the thing about everything is that it all gets easier with practice, so be careful what you practice
Heres the thing you gotta understand about statistics.
If your chances were previously 10%, your chances are now 18%, not 90%.
if your chances were roughly 1%, they’re now just slightly less than 2%.
thats how that works.
People say, don’t give up on your dreams. But sometimes that’s unavoidable. Life throws you the equivalent of an Olympic sharpshooter losing their hands in a tragic beer pong accident every once in a while, and you can’t change that. And sometimes, you just find out your dreams weren’t all that good of an idea in the first place. My dream was always to work in academia and teach medieval literature, and even if everything had gone one hundred percent right for the last decade, I probably still wouldn’t be doing that right now. The job market is… tough in the humanities. It is tougher still if you are interested in something as deeply unfashionable as Old English. But even if that wasn’t the case–well, life comes at you with a sharp knife and it can peel your dreams away one by one, and leave a lot of raw flesh behind.
I am stubborn by nature. I don’t like to give up on the things I want. And just because your future isn’t shaped how you’d like it to be doesn’t mean you have to surrender it forever. What I am struggling to learn, to really internalize, is that there is a big, big difference between giving up on your dreams and giving up on your values. Just because you can’t be an astronaut doesn’t mean you can’t be an astronomer. Just because you can’t fight dragons doesn’t mean you can’t save lives. Identifying what values your aspirations fulfill, and figuring out other ways of achieving that fulfillment is really important.
I’m struggling a lot right now with understanding who I am and what I really want my life to look like. It feels a lot like failure. What I value hasn’t changed, though. I have not surrendered that, and I never will. Perhaps that just means that, when it comes, success will look a little different than I thought it would when I was younger.
Orbital path of asteroid near miss in 2002. Yah, that’s how close we came to nuclear winter and possible total destruction.
being a woman isn’t about the body you were born with or your feelings or your brain it’s about being haunted by this quote from margaret atwood for your entire life
Anyone else constantly on edge because we are in the final stages of late capitalism and these next couple of decades are gonna be make or break for the western world, and this just happens to coincide with the part of my life where I’m supposed to make something of myself :/
Small and angry.PhD student. Mathematics. Slow person. Side blog, follow with @talrg.
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