My sickness

I have oftentimes wondered at my lack of ambition. To be honest, my wife has wondered at it far more than I. It is the bane of her very life, and for good reason. I tend to be unmotivated and unambitious. I do not "schmooze" for work, I am bad at courting people, and I could not possibly tell you where I want to be in ten years. My endeavors (this very essay included) tend toward the self-indulgent rather than the possibly lucrative. As I told a friend the other day, "Hardly anyone reads this crap when it's free, I don't foresee anyone paying for it." It's not that I would scorn success, fame, riches and all of that "American Dream" claptrap, I just seem not to strive for it.

It has been years now that I've been dealing with this problem. I have never been a particularly competetive person, preferring to have fun at whatever I'm doing rather than come out on top. Losses are generally met with an "Oh well, next time," while wins usually garner a "Well, that was a surprise. Again?" This is not, of course, taking into account my acknowledged love of shit-talking, but I think that can be sidebarred for a moment while I focus on the real issue at hand. Shit talk is a fun hobby, but I never even indulge in it unless it is with close friends, and generally only when I am losing.

Confronted with this growing problem, I asked myself – as I find myself doing more and more often nowadays - why? Why am I so lackluster about success, about the future, and about the rewards that everyone seems to be so infatuated with? Upon great reflection, I think the problem is that I am an inherently nostalgic person.

Nostalgia, I have come to realize, is a dangerous and insidious disease. It sneaks up on its victim without warning, consumes them, and leaves them to rot and decay, unable to take nourishment from their memories and unwilling to subsist on the present. I would not classify myself as a person who is morbidly nostalgic, but I certainly do have a serious case. The funny thing is, I am not nostalgic for any particular time or place or situation, but rather have a general malaise that covers more-or-less all of my existence. There are days I am nostalgic for a conversation I had last week, and days when I sit and contemplate the fun times we used to have jumping from couch to chair to bed, pretending that the floor was made of lava. From time to time I even dwell on memories that I am not entirely certain actually happened. Such is the depth of my illness.

To my thinking, nostalgia does not necessarily mean a desire to return to a certain time in one's life, but rather the somewhat unhealthy tendency to return to that time and dwell on it. I would rather die than go back to who I was in high school, but I do spend a certain amount of time thinking about those days fondly. I spend an inordinate amount of time contemplating fun times my wife and I have had as adults, running over them again and again in my mind, when it would be so simple to create new ones. Of course I have never, and certainly would never, turn down the opportunity for entertainment in the present tense, but somehow in my mind, something that happened even twenty-four hours ago holds as much or more significance as what is happening at this very moment.

So this is the root of my problem, the germ of my lack of ambition: if things past hold as much weight as things in the future, then why bother striving to new heights? It has begun to disturb me slightly that, when faced with the threat of death (either real or hollow), my typical response is "Eh, I've had a good run."

This, then, is the beginning of my convalescence. As the old, hackneyed, horrible saying goes: the first step to recovery is admitting that you have a problem. Hi, I'm Andrew, and I'm a backward-looking person. I hit rock bottom this afternoon, when I came to my senses and realized that I was reading inane email conversations I had with my friend Steve five years ago. I have indulged in behavior that was destructive and harmful to myself and those around me, to my work as an artist, and to my role as a husband, a teacher and a friend.

Man, that felt good.

Only eleven steps to go.