Ambition addiction / Ego like nicotine
"O god, I could be bounded in a nutshell, and count myself a king of infinite space, were it not that I have bad dreams."
-> Hamlet
Ambition
I am so many things. Ask me who I am and I'll walk you through a library, I'll open file cabinets, fumble with a keyring, dig through boxes of camera film and unlabeled thumb drives. An archivist, obsessive. Jackson Pollok could paint a better portrait of me than I could. It's almost a relief no one has tried to get to know me. almost.The brain wrinkles and folds and pulses with webs of neurons and veins. I feel mine is a mass of writhing tentacles, coiling around each other, reaching, stretching, incomprehensible. Each slimy appendage with it's own brain, it's own heart. Beating all together like war drums. It's so loud sometimes I can hardly think. My thoughts are often conversations. Words on a page. I have to talk to myself to think. So I write. I write a lot. Lists, poems, quotes, ideas, things I think, Things I like, feelings, diaries. Blogs. Social media posts.
Ignored, Outcast. Too loud, too talkative, too much. I stayed between pages of notebooks and lines of code my whole life. I guess it makes sense I'd want someone to listen. NPD is a hell of a thing and looking back I can see the signs of my god complex pretty early. The conviction that someone would pay attention, listen. I started posting poetry on instagram when I was 13. I never wanted fame, I guess, kids weren't internet stars back then. But I thought someone would read, would like them. That I could grow an audience, maybe. A foundation for when I published my first book. First. There would be many. Ambition. Attention. Appreciation.
I was desperate. It's almost funny. Writing is all I had, all I was, All I could give. And even though no one noticed me, I was there. I learned to scream into the void. I didn't notice the void filling my lungs with each breath, but we had become one. Encased in my own shell, Somehow, I had become a king of my own infinity. Convinced it was my birthright to be a god. I kept writing, posting, screaming. Addicted.
I'm 22 now. Last year I got into CSS/HTML. Yet another hobby to throw myself into. Another obsession, another thing to fill notebooks with. Another jewl in my crown. I had fun at first, a lot of fun. I love learning and I loved seeing my website, as crude as it was, come together. I very quickly spiraled. Very quickly got the idea yet again that I could be important, I could mean something. I made a lot of different blog pages for different things, tried many different site builders, spent says filling pages and tweaking code. It never looked good. But I was proud. until I realized I had gotten so carried away and it was all too much, and it was no longer fun.
I convinced myself I could make something people would want to read. They'd be interested, invested, they'd care and I'd exist. This wouldn't all be for nothing. I didn't want to let go. But it was exhausting. I couldn't admit defeat. I had to build my fucking legacy.
When you're at rock bottom, there's nowhere to go but down. I built SubBasement after SubBasement.
Ego
I didn't want to let go of any of it, even if it was no longer fun. Letting go means I'm no good. I wanted to be good. I wanted to have fun. I wanted to be this great thing. I wanted so much. I tried to make it make sense, I tried to act like any of it mattered. It didn't. It never would. Not like this.It mattered to ME. I cared about this, I didn't want to crash and burn, I didn't want to admit that it wasn't just about a few blogs. It was a lifetime of never being good enough. Never being seen. Trying, picking up a project, running alone in the dark, giving up. No one noticing. No one remembering my name. Not existing. It wasn't about the blogs, not really, I can write and keep it private, but the idea that I could make a cool, shiny web of sites that people would see... I wanted that. I thought I could have it.
I stopped working on everything for a while. I was overwhelmed, facing realities I didn't want to face. But I hated ignoring my projects, too.
I guess there's some relief in letting go. I finally decided I want to have fun again. No one but me knows the pages are gone... and that stings, but, now I can focus on one thing, make it how I like it, have fun again. There's still other projects I'm working on, but it's fun.
I'm learning how to let go and be okay with it. I'm learning how to let myself be amateur. Learning how to exist when only I know I do.
The mass of tentacles slides around, pulses, reaches and pulls and wraps around itself. And that's all it needs. It'd be nice to let someone inside the sarcophagus. For now the tentacles hold many different projects, hobbies, pens and paintbrushes and cameras and flash drives and we bury them inside. our nest of cables and wires. the electricity is warm.
Here in this infinity, I could be a king. I could be so many things.