I am a very passionate person. I give off the appearance of apathy sometimes, but it is only a safety mechanism so no one can touch what I strive for and hold most dear.
I hold a certain individual in a very high regard. This individual is promising as a teacher one day and intelligent. He is funny, and noble and---and if I were to list all of his wonderful traits, this paragraph would be an essay dedicated to how wonderful he is. But there is one very striking and unsettling way that he is not so wonderful. He has no drive.
He has no instinctual motive to do and be better or to rise above an opinion to ascertain a new one. He simply exists with no desire to move forward. He's been in the same job for years, hasn't tried to go back to school and he doesn't try to even figure out what he wants. He settles for stagnancy because it is safe and because he feels in this way, he is hurt less than he has ever been.
What strikes me most confused about his character, is that he chooses to stay in one place. I've met people traumatized by their past, inspired by it, or in such decline from that past that they literally believe they cannot do things that "normal" people do. But this is not my friend. He recognizes his position, the worser positions and the better ones that come with work. He vacantly decides not to move. It's not as if he's incapable or blind; he's afraid.
And even as I tried to comfort him and assuage any of his feelings about not being good enough, he turned all of it away. It's as if bullies' opinions amount to more than those who actually care about him.
It is literally the saddest thing I've ever seen in someone with so much potential. No one can fix your problems for you, and no one can wave a magic wand and erase the past. You can only blame people for what they did to you; how you choose to react or move on or not move is entirely up to you. I honestly think that this apathetic attitude towards stagnancy is the reason why capitalism works so well for the 1% and why the college dropout rate is so high.
We had an existentialist discussion in AP Lit a few weeks back, and my class was split into two separate ideas: the one where your choices control your future and the one where fate decides everything for you. Even if you believed in fate, do you really want to be the person who didn't try to change it? Fate is such an abstract concept too; everyone thinks of fate as the endgame, where you end up. They say it's your fate to marry this person or to end up with this job. I don't think it matters. You can't just waste away because everything is predetermined or live in the past because everything already seems like it sucks. Maybe we don't choose where we end up, but we sure do choose how we get there.
When I get to my endgame, I want to say I did all of the things I wanted to do, or that I was, at the very least, happy with what I was doing. I know now I will have tried to be and do better, and when I get to my endgame I know I will have done exactly that.
As much as I love my friend, I can't save someone who doesn't want to be saved. But I will never stop trying to convince him or anyone with this mentality that it is worth it to trying to save yourself.
It's your choice and your move. Or lack there of.
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