I want to make my mark on the world. I want to be something amazing, something memorable that people will look back and think: Wow! I could very well do this but the only thing really setting me back is me. I set myself back by saying not now, later. I’ll practice my instrument later. I’ll finish this and the other 4 essay ideas made from my own mental space later, I’ll clean my room later, I’ll clean my bunny’s cage later, I’ll clean the bathroom later, I’ll make myself food later, I’ll do my chores later. And with all that planning and laters, big surprise later never comes, even now I’m wasting time on this when I should be cleaning and getting ready because if my stuff isn’t clean by the time my mom gets home she isn’t going to be happy but I keep putting myself at ease with the delusion I and the people before me have created called later. It’s not that I’m not capable, I know my skill set and I can get it. As much done as I plan or need to but I still don’t and this has caused a lot of personal losses in my life, some observable and some not. This summer I was supposed to take a Spanish 2 course and a PE course called HOPE and I got kicked out of the first one and the second one I dropped and both because I wasn’t doing my work and I was severely behind and kept putting everything that I was supposed to be doing off for a later time that never came until it was too late. Another one was a play I was in called “As you like it” by Shakespeare, I was an understudy for Phebe and I never learned my part and while I’m lucky nothing happened to where the girl couldn’t perform I still view it as a personal loss that I never took the time to sit down and perfect those lines because in the end they were still mine. I think that it’s not really anything else but the problem of my conflicting mindset. I want to get a bunch of things done and I want to be successful and yet most of the days I have had this summer I’ve barely even left my bed and now I’m going back to school in 4 weeks into my sophomore year with barely anything to show for it other than a new realization that my teachers, parents, relatives, have all been saying for years that I put myself in my own situations and my own problems and that I am my own worst enemy when it comes to doing the things I want to do and being the things that I want to be, and they are right. The fact that I get the luxury of this and I still do nothing with this is pretty selfish, there are people everywhere who don’t get the luxury of later or not right now, or soon. In my community there was a 12 year old 6th grader who went hiking with his parents a week before the end of school went swimming or hiking I don’t know where probably not around here if what I heard about hiking is correct, but somewhere remote and either hit his head and died or drowned. No second chances, no more later, no more soon. It was immediate and unchangeable and unstoppable. Of course his parents, family, friends, and siblings are devastated, I didn’t even know this kid and I’m devastated that something so serious, so quick, could happen to someone so young. And yet even though we know how limited our time is here on this earth, how quick it’s here and gone, how time is never in our favor, I still sit and say later because comfortability is better than getting up and doing something about it. If I had stopped sitting around by now I would be a prodigy in so many things and I would have almost all I need to have. And yet I have right now. This moment. As I type this. But if I don’t get up and I don’t do nothing that is how it’s always going to be. I will always be as trapped as I make myself my perception is my reality.
Right now I am stuck between two realities: what I wish I was and what I am. This isn’t going to instantly help you get up and work, this might not even motivate you which is something I also search for but very rarely find, but if might help say later less. It might help you say let’s just get this over with. I’m going to go practice my instrument now, I’m going to finish my other 4 essays now, I’m going to clean my room now, I’m going to clean my bunny’s cage now, I’m going to clean the bathroom now, I’m going to go make myself food now, I’m going to do my chores now. Not because I want to, or I feel particularly motivated to, because if I don’t start now later will never come, later will up and pass me by before I even realize what has happened. Take you time back and stick up the finger to later.
