day I’ll share them with you – but just one of them, from not so long ago, give you an idea of the loft, was to become the richest man in the world. It didn’t, still doesn’t, seem like the most difficult thing in the world. I keep thinking just how disappointed I’d be if I couldn’t accomplish everything I set out to do.
Now I realize most of this is self-imposed pressure and I shouldn’t let it get to me but sometimes it does. And when it does I feel like crumbling and then depression hits. My greatest competition has always been myself, the version of myself I see in my head that is. When I tell my mum my fears she always tell me that the future is still far and not to worry too much about it, that I should commit my plans to God. Well, we’ll see, check in on my in 10 years and we’ll see just how I’m doing. But for now I’ll figure out how to deal with it. Peace!!!