The tattoo on my achilles heel is an X. If you squint, it kind of looks like an intersection, or a crossroad. To me, this represents indecision, my biggest weakness, and the thing I regret most in life – not taking action to pursue love over fear. As I sit here at another crossroad, I can’t help but think of the lyrics from the song that inspired the ink:
I’m standing at the crossroad,
There are many roads to take,
But I stand here so silently,
For fear of a mistake,
One path leads to paradise,
One path leads to pain,
One path leads to freedom,
They all look the same,-Calvin Russel, “Crossroad”
The past few days, I haven’t felt quite right. Hell, the past year I’ve felt off. I, like many of you, have made some hard choices in my life. Some have brought laughs, some have brought tears, and all of them have brought lessons. Whether or not I’ve paid attention to those lessons remains to be seen. It’s a long and windy path we walk down, branching into many different eternities, but we’ll only ever know the one we choose. Life is choice, and there are a thousand tradeoffs we have to consider as we move forward through it. Luckily for me, I’m quite simple-minded. I tend to oversimplify all of my decisions into either/ors. Otherwise known as black or white decisions, on or off, 1 or 0. I mean c’mon, I’m a computer scientist by training; it’s what I’m programmed to do! Unfortunately, I hate being a computer scientist, and I want to tell you why. This is one part explanation, one part apology. Mostly to myself. When I’m living my authentic life, big decisions come easy to me. Recently, decisions have been hard. I apologize for convincing you that I was ever doing stuff for “logical” or “career-oriented” reasons. As I’ll show you, every big decision I’ve made has been to pursue relationships rather than career, and I’ve just used career success as a way to get people off my back. Recently, I’ve lost sight of that, for reasons I will discuss. I’ve always been grateful for the people in my life, and never felt like I needed anything more. Sure, a stable income or a house of my own would be nice, but not at the expense of being around the people I love. Recently, I’ve felt like I can’t be around all of the people that I love, and it’s tearing me up inside.
Nine years ago, the first big decision popped up. Everybody kept talking about it, but it didn’t seem that difficult to me. On the one side was a bunch of hard work, interviews, essays, preparation, letters, and selling myself to a bunch of far-off jerks. On the other side stood my sister and parents. Easy peasy, no way am I writing an essay for fun (little did I know back then…). Sure, I could have “applied” myself and tried to go somewhere farther than 112 miles away, but for what? As dumb as I’ve been at times, I’m truly proud of myself for having the wisdom at 17 to see what many others didn’t – my relationships with my family mean more to me than any career success ever could, and it’s not even fucking close. I applied to one school. One. I never even finished my application to the other in-state school, which shared forms with the school I went to.
Seven years ago, I entered my second year of university studies, or my first real year of engineering school. I immediately realized that it wasn’t for me, and another decision popped up: switch to computer science and finish in the same amount of time, but taking more classes, or stay in mechanical engineering and take 12 credit-hour semesters. As much as I personally wanted to solve puzzles all day, the allure of my friends sitting in class next to me was impossible to ignore. I couldn’t give up skipping class to play frisbee on the quad, skipping class to go get pizza or beer (a theme develops), or playing video games in the back of a lecture hall after the obligatory one week of pretending like I was going to take notes. What seemed like a decision never really was one, because the answer was obvious. Besides, it was math either way, and I actually wanted to switch to a social science like history or economics, but that would have added another year to my schooling, and I don’t particularly like classes (being told what to learn takes the fun out of it).
A few years later, I had an “oh shit” moment as I realized that graduation was a little more than a year away, summer was about to start, and I had no job or internship lined up. My little arrangement of doing some bullshit math homework in exchange for partying with a ton of my friends wasn’t going to last forever. I saw the writing on the wall when my older friends got jobs and complained about their lives. I panicked, and furiously began researching alternative paths. I figured I struck gold when I found a 20 hour per week job that would enable me to stay in Columbia and keep hanging out close to my family and friends – graduate school. I came up with some bulletproof logic and convinced myself that I was doing something good for the world, when in reality, I just didn’t want the party to end. It didn’t pay well, but who needs money when you have friends? It’s easy to make decisions when one side tempts you with money and knick-knacks and the other side tempts you with friends and parties. Piece of cake, and yes, I will have another beer.
Then, something changed. My 20 hour a week job took way more thinking than I expected (shocker, but I was legitimately surprised), and exactly the wrong kind of thinking for my move-fast-decide-quick brain. They wanted me to slow down, think deeply, show all of my work, and convince people with specific arguments, rather than use my natural talents of joking around and convincing people with big picture ideas. On second thought, fuck that. My only Bs in school have come from math classes where I rush through homework and tests and don’t check my work. Speed is what makes me great at life, but bad at research. The stress it puts on my brain is hard to describe, and tack on to that some very stressful relationship problems, and it’s no wonder that I was constantly asking for extensions on work deadlines. Somehow, as slow as I felt like I was going, I still went faster than all of my peers, even though I dreaded it. The instant I proved to myself that I wasn’t being lazy and I just actually hated research (after three years of hard work, and a personality test that said I was the exact opposite of the typical researcher, news to no one), I quit. And honestly, it didn’t come soon enough. Research damaged me, slowed down my creativity, and totally burned me out. I lost my spark and interest in things. I thought a year off would help.
It has, but it hasn’t. My plan going into graduate school was to use all of my free time to start a freelance writing career, so that I could use my big ideas for good, and mainly, so that I could work an actual remote job that would enable me to live by my friends and family and have enough free time to hangout. Currently, I’ve made $0, so it’s not going too well. It’s been hard to find my creativity again, and I’ve been pretty torn up about the fact that I let myself stay in the hellish situation called research for so long. On top of that, the whole reason I want to be a writer is basically to convince all of my friends and family (and the rest of the world I guess) to give up material wealth and live in one big happy commune, and that’s not going so well either. These two combined have me feeling like a bit of a failure.
It’s my fault for not sharing this earlier. I fear ostracizing myself due to my propensity for aggressive debate, so often, I keep my thoughts to myself. This hasn’t been a productive way to build relationships, and I’m realizing makes me unrelatable. Really, I feel like I’m too relatable because of my passionate thoughts on every subject. Some people just don’t like thinking that hard about inane stuff, but it’s how I keep myself entertained in life. I’ll work on figuring out how to do this better, but in the meantime, please accept these typed words in lieu of spoken ones. I deeply love and care about you, and want to extend an apology that I haven’t been the vulnerable man I know I can be. I haven’t found a way to share my passionate thoughts without being aggressive, but I’m working on it. Writing helps convey messages with less vitriol. Hopefully you see now that even though I’m not that good at talking about emotions, my emotions are deeply passionate about my friends. I regret that I’ve focused too much on big picture decisions and not enough on small acts of love. I will work on this moving forward, but I hope you see now why I do what I do. I need nothing besides creative fulfillment, and yes, a house and some food, I guess. But I’m not chasing money, fame, fortune, prestige, a new car, or any of that utter bullshit.
As I stand here at yet another crossroad, this decision feels gray. Fuzzy, as we say in research speak. I’m torn between multiple different cities, and my heart hurts. I don’t know what to do. How do I pursue what I love in this situation, when any decision I make means giving up quality time with people I love deeply? As long as I still feel like this, I will resent our modern society for pulling communities apart, and convincing them that a stupid little cellphone can make up for it. I want to start a commune in the woods, but apparently, there are “no jobs” in the woods. Maybe the Amish are right, and we should all ditch our silly technologies in favor of local community. Which would you rather have: friends close by, or a million bajillion dollars? These choices are not easy to make, but nobody said life was easy. Actions speak louder than words, and I hope my actions continue to reflect these words that I don’t say enough: I love you.
XO, Blake