I’ve been thinking a lot about fear lately. Mostly because I am full of it. I’m bursting with it really. 

If I were any more fragile right now I’d be made of meringue. 

There are moments in your life when reality hits you so hard in the face, you have to take a step back and wonder why it would do something as awful as that. One of those moments where you ask yourself, “did that really happen? Did life really just bitchslap me in front of all of our friends at Kelly’s birthday party, and then just walk out of the room like everything is normal, and then pretend the next day like it doesn’t have anything to apologize for, and say that it isn’t even worth talking about?” I just had one of these moments. 

It turns out, through a series of events that would not be interesting enough to outline here, that I am completely and unequivably fucked. I, at the tender of age of 21 have had a complete mid life crisis and suffered a startling loss of direction. I used to have a pretty firm grasp of my goals, my desires, what I wanted to get out of life, and how I was going to get there. Things seemed pretty clear, because I planned for them to happen, and I’d be damned if I’d let anything get me down. 

Well, consider me damned. You can also consider me fucked up the ass, fisted and verbally abused while you’re at it. 

This of course all comes back to that wonderful thing we call money. It’s no secret that my finances have always been in a sorry state. I never factored in being rich anywhere in my grand life plans before, because being comfortably poor has been the one constant in my life. In fact I can say that it’s definitely been one of the few facts of life that hasn’t let me down at some point. Well, not to deviate from the norm, money has once again stuck it’s big, fat fist up my ass.

(I apologize for the graphic gay talk. I just finished season one of Queer as Folk, and I now dream of a world where queer terminology just becomes something second nature and colloquial)

I’ve been sitting here for the past couple of minutes trying to come up with a more eloquent way of saying thing, but really the best image I can come up with that will adequately illustrate not only my emotional state right now, but also the situation as it stands now… I’m fucked. 

I’ve been backed into a corner. A corner that includes taking a management position at family video and indefinitely putting off my dreams of being that kick ass twenty-something living it up in the city trying to make it as an artist. While the idiom “starving artist” has its charms, in my case the starving part may become a  bit too literal to be healthy. I always had these big aspirations about struggling for a couple of years to pay the rent , then being discovered for my intense amount of talent and being able to live a comfortable life of noteriety and financial stability. 

That’s not going to happen for a long time. Because dreams like that, dreams that big take time. They take focus and dedication, and more importantly they take people. Meeting lots of interesting people who can help facilitate your rise to the top. Working 60 hours a week in Kansas City for Family Video so I can pay off my staggering, dear I say paralyzing amount of debt won’t leave a lot of time. It won’t leave a lot of room for a life either. At least not the life that I ever thought I’d be living.

And without all that, I feel hopeless. I feel like for the first time in my life the luck has run out. I don’t think I can talk my way out of this, nor can I wait around for some kind of miracle to happen that’ll get me through. I’ve been a fool, and now life’s little lessons have finally caught up to me. And it ain’t pretty.

It took me a long time to be able to sit down and right about this. It took me a long time to sort out my feelings about the whole thing. I’m scared. I’m scared that I won’t be able to hack it. That everyone who’s ever thought I’d fail will be right, and I’m afraid more than anything that I’ll lose something about myself in the process. This is all, of course, fairly dramatic, and like a lot of things I’ve ever blogged about will serve as a milestone in my own self-absorption and will only be looked back on with scorn and a maybe a slight laugh on my part.

That’s what I’m hoping at least. I’m hoping that the mix of my defeatist attitude, and my alarmist nature have finally met cute and are looking at have one big life-sized baby called a stress related ulcer. 

Let’s hope that at least doesn’t happen.