Misplaced Ambition

“To be or not to be, that is the question.” My life could definitely be a Shakespearean play.

Even when I was little girl, I knew I wasn’t like all the girls around me. I had a germ that not many around me had. The germ was pretty common in a lot of women around that time but apparently it wasn’t common enough in my surroundings. The germ was “ambition” and it is still germinating in my brain today. I always had a feeling that I needed to be something big, something other than just another “Mrs. Someone”, which is all the girls around me wanted to be. Funny how even at that age, girls are so sure that they can be nothing but somebody’s wife and be content with that fate.

I longed to be larger than life, and for a while, around the end of my high school years, I achieved that larger-than-life status. But shortly after I started college, I realized that I wasn’t all that great, that there were girls who were than me, who had achieved much more than me. That served only to demotivate and confuse me when it should have done the exact opposite.

In addition to feeling like an absolute waste of air, I realized that I had been mistaken about my aptitude and had gotten stuck in the wrong major. Could life get any worse?

Probably it could.

Somewhere down the road I realized, much to own peace of mind, that I didn’t have to compare myself to anyone, that I didn’t need anybody else’s achievements to undermine my own, even if they are only a few. Some achievement is better than none.

So now I have a bunch of choices to make. I can’t just sit around doing nothing. I have to go out and grasp my calling and make it turn me into more than a woman; make it turn into a larger-than-life phenomenon. But what really is my calling? Mass Communication/Journalism? English Literature? Comparative Studies? Politics?!

The confusion has been there since I was child, mainly because I think I am a little bit of everything; 1 part avid reader to 2 parts writer to 3 parts public speaker. I also had the illusion, somewhere in my teens, that I could actually become a world renowned mad-scientist if I focused all my energy on chemistry. I also wanted to be a singer at one point, which I knew wouldn’t really fair well with the majority in my family. I also wanted to be a lawyer, but my Mom was quick in killing that bug.

Most of all I wanted to become a writer, and that bug never really left me – if only it grew bigger and stronger and meaner with the passage of time. I want to write about places that exist in my imagination, about the lies we tell ourselves to keep us from falling apart, about the experiences common to all humanity, about sunsets and mountains and the price you pay for being too strong in a weak-willed society.

So, a writer it is then, eh?