Om ingenting. Eller någonting.

I’m reading a marvelous book by an author whose name you might guess.  It’s written in sections that correspond with phases of the characters’ lives.  I’ve just finished high school and am following them into college.  One step beyond this in my own life, I’m a little fearful of reading through their college years and seeing what’s beyond.  The book is filled with imagery about waves–about the ebbs and flows of the joys and sorrows of life and I’m worried that life is a wave whose crest is in young adulthood.

One of the characters talks about breaking into her “hoard of life”, saying that she has some fifty or sixty years to spend.  She feels she can spend it freely now that her years in school have come to an end.  “I have fifty years, I have sixty years to spend. I have not yet broken into my hoard. This is the beginning,” she says.  Though I have that silly feeling that death has nothing to do with me even as I feel I’ve come to terms with my own mortality, I probably have, at best, the same number of years the character feels she has ahead of her.  I should be breaking into my own hoard right now.

I think perhaps that worrying that my life will peak in my 20s or 30s is getting a step ahead of myself, at least in terms of the hierarchy of my fears.  An even greater fear is that I won’t be able to scale this peak.  I don’t feel like I have the tools to force opened the locked door to the potential for great, bright, golden years.  I have deep passion, intelligence, education, and all kinds of other attributes that would be perfectly useful to anyone who’d be willing to help me cultivate and refine them.  But, with scores of unanswered job applications and my relative isolation in this small Midwestern city, I feel like I’m going to be stuck by the wayside.  The cards seemed to be stacked against me and I have no idea how to rectify that.

I’m having a pure, unadulterated bout of envy.  Somehow, when you hear stories about fabulously successful people or terribly unfortunate people, you’re made to believe you needn’t worry about that sort of thing because you belong to a massive, very satisfied, and perfectly respectable American middle class.  While the situation of the socially disadvantaged is unenviable, a sort of mythology about the wholesomeness of your station in life attempts to diminish the invidiousness of those who have more or know more or who have accomplished more than you.  Unimaginable wealth seems immoral and academic achievement seems stuffy, so you’re happy with your “hard-earned” income that allows you to consume, consume, consume and you feel an air of superiority about it. You’re better than both the rich and the poor.  Your common sense and well-roundedness are all you need and both the intelligentsia and the lumpenproletariat be damned.

What the Hell? I reject that entirely.  I want to be wealthy enough to have an apartment in every major city I fancy, I want to write tomes and treatises about things of earth-shattering importance.  I want the power to affect change at a societal level.  I want to be cultivated and polished and refined.  But of course, anyone who wants to be any of those adjectives is some sad sack from that big happy middle class who needs to be bashed down into place.  Well you know what?  I think that the very will to education, present in the intelligent individual, should entitle them to it.  Let all of the people who are perfectly content in their middle class lives stay there.  I have no judgment for them, but for God’s sake, don’t drown me in their sea of minivans or their once-in-a-lifetime cruises to Cancún or their cookie-cutter subdivisions or their Sam’s Clubs.  I realize I’m conflating various socioeconomic and cultural groups, but I don’t have the time to sort out taxonomize all of the kinds of people I don’t want to be.  Also, I should backpedal a bit and say that it’s not all about the wealth.  It’s about the opportunities of the élite.  Wealth begets wealth and sends it to fine boarding schools that provide back doors to Ivy League universities that are pipelines into successful careers.  It is of this process that I’m stuck on the outside of that makes me insanely envious.

Worse, perhaps is that I’m closer to it.  One of my parents has enjoyed tremendous financial success, launched in part by my grandparents’ financial success on that side of the family.  There was all the financial capital to send me to a good college preparatory school and to a fine Ivy League university but my family lacked the necessary cultural capital to make it happen.  Only too late did I realize what I should have done to get where I now want to go.  Now I have accomplished friends and acquaintances from the best schools in several countries who are doing amazing things and beginning what will, no doubt, turn out to be illustrious careers.  I’m left with this sick idea that it’s too late for me, but that I should have children who I shall raise well and from whom I’ll demand intellectual sophistication.  Never mind the complications that my sexuality poses for begetting a family of my own, I imagine that I would be a deranged, overly demanding patriarch who’s left bitter and alone at the end of his bell curve, his hoard of life spent trying to sculpt and chisel his children to make up for his own perceived shortcomings.

Phwew, deep breath.  I’m only 24.  I still have those fifty or sixty years to be an American success story, right? –an aw-shucks would-be intellectual just waiting to be plucked from the poor soil of his naïveté and cultural and academic undernourishment and set aside for something great.  Somebody save me.