My favorite thing I've ever written was a paper I wrote in high school. It was a paper that was supposed to center around "Gone With the Wind" and had to be based entirely on our favorite quote from the book. I picked this exchange between Scarlett O'Hara and Rhett Butler:
“Yes, I want money more than anything else in the world.”
“Then you’ve made the only choice. But there’s a penalty attached, as there is to most things you want. It’s loneliness.”
You'd think someone who'd latch on to the gravity of that hard truth years ago would be able to escape it. Unfortunately, and I'm channeling my best Jeremy Clarkson here, "You'd be wrong."
To be fair, I'm not exactly rolling in the Benjamins, or whatever hip phrase for "making a lot of money" is in fashion now, but my life is something that sixteen year old me would be really proud of: I'm a professional programmer, and I'm not saying that to brag or anything. I'm a software developer working at a gigantic multinational company. But it's come at cost.
Work stresses me out. People stress me out. At the end of the day, I don't feel like doing much more than coming home and just laying down for a little while, but I'm disgustingly, rock-bottomly lonely. I guess I could hang out with people after work, but I don't feel like it. You can see where this is a problem. For all the soul-searching and spiritual enlightenment I tricked myself into thinking I had when I was a teenager, I'm pretty hopelessly lost as an adult. I don't know how to juggle the internal conflict of wanting to be near people and wanting to get away from them. I got what I wanted, but I didn't think it through. I've even blamed this funk on the city I'm living in (which really doesn't lack a pretty severe funk of its own), as though Lexington or Nowhere would be places where I'd be happier.
Lexington with all of it's young nostalgia.
Nowhere with all of it's bittersweet memories.
I can't decide whether it's this city or just my life in general. It's all good on paper. Everything checks out. The numbers add up. I should be happy, or maybe not so far as happy. . . content? Whatever.
I want to believe that this is just a chaotic period of restoration and eventually everything will be fine, and who's to say that still doesn't hold true? Well. . . Margaret Mitchell, namely.
I think I'm talking too fast.
