"Sometimes I feel that I have failed everyone who loves me. I have let complacency rather than dogged determination define my life. When I look back at the quarter of a century that I have spent on this planet, I see nothing but failure – potential unfulfilled. The runner who constantly looks over at his fellow competitors quickly finds himself lagging behind. I measure and compare myself to those around me, all the while layering mask upon mask, until I do not know who I really am. Although I put up a brave front, the fear of relegation is truly a self-fulfilling prophecy. As a teenager, I experienced the deepest scar – genuine heartbreak. The heartbreak was the product of timidity more so than of bold arrogance. It was a massive blow upon my budding masculinity. Rather than growing up, I was stunted. I found the stereotypes far too easy to abandon. An arrogant, brash, and consciously negligent visage desperately concealed a profound disillusionment with the world and with human relationships in general. I could not trust myself, much less in others. Friendships were strained. My ego grew seemingly larger, while truthfully my self-esteem neared annihilation.
Emptiness was all that I felt. I could not see beyond a moment in the past, and a penchant for superficiality emerged. Things, things, and more things are what I turned to in order to fill a void that seemed boundless. I could not see an end to the pain – apart from the auto-destruct button. Where would I go? It all seemed to have passed me by. Once, I sat alone in the playground, reminiscencing about the lovely joyous excursions as a child. I was wiser back then, I thought, as that young boy swinging on the swing, without care or neuroses. He ran side by side with his peers without direction or telos; the joy was in the act itself. There was no concern for measuring sticks, no persistent fears about failure. But even childhood is romanticized beyond recognition; recollections are unreliable, the product of a melancholic mind. If better times were behind me, what could I look forward to?
Even now, as I type this meandering collection of pathetic recollections, I still think of what might have been. It has paralysed me. I have made bold manifestos in the past. “I will turn things around now!” are how they usually go. But the singular gesture, the monumental moment of epiphany burns out quickly once things ease back into the status quo. How to turn things around? I still do not know. I just know that I want to change. I just haven’t found out how."