First Draft Life

“The first draft of anything is shit.”

-Ernest Hemingway

 

Are you still on your first draft?

 

Did you meander from adolescence into adulthood with a vague but resolute sense of who you are- a construct that has served as the basis for most of the important decisions you have made?

Let’s look at the path well-travelled, the Default life framework:

 

Legions, it seems, eagerly rush headlong into establishing a boring little life they’ve settled for. They work a boring job, to pay for their boring house, where they live with the boring kids they had with a boring spouse, as part of a boring marriage.

 

Maybe those decisions made their lives idyllic. Maybe they did not. Maybe once they decided ‘this is who I am and this is how I see the world,’ they cemented that image and ran with it. Lockstep, prescribed and orderly.

Is this the life they wanted, or is it the life they accept?

 

Maybe it’s just me, but I cannot imagine such an existence free of complication.

 

During certain periods of my waking moments, I have felt like I have somehow become separated from myself. Fractured.

 

If things are not going well, I tell myself that the way I am thinking, feeling and acting at that particular instant are all some sort of anomaly, some sort of temporary interruption of self that is necessitated by circumstance.

 

It’s not really me, it’s just something that I need to do for now.

 

When I feel I have diverged or fallen short of the image I hold of myself, I tell myself that once circumstances change, I will again occupy the confines of a ‘correct’ self-portrait.

 

At what point will I be forced to acknowledge that there in fact is no other? The procession of unrecognizable faces staring at me from the mirror over the years are actually a singular reflection.

 

It is me. It always has been. 

 

Biology requires adaptation. Change. Revision.

John Anson