It’s 4:55 in the morning. I woke up a few moments ago because I was incredibly thirsty. The whisky that I drank last night was very dehydrating. I went to bed at some point between 1 and 2 AM, and I have to be up in about 1 hour, at 6 AM, for work. Nevertheless, I sit here typing… Naturally, I am groggy since it is the middle of the night (almost time to get up actually) and I had a little to much alcohol before bed. Random irritating thoughts were going through my mind from the moment I woke, the first being that it was troublesome that I would awake feeling slightly unwell while knowing that I would have to start my day very shortly, after little sleep. I got up to get some cold water from the fridge. My mind cycled through images of things that I found gross at work, I’m not sure why, almost as if I was having an involuntary lucid nightmare. I am not fully awake. It’s weird how being hungover and tired can take your brain to strange places. A thought that did not feel strange was two simple questions: “what am I doing with my life?” and “why am I doing it?”. The thoughts cycling in my mind stopped very abruptly on these questions. I feel like I have asked myself these questions before, but I feel like I am thinking about them differently at the moment. What would I be doing if I did not have any constraints (primarily the intangible kind that are self-imposed due to feelings relating to family members) and how much more of this can I take? One more question comes to mind: would I be asking myself these questions if I didn’t feel so tired and irritated? Would I wake up tomorrow, or next week, or next month, after a good night’s rest, and not have this feeling of dread? This really is a feeling of dread. Perhaps I have instinctively started writing to attempt to put a finger on where that dread is coming from. I think back to London when I was overcome by a phase of overwhelming anxiety. Am I headed in the same direction again? I have the urge to find the path of least resistance to being satisfied with my daily life again. It feels like an imperative for my own sanity. The past few months have not been healthy for me. The past few weeks have been the worst part of it all. Have I hit the low point in this period or is there further down to go? My new job as a line cook is taking a toll, for a variety of reasons. Perhaps the feelings that I have towards this job is a symptom of a deeper underlying problem. I come back to the question - why am I doing any of this? Am I doing this for myself, or for my parents, or my girlfriend? Am I doing it to achieve something positive, out of motivation to reach a goal that is interesting to me, or am I doing it out of fear? The truth is that I know that my family members’ feelings, and my fears about how my actions might affect them, have too much of an impact on my decisions. So what should I do? The answer should be self-evident I suppose: figure out what I would do if I wasn’t basing my decisions on fear. Fear kills dreams and ambition, doesn’t it? Seems like a rhetorical question. Would my time better be spent finding a purpose, something to put my wasted energy towards? I have been thinking a lot of my friend who is dedicating almost every waking hour of his day to his creative projects which he appears to be passionate about. His day job pays the bills but it is not “what he does”. His drive is admirable. Motivation like that must only come from knowing that his time is being spent on something meaningful. At this moment I feel motivated to do something meaningful, but I don’t know what. What I do know is that I have not been productive, and what I have been doing does not feel meaningful. Am I delirious or will this still make any sense later? It’s now 6:03. Time to start the coffee machine and get started with my day.
Here’s my conclusion for now. I have to stop asking myself “what would they want me to do?” and figure out what I would do. Would I be doing this job? Would I still be doing an MBA? Would I still be in my relationship? Would I be in in a different city?
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