This weekend, my little world was rocked. Not by a single event but a collection of decisions and events. Things I have control over but for whatever reason have chosen not to pursue.
The most notable, not making getting my degree a priority.
Honestly, I could of had it months ago by writing 20 pages of bullshit, but a combination of childish disobedience to cave into "The man", not wanted to admit that it was time to grow up and... well, maybe part of me wanted to see how far I could fall. I'd been a very good student since before I can remember. It's one of the primary pillars that I had used to base my identity and when school was "almost" over, I didn't know what to do. So I didn't do anything...
And have been drifting since...
But I still had a couple dreams/desires...
The first, learning to dance: I sometime joke around with my friends that you don't really know what life is like until someone leaves you on the dance floor. That's the most vivid memory that I had when I was in high school. I didn't have a lot of self-esteem back then and I was caught up with the notion of what I was supposed to be versus just being who I was and on the way to what I wanted to be. In college, I vowed and eventually became pretty good at dancing. It became one of my passions and I took that feeling of accomplishment and used it as energy to improve other areas of my life. When I was nearing the end of school, I took some other dance classes but it seemed that I couldn't get that feeling again. I stopped doing as often and then I got scared to get back on the dance floor; the fear of comparing myself against what I was able to do and what I thought I should be able to do...
My other desire is to program in Cocoa. I've been playing with this dream for 6 years. Six years...
That's actually the first time I've actually thought about how much time I've put into just thinking about something instead of just doing something about it. I open the books, I do the tutorials, but I get stopped when I think about how crappy my code is going to be versus some imaginary other programmer. Honestly, it's one of the stupidest reasons not to do something... "I'm not going to do this because someone else can probably do it better, so I'm not going to even attempt to improve my skills."
So what shock me up?
I came across a blog entry by Aaron Hillegas (Leaving the Classroom), the author of Cocoa Programming for Mac OSX. A book that I've been lugging around a keystone of my fantasy of being a Cocoa programmer. In my dream, I was going to finish the book, go to one of his classes and become some kind of ubber programmer. Why was this happening? Why would he do this to MY dream!
He wanted to focus on the important things in his life.
And that's when it hit me...
I haven't been doing that. I've been just floating through life... Drifting along with these fantasies in my head. If these dreams were important to me, I should have been pursuing them.
I felt overwhelmed and I had to sit down. "What have I been doing all this time?" "What is important to me?"
My family is important to me.
My degree is important if only to make my parents proud.
Dancing is important to me.
And being a Cocoa Programmer is still important to me.
I won't give up. These are the things that are important to me.
Thank you for helping with my dreams and slapping me back to reality.
