You sensed that you should be following a different path, a more ambitious one, you felt you were destined for other things but you had no idea how to achieve them and in your misery you began to hate everything around you.
--Feodor Doestoevsky, Netochka Nezvanova ("Nameless Nobody")
This nameless nobody relates very strongly. At least until the word "misery".
__________
I can't say I was groomed for anything. My parents put me in a 'gifted' class in grade seven, not because I was some sort of prodigy but because I was ferociously bullied at two different schools over the three years prior and they thought a group of more academically inclined students wouldn't break my glasses or stuff me into garbage cans and toilets face first. A good thought: the only bullying I got in grades seven and eight came from the "(mun)danes" in the school at large. But my fellow 'gifties' didn't treat me very well either, because my 'gifts' didn't align with theirs. I've told you this before.
I can't fault the teachers....academically, at least. My grade seven teacher read us everything from Beowulf to Bernard Shaw, and for every book we read in class I'd read at least one related novel at home. Mr. McLeod was also in the habit of whispering in his students' ears, and licking them as he did it; he was sacked sometime in March, if I remember correctly.
Those two years in the gifted program, as I've also told you, stunted me terribly in mathematics, a subject I had less than zero aptitude for as it was. I hold them directly responsible for my having to work my ass off in grade twelve for a final grade of 65 percent -- twenty points below any other grade I received in high school.
My mother often lamented that my grades weren't even higher. She felt that I was slacking through high school, that I should have been applying myself much more diligently. We had some very bitter arguments.
I am, and always have been, a "good enough" sort of person. High eighties to mid nineties seemed good enough to me, good enough to get a scholarship from the Ontario Provincial Police, good enough to set me up for whatever I wanted to do in life.
I had no idea what I wanted to do in life. I still don't. I doubt I ever will.
I will never forget some random stranger on the quad outside MacDonald House, Frosh Week, asking me what I was majoring in (English) and what I was going to do with my degree. I stopped dead. If I didn't know what I wanted to do with my life, how could I know what to do with a degree? The random stranger suggested teaching and I recoiled. It's not that I couldn't be a good teacher. I think I could be...if my students wanted to learn. I'd just spent five years of high school surrounded by people who didn't want to learn, and the prospect of dealing with those people professionally made my blood run cold. I shelved the decision. I'm good at shelving decisions.
It became a moot point because I never finished the degree. I never finished the degree because I was so beyond disgusted with the entire university environment (and also because I became hellishly addicted to the internet, which was everything I came to university for). And I've told you that too.
That's a lot of words to say I have never done anything ambitious towards following any path. According to Gospodin Dostoevsky, I should be (a) miserable and (b) inflicting that misery on all around me.
Well, first off I'm not generally miserable. I do go through down periods, usually lasting a few hours to a few days, and yes, I can get in a rut about what little I've made of my life and how little effort I can ever seem to muster to make anything of my life and it's beyond laziness, Ken, what the fuck is wrong with you?
Second, at those times you won't find me here. Whatever the old saying says, misery does NOT love company, and I have enough trouble imagining people hate me without giving them a(nother) reason to.
And third, especially since the pandemic, when I find that hate starting to slide in, I make a choice to replace it with love. "And in my confusion I began to love everyone around me".
_________
I don't believe in destiny.
As I understand it, destiny is something lovely and huge that just happens to you, without any effort on your part. If you have to work for it, it's not destiny, it's a product of your own hard work. I really do want to emphasize this point. My pal Craig was destined to be a professional trumpeter. I knew it in grade ten and I'm pretty sure he did too. Do you have any idea how hard he worked to get to that point? He practiced hours and hours a day, networked his ass off, and I can't think of a single thing I want badly enough in this world to expend that kind of effort. Craig's talent with a trumpet is undeniable, but it was his tenacity that allowed him to live his dream.
We say of our life partners that we were "destined" to be together and it's sooooo romantic, isn't it? Or maybe cloying, maybe just a bit controlling. Who are you to deny your destiny? You belong right here, with me.
I mean, it's hard not to imagine some guiding process behind the dizzying array of choices and circumstances that have to occur to bring any two people together. But calling it 'destiny' kind of undermines what happens after you meet...a whole lot of hopefully very conscious choices on both your parts to grow closer. Little different from how Craig made a conscious choice every day to pick up his horn and blow. How do you get to Carnegie Hall? Practice, baby, practice.
Besides, not to put too fine a point on it, but I truly believe the group of potential lifemates is much, much larger than most people imagine.
_________
The path of least resistance always felt like the correct path to me, as far back as grade school, if not before. To this day, if I make a typo three times writing a word, I'll abort the entire thought. To those who say "no pain, no gain", I've always retorted, "no pain, no....PAIN! Duh!" And so I've lived a simple life, with simple pleasures, all I can afford. But you know something? The best things in life really are free. I look at a guy like Elon Musk and marvel. He's got everything he could ever want, enough money to buy and sell God....and I've never once seen him happy. I've never once seen him sharing a friendly, let alone a loving, moment with anyone.
I see in him everything Eva saved me from, an existence full of stuff, devoid of substance. Instead I learned to "en-joy" life: remember, the prefix "-en" means "to put into". Put the joy into life and you'll find happiness in the damnedest places. I microdose on little glimmers of joy every day.
I have no tenacity, so I've had to scale my dreams down. I'd love to see the world, but the system we have says I would need to fundamentally change who I am to do it. Because I can't just run out and hop on a plane; that costs money, and the only legal way to get money in sufficient quantity is to sell your soul to the machine.
I refuse.
The machine is fundamentally anti-human. And I don't know if you've noticed, but it's starting to break down. There's a ronk! ronk! ronk! as society loses its bearings....the whole thing's going to come apart in your hands if you get too close.
Do I wish I lived a different life? Sometimes. Sometimes very strongly. But never enough to forfeit who I am.
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