I've been thinking lately about things people told me when I was younger.
"You're too young to be a pessimist."
"You need to live a bit longer to feel properly frustrated."
And it's made me think, what qualifying age and how much experience of life do you need to have before you can be a pessimist and properly frustrated?
Frustration can be found at every point in your life. When I look at Roman I see his frustrations with so many things and he's not even a year old. He can't speak in sentences, has to "go" in a nappy, he can't walk, has to rely on everyone else and their schedules (kind of) to be fed, cared for and loved. Of course he doesn't know anything different and is working from the ground up but I can see the frustration of when he takes to his feet and can't get anywhere fast...or, you know, get anywhere at all.
But he still ploughs on regardless. Still pulls himself up onto the radiator thingy for drying clothes/tables/anything really and he still tries the quest for being able to cruise around the place rather happily.
For myself right now there's a frustration in my life that I can't seem to move forward and I feel at the same spot I landed upon about five or six years ago: back at the beginning. In the sense there's a bit of a freedom about that, there's also the major blues you get with it. The creeping thoughts of: I'm going to end up a nobody. And they'll carve my grave stone with: Cara Quinn, Nothing Special. And slowly, slowly all these other random assortment of thoughts combine to make one ball of misery.
And people tell you things like;
People: "Hey, Jesus was a nobody."
Me: "A nobody who started a movement with 2.1 billion followers."
Plus, that's just dumb. Jesus isn't and wasn't a nobody. Don't even get me started. Seriously.
Anyway...Jesus and babies that are trying to walk everywhere aside I'm mad at myself for being 25 and having too many interests that I can't really do anything with.
Last weekend my Dad told me to make plans. I remember being 22 years old and telling him; "Plans are TOTALLY dumb! I never see them through anyway, so I don't see the point in making them!"
Words, meet mouth. I shall now begin to devour you and prepare for desert: some Humble Pie.
The thing is when you're 15 you start to develop this complex. It's called I Know Better Than My Parents. You don't shake that off until you have your own kids. I'm serious. Or maybe when you're 30 if you don't have kids. Or maybe when you're 30 and have kids. Or maybe you're one of these people who don't ever suffer the complex.
The thing is this: Daddy K was right. Plans are not "totally dumb." They're essential. I have also been writing lists for years. Mummy K does this as well and this is a kind of planning. So really, I've been making plans my whole life.
So, this week, I made some plans. It's not the first time I've sat down and wrote a list of formal ideas with dates attached to achieve said ideas and still not followed them through. But I know I will see these ones through, for a start they're goals I want to reach and the above is my road map of how to get there - well, maybe not a road map as I'm terrible with any kind of map or instruction, but you can grasp the metaphor I'm sure.
So perhaps yes, this is the beginning. But it's not so bad being here after all.
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