[CW15] Seven Years

Seven Years

“That is insane”, you don’t have to tell me. “Why would you do this?”, because I have to. “You will regret it”, I am already full of regret.

Even now, weeks later, these conversations still bounce around in my head. I’m not angry at them, I really understand where they are coming from. Maybe some of them are even scared it will happen to them, that they get up one morning and find out everything they worked for all their life was pointless.
Not pointless per se, but it is hard to not be dramatic in that situation. I still learned a lot, I still met wonderful people and had some great days. But I can’t help but wonder who I would have met — how far I would already be — had I realized my mistake sooner.
I don’t blame anyone for this, except maybe my mother. Actually most likely my mother, she had quelled all of my interests, all of me all my life to the point I could not recognize what joy felt like.
Sometimes you look back at your childhood, and you wonder how you could ever have been so blind. Many argue children are stupid, but they are really only the most unfiltered a human will ever be. A child had yet to make any of the cruel decisions we have made thousands of times. A child had yet to experience the true terror of personal failure. A child had yet to have their dreams be confronted by reality and their own inability.
Or so you would hope.

If I think back to my earliest childhood memories, whatever few are left, I see who I am just rediscovering. I see someone who spend most of their days imagining tales, who learned to use the family computer to animate little short movies. I see someone who figured out navigating word processors to write their first little novels,.I see someone who tried to teach themselves the piano just because one stood around. I see someone who got their mother to give them a guitar and a lesson with a tutor for it. I see someone who spend all day in school not listening, but instead doodle fancy mandalas in notebooks to pass the time.
But I am the only one who sees it.
What my teachers saw, was someone who never paid attention in class. What my mother saw was someone who excelled in math and nowhere else, because of laziness and wasted time. What they saw was a child clumsily reading music notation trying to figure out how to use a piano for weeks and failing. What they saw was a child that spend weeks trying to apply what was shown in a singular guitar lesson, but never ask for a second one — so why book it. The piano went away, so did the guitar. What they saw was a child getting proficient with computers, operating this complicated animation and editing software. And computers were the future right?
So that child still barely scraped by in school, but over the years it was derived of all of it. The instruments were a distraction, the short movies quaint — but as long as it got better at using excel it’s fine. The books were cute and all, but printer ink was also expensive and it shouldn’t waste its allowance of that. That child turned into a teenager still barely scrapping by in school, playing a handful of games all day, increasingly isolated.
So one day you saw that teenager was interested in making the one thing that gave them hope in life — video games. And to get to games, you had to get through a thick book of programming language and the challenge of figuring out what the fuck a linker was. It took weeks, months even, but what else got one to do. Eventually the first games worked, the math helped. So now it had two things it excelled at, math and computers. So its mother showed it a new school, one where nobody that had bullied it would go to, where it could learn not only computers but also electronics. So the child went for it.
Years of it, and its grades improved. Without pesky chemistry or biology or art, with only electronics, mathematics and complex circuitry on the schedule, it actually did well! So only one place to go right? Computers.
Fucking computers.
After all it was the future right? And all the kids grow up with these new tech the adults barely understood, its the future right?

Seven years. It took seven years.
That teenager turned adult took seven years to get that bloody computer certificate. Seven years and it was handed this piece of paper that said “congratulations, you can computer” and that was it. By that point that adult already struggled for months finding a new computer job, because its last one just collapsed under the weight of its multiple-month burnout leave.
So here they were, the highest grades in computer, the most prestigious and praised student. Their math grades crashed over the years, but they adapted. They started running the game projects and designing these huge architectures that gave them the best grades and prospects.
But no matter how long they looked, they didn’t find anything. Nobody hired someone to do games, nobody looked for someone to lead games. All that was left was the regular computer stuff they had avoided for so long.
So after months of this, of nothing, they made the most fatal mistake yet.
What had carried them through the burnout? A guitar they picked up on a whim. What had gotten them joy over the years when the computer made them sad? Fiddling with music software. What was the most fun part to them when leading the game projects? Designing the world, imagining the levels, the joy players could feel, the mechanics and what they could mean.
So what did they do, months at home without a job in sight? Seal their destiny.
They picked up a pen.
And they wrote.
And once they started, they couldn’t stop.
They wrote thousands and thousands of words, pages upon pages upon pages. A world was growing in them, characters came to life. A stage abandoned for decades reopened in their mind and dozens of actors stepped up to it and performed. Their fingers could barely keep up with their mind, crafting and building. Their hands started hurting in the evening and had to make due in the morning. Tens of thousands of words had hit the page.
And there it sat, printed out. Three hundred pages of a story, so captivating to them that they cried when they finished the last few pages. And a prospect: This was a draft, a first one. They hadn’t written in almost two decades — it was likely bad, it would need months to rewrite and improve.
And what thought condemned their existence? What feeling swelled in them and chocked them almost to death?
Excitement.

Every time a computer was touched, it was a chore. It touched the machine so many times it didn’t notice how much it hated it. The proficiency in math and computers was not a skill, or a passion — it was a survival strategy. The computer could make what it wanted, given enough persuasion. When it was done, it was relieve, it was over.
So here they sat, looking at this script and getting excited. A piece of work being exciting. Not the prospect of the result alone, but the work itself. This was not a chore, not an obstacle, not a great challenge to overcome. Were it not for rent, not for job, not for food, not for sleep, not for taxes, not for mother, not for public transport prices rising yet again, it would do this all day every day.
So here they sat, staring at it and regretting their life.
Seven years.

So what to do? Seven years just down the drain? That’s fucking insane. Do you hear yourself? You just spend your entire twenties on this! Seven motherfucking years on getting the computer paper! Have you lost it?
Yes, yes I’ve lost it. I lost it a long time ago.
And I am sorry, I am so so sorry, but I have found it again.
The world of computers is crumbling, the not computer one is burning. Misery and misfortune is ruling the waking hours. And here I am, having the audacity to cry tears of joy.
I apologize, I am so sorry, I really am. I had put down the pen — maybe it was ripped from my hand. I had put down the guitar, the drawings, the stories and the joy of creating. And it took me fifteen years to find them again. I am so sorry for making you wait old friends, do you still love me?
You do? After making you wait this long? You still want me, you waited for me all this time?
How could I not cry tears of joy.
Are you scared? That one day you will wake up and remember everything, remember that what you had worked towards all your life is something you actually hate? That you deluded yourself into thinking it’s what you wanted from life? That the compromises you made will catch up to you, that they become unbearable?
Honestly I don’t have an answer for you. All I can say is that maybe go out and challenge yourself, what you think who you are. The sooner you do the more harm you might avoid. But really, would you take advice from the woman that just wasted seven years on a computer degree she hates? I don’t know if I would.
Regardless, thank you for reading this. This time I will not put the pen down until I want to.

[CW15] Seven Years