Late Bloomer

  A bad cold, headaches, and mild depression have crept over me, washing away yesterday in restless sleep. I read about the great poets when they were my age and I feel like I am  years behind them. Meaning, they had all accomplished as much at 15 as I have at 23. I know I had about five wasted years since I started college.

  One of the hurdles that I have to get over this year, is my fear and disappointment about arriving at adulthood, not an artist, not a millionaire, not a decadent burnout, not an accomplished poet or painter, all these things I dabbled at "being" (tried to be or wished I was) without much success, rather I arrived as a directionless, unemployed, blogger. 

  I walked back onto campus yesterday. It's interesting that I think I took exactly the same walk five years ago. I remember watching myself, as I bounded onto campus, 18 and starting school all over again. It felt like a Renaissance, a second chance, a burst of unbounded energy. Then, yesterday, I was 23; school was finished, and I was just tying up some loose ends. I felt melancholy but wiser in some sappy sort of way.

  I got all the important things that I needed out of college, I guess. But no matter how hard I worked, I could only get about 50% out of myself. I worked like a madwoman trying to do everything at once. But two things I didn't do . . . I didn't prioritize well and I didn't take care of myself emotionally and  spiritually. By the last semester, I was burned out. I jogged through the finish line... way behind, and exhausted.

  A part of me desperately wishes I knew (at 18) what it has taken me so long to learn: The habits, routines, and little choices one makes in life. I always told myself that I was good at the big things and bad at the little. I pretended to be the savant, but the truth was that my concentration was scattered over disparate discontinuous points of focus. My "backbone" was weak. Art requires a combination of recklessness and precision. Most of the time, I was just lazy.

  If I look back at the journals I wrote five years ago, it is clear that there were many other problems I had to deal with before even getting to the point I'm at now. 

     My hope is that for whatever reason, my timetable is different. Maybe something inside me is still growing... an unrealized potential, gestating, waiting for an opportunity to be born.