The Introspectacles

 Adult - a person who is fully grown and developed I've felt like I was coming of age for so long now that I'm starting to wonder if that will ever happen. I think being an adult means that you are perpetually coming of age. At every age, when I look back at my previous age I can see how much of a kid I was. The 'grown-ups' around me can sometimes be so childish with their beliefs and fears. Now I truly wonder what it means to be an adult? Is it simply to be above the age of 18-21? Is it that we now need to bear the responsibility and consequences of every decision we make? Is it to be reliable and dependable and take care of those around us? I guess all of those things constitute being a good adult. Many people around me(my family included) are good at these things.  For me, in order to grow up I feel like I need to figure out the world for myself and trust that I can make good decisions based on that. So much of the hard decisions we need to make depends on our resolv...

  adjective, with no special or distinctive features I am ordinary. The problem with my life is that I thought I was someone special and I assumed people had high expectations of me. "Intelligent, smart, pretty." good at everything I do, that in the end no matter what I did, how much I did, I kept letting everyone down; especially myself. If only I  had realized sooner that I was ordinary, more importantly that it was okay for me to be ordinary, I could have been living a happy life, doing ordinary things without feeling guilty. Now that's extraordinary.

If I were to describe myself without trying to impress anyone, I would describe myself as shy, unassertive, introverted, warm, kind-hearted, loyal with a hint of courage now and then. I have a hard time standing up for myself. I am slightly unaware of my surroundings especially in social settings and also have low awareness of my facial expressions. As a result, I am sometimes misunderstood for being judgemental(based solely on my facial expressions and not any words that were spoken), alientated and excluded at times for it. I took up a job that required me to work weekends and one that is hard to take leave from.I have to makeup for days I missed rather than getting a few days off like the rest of the organised work industry. So I missed a bunch of family gatherings, birthday parties, long weekend trips, important events. You can also now add to my list of faults as someone who probably doesn't really care for others even though they are super important to me in my head.  Express...

 The fourth dimension. The coin of life. "The only reason for time is so everything doesn't happen at once" ---- Albert Einstein I wish I could time travel. The first thing I would do is go back in time to when I was 18 and tell myself the things I've learned. The second thing I would do is go into the future and watch how I die (so I can get that over with.) The third thing would be to go far into the future to see what humans are like. What else did we figure out or did we forget everything? Did we survive or go extinct? What will the earth be like 20,000 years from today?  "There is never enough time to do all the nothing you want."    ------ Bill Watterson Time. If I had enough time, I would waste it away fantastically; following my curiosities; spend time just thinking. By the time we learn even a grain of truth, half our life is done. In today's world, ironically, we spend so much time doing everything but what we want just so we can afford to do t...

 In Ursula Le Guin's "A Wizard of Earthsea" there is a tale about a wizard named Ged who before becoming a great wizard fights an important battle with a Shadow that had been following him for many years. When he actually confronts the shadow, he realizes that the shadow is of himself. It takes him many years to defeat his shadow because it was just as strong as him. That's where I'm at in my life right now. I've been fighting my own shadow for the last 5 years. My Shadow is all the pain, self inflicted and other, that I carry around with me.   I think of the times I worked really hard and ended up having to start from scratch for no fault of mine. I think of the times when everyone around me was against the choice I had made in life and all I received from friends and especially my closest family(which surprised me) was negativity or a strong force to go on a different path. It's hard to fight against the people who care about you the most in this world. ...

  Life after death. Sometimes my heart bursts with an overwhelming feeling of time slipping away. Was I supposed to do many things, or was i simply supposed to be? Is it okay for me to live my life like this... slowly, wastefully enjoying it, wastefully procrastinating? Afterall, there is a good chance that we only get one chance and I may never live again. Is it a priviledge that I received; to exist in the first place? I keep waiting for something profound to strike me that will give purpose and meaning to existence as we know it. But, everyday it's the same. The space between the things that exist is a giant void of our unanswered questions. I grew up, not fearing death, because I learnt at a very young age the idea of reincarnation and that all of us may have had past lives and that this is our current afterlife. But there are too many holes in this one. For one, reincarnation probably doesn't exist. Second, there only seem to be more questions to this answer. If it does th...