Vicariance

Dec 17, 2007 - 14:25 PM PST

I'm a watcher. It is a statement of fact that I'm none too pleased with because I wish I were a doer. Don't get me wrong, I do like watching people, observing interactions, be they live or digitally accessed - but it seems to be like a sickness with me, a sickness that is progressing, progressing while the band plays on: I used to watch AND I used to do. I'm sure there have been many brief periods in my life where I have done more than I watched, but starting around my twentieth birthday my quarterlife crisis began. It was just before the Millenium, and all of the Y2K hoopla was alive and paranoid. Myself, I was actually telling people that I was having a quarterlife crisis...[laugh] I just realized that back then, I thought it just had to do with nomenclature. I no longer considered myself a teenager at the time because I was in University, but there wasn't a chance in hell that I'd call myself an adult. I remember feeling like I was going to be sick, while hyperventilating, at the thought. However now, simply due to numbers, I didn't know what to call myself. NineTEEN = teenager...Twenty = ?????. I opted out of making a choice between teen and adult, and instead just called myself a student.
[I dunno if I'll get into it today, but hindsight is working overtime at the moment,
and I am beginning to connect dots about how fateful is was to give myself that
label...it's eight years later, I'm not technically a student, but I still feel like
one because I've yet to finish the degree I started then, though I have been working
on it since then with only a few interruptions...I don't want to make decisions about
my future because I feel like a failure as a student, and passed results are the best
indicator for future results right Dr. Phil? (though I read an article yesterday by
April Meyers? here on quarterlife that makes me want to re-evaluate the parameters for
'failure' that I'm using.)]


I always have loved to watch, to just Be and to let the visual input seep in. I liked just thinking my thoughts, and somehow I've always felt put-upon when I got pulled out of my thoughts and was asked to express them. It's a pain in the ass trying to communicate sometimes. It really does ask a lot: What if I don't feel like talking at this particular moment? What if I were much more content to I watched, AND I did. I did more than I watched, but the balance has been slipping slowly, yet steadily towards passivity. My life, my body, my actions, and my words have been marinating in tar of Numbness and nothingness.


I feel like I'm losing the plot here...that's ok but I started this off and called it VICARIANCE because i wanted to talk about how I've gotten to a point where I'd rather experience life safely and vicariously through tv shows, than actually take risks and experience it myself...yet I'm different parts of me are pulling in either direction...crap totally can't get it out now...I'll come back to it...but I didn't expect to veer off into re-living the birth of my quarterlife crisis. I'm a little thrown, but this is obviously the forum to knead these insights out, so I'll get back to it but omg I'm hungry...FOOD!