“You really need to get your act together and get to State.”
I looked up at this man, my girlfriend’s old boss and thought, “Who do you think you are?’ There I was cheering on his kid, who didn’t even know which way to run on the soccer field, and he has the audacity to tell me to get my act together? I was, to say the least, a little perturbed.
The following night I was sitting in the car with said girlfriend after watching “The Social Network” (I liked it, she said it bored her.) and the conversation turned serious. “You’ve been in community college for eight years. When are you going to finally graduate. This is going nowhere if you don’t.” I was kind of starting to notice a pattern.
I have a tendency to drown out people when they’re pointing out my negative aspects so I just sat there staring out the window and enjoying the Bloc Party song that had been stuck in my head for a few hours. Unfortunately this little coping mechanism has caused a lot of problems in the past so I forced myself back to reality. I began wondering, ‘Why haven’t I accomplished this one goal? What is it that’s holding me back?’
“Heric, I think you’re just scared,” I heard her say.
Sometimes I wonder why I even try to figure anything out on my own.
She was right. And I think I’ve known this for years but I was just in denial. So many like myself have hopes and dreams that we want to achieve in our lifetime. We set goals and let them be known to the world. But when it comes to putting in work and doing what is needed to reach these goals, we tend to freeze up. And it’s the fear of failure that causes this.
How long can we go on like this? How many times can we start something just to quit in the middle of it? How many times can we tell people about some idea that never comes to fruition before they just start rolling their eyes?
Living like this can cause us to never be fulfilled as a person. We stay in our comfort zone, refusing to ever put ourselves in uncomfortable situations.
I know this article isn’t for everyone. There’s probably quite a few out there reading this that are thinking, ‘How about you quit whining and just do what you say you’re going to?’
Well to those I say that this is one of those goals that I had set for myself; having my own column in the school paper. As simple as it sounds, it wasn’t easy. And I’m not stopping at this.
For those that are like me, scared to start anything new, let me give you a little piece of advice my significant other gave me that night in the car.
“I think you have to just do something. Something you’ve been wanting to do forever. Buy a plane ticket, quit the job you hate, something, anything. But once you do just one thing that you think you can’t, everything else seems possible.”
So while I don’t plan on doing anything that drastic, yet, I will do certain little things that I’ve been putting off, starting with getting my act together.
