Acquired Ability: Existential Crisis
People think success is a step by step process. They think there’s only one way to be successful. That’s not true. There is no one recipe for success. You just have to do what works best for you.
How will you know what works best for you? You just don’t know until you try it. How far do you have to go to find something that works for you? You don't know, so you have to plan ahead.
Planning is hard for me. Of all my ideas, about 25% are actual, coherent thoughts. I can only work about 10% of those coherent thoughts into an actual plan.
I thought tonight would be the first time in my life a plan actually worked. I was wrong. And what did I get for my troubles? Two black eyes and scratches all up my arms.
How did things go from zero to “time to hide behind a tree way out in the middle of nowhere”? It's kind of complicated and messy, but here we go.
At school, I never received any awards, because I never did any extracurricular activities. I had to work so much harder than my friends at getting my school obligations done. I had no energy left for stuff on top of that. That always made me feel a little bit broken. Since the awards you win matter to colleges, the guidance counsellor instructed me to take a personality quiz to see what type of extracurricular I'd be good at. I took the quiz, and it said that I should do drama, since the AI working behind the scenes predicted that I'd make a good actress.
You can't use an AI to predict that sort of thing. You never really know who's going to be successful in performing arts and who won't. For every person who goes on to be a famous actor, there are about 50 who don’t. Nobody talks about them. We hear nothing about them because they didn’t succeed.
Beyond AI's failing to take into account survivorship bias, we had a bigger problem with the drama department: they couldn’t seem to make up their minds.
The original plan was to do Romeo and Juliet, but Sarah’s dad didn’t want her to kiss Joshua. In response, the school changed the play to The Lion King. Due to a translation flub, we wound up with the materials to do Cats. In less than a week, they changed it to The Hunchback of Notre Dame because Cats triggered Bernadette’s fear of cats. That lasted about a day because literally everybody thought it was “problematic”. Everybody got sick of the department constantly changing the play, so we settled on doing Singing In The Rain.
I got the part of Lina Lamont. Rather than do Lina's hellacious voice as a screechy Brooklyn accent, I thought it would be funny if I did a lisp (think “I have a vewy gweat fwiend in Howwywood named Wina Wamont”). The idea was that Lina's voice wasn't just hard on the ears, but hard on the brain as well.
I thought it was funny. Other people disagreed with me. Hard.
One morning, the school sent a car to take me down to the school board’s head offices. They wanted to have a talk with me about my performance as Lina.
The car came by to pick me up at 5:30 AM. I wore a simple, purple lace dress. My hair was kind of greasy and akimbo because I didn’t really get a chance to fix it. Since I was in a situation where I had to choose between brushing my teeth and doing my hair, I went with the teeth. In my mind, keeping your gums healthy always beats out having your hair look nice.
I tuned out most of the drive, but what sticks in my memory begins when we drove down a dark road with wet pavement surrounded by lots of trees. As we continued, it started to rain outside, and the trees Seemed to close in on the road. When we passed the first sign we’d seen Since we got on the freeway, I had that overwhelming feeling I should’ve turned back.
It got dark really quickly. I couldn't tell whether it’s actually night or it’s dark enough from the trees, like in Germany’s black forest. I could feel my stomach drop a little bit when we headed through a road tunnel. Uh oh, I thought, nothing good ever happens in these.
"What do you mean?" the driver asked me. I guess I thought out loud a little too loudly.
"I mean that tunnels are kind of scary to me," I responded, "Princess Diana crashed in a tunnel. People always seem to get carjacked in tunnels, and during stuff like earthquakes and landslides, tunnels always seem to collapse on people."
“You have no need to worry about the tunnel. You should worry about how you’re going to explain your performance to the superintendent.”
As for what I would tell the superintendent, my plan was to say that I wanted to leave my stamp on the school so I would feel a little less broken inside. I felt pretty confident that they'd buy it. Now, I'm not so sure anymore.
The school district’s head office was one of those places where reality felt somewhat altered. It felt more like a pit stop than an actual destination. Even though I was in a ton of trouble, I felt unusually at ease.
I think this is why people take gap years. Existing in between two points in time or between two places actually feels good. You feel like you can and should do whatever you want.
It feels way better than being dragged into one of those situations where everything you say is the wrong thing. I know because that's exactly what my meeting turned into.
I'm not going to play that game. I'm not going to take the bait. Unfortunately, I didn't know what to do, so I walked out.
After I left the room, I got the urge to just run in a straight line. Once I went from the hall to the parking garage, I just bolted. Apparently, if you run fast enough, you can run up a wall.
Running up the wall is mostly a motorcycle thing. you have to move pretty fast to do it. The motorbike sticks to the wall because the friction counteracts gravity. if you aren’t moving fast enough, there won’t be enough friction to stop you from falling. I have no idea how I managed to run that fast.
A minute later, I could hear the superintendent say, “Janice, bring me a very long stick, we are running up the wall after her.”
They were chasing after me.
They didn’t catch up to me. I heard much clattering and swearing soon after. I think they may have needed a longer stick.
A few minutes later, I slowed down just enough that I couldn’t maintain enough friction to counteract gravity anymore. The minute I sensed that I was going to fall I stuck my arms out to break my fall, but I beaned myself in the eyes with my wrists. Much like running fast enough to run up the wall, I have no idea how I managed to do that. Also, I landed in holly bushes. The coarse leaves scratched up my arms and legs.
I felt like such an idiot, but at least I made it outside.
Outside was hot and humid, with a brisk wind and heavy rain. Thick, lush greenery concealed a chorus of screaming frogs. I continued to run until I reached a tool shed. Once I got there, I took cover.
By the time the rain stopped, morning had already come. I crept out of the tool shed, and glared at the offices from behind a tree. But that would’ve done anything. I tried to put my stamp on the school, and it fell apart hard.
Some people treat journeys such as these as vision quests where you come back with certain abilities and a new outlook on life. I don't think I gained anything other than bruises/scratching from falling off the wall and a huge existential crisis.
What makes planning a response so hard? Is my executive function just garbage, or are the people around me trying to set me up to fail? Are people reading my mind, and if so, are they doing so to conspire against me? Questions like these make me ponder the validity of my existence. How do I know what’s right when every decision feels like the wrong one? No matter how hard I plan, something will happen to make it fall apart.
@writeroftheprompts
