Fingerprints

My brain won't shut up. Seriously. And it's not like there is just one train of thought that my mind keeps going on and re-working to try and find a different solution to. It's like my brain is Grand Central Station, and there are tons of trains all leaving at once, and since I am not run by lots of very intelligent people and am flying solo, I'm not able to keep track of all the trains leaving the station. It's basically a free for all. Thoughts are coming and going just as they please. I'm starting to feel like a spectator in this new sport I have stumbled upon except I'm still unsure of all the rules. As the saying goes if you can't beat them, join them, so that is exactly what I'm going to do. I'm going to make the rules.

I am experiencing some growing pains. I have felt some here and there recently, but have taken some metaphorical Tylenol in hopes that they would just get better an leave me alone. Well now it seems that they are collectively rioting to get my attention. Well OK aches and pains of life, I see you, but that doesn't mean that you win. Yet.

The funniest thing that I find about these annoying growing pains is that none of them are bad, they actually all collectively point to a greater good, to a girl more successful than you would think for her age, and honestly I think I am scared of that. I have to opportunity to excel at a lot of different things, and in the madness of it all I think I have forgotten that I am allowed to be a little bit afraid of who I have the potential to be.

I don't like telling people how old I am. For whatever reason, life crept up on me faster than it did for others, and I learned some very hard, very real yet very simple lessons very early on in my teenage years. Life is what you make it, and this life is so extremely precious. There isn't a day that should go by when you shouldn't fight tooth and nail to get absolutely everything you can out of every single day, because unlike little orphan Annie, I don't always count on tomorrow. In the midst of coming to grips with all of this in my late teens, I think I got the free gift with purchase by promising myself I would be somebody today, not wait until I was the proper age for someone to believe I was the someone I said I was. While I do believe that I have achieved a menial amount of success with many new open doors, I think I have forgotten that it is OK to be daunted by the future you want. It' s OK for a second to be afraid of who you have the potential to be.

I have accepted a lot on my plate and all of it is wonderful, but I find myself being more hesitant than normal. I finally think now that it's because I don't want to fail at any of it. But honestly, who determines failure or success? Is there some sort of handbook that I haven't read that shows the qualifications for failure and success? What I deem as failure may be seen as a win to someone else. Life is about perspective, not rules and regulations. There is no such thing as win or lose, it truly is all about how you play the game.

There are many things about life that are unclear. How do you open yourself up to someone and let them really see who you are, instead of pushing them to see what you want them to see. We can't control someone else's perspective, so we try and sweeten the deal by manipulations and re directions. It's hard to be an open book, even when that's all we want to be. We become so aware of the fact that someone may not like what they see, that we try and manipulate just what they see. At least I do. I am not innocent of playing the game of I'll show you what you want to see, instead of let me show you who I am, but I don't really think that many of us are.

I guess what I am trying to say in too many words is that it's all OK. It's OK to be afraid, to take a break, to re-evaluate, to take a second and re-work what you think you are doing. All that I know is, I love that I have been given the chance to be Courtney Whittamore, which includes having lots of opinions and lots of questions and not very many answers. Life is more about the questions anyway, cause if we knew it all, where would the adventure be? I want to have it all, and then some. Just like everyone else I want to be king of the world in my own way... someday. Today I am happy to be sitting on my bed, knowing tomorrow I get to go to work, then to learn, then to better myself, then to be with the ones I love. And then the next day I get to do a variation of the same. And that everyday, I get to create something that only I have the chance to create. And that someday, someone will look back on this life of mine and think that they wouldn't have been the same without my fingerprint on the world. That's all I want. To leave my fingerprint on the world.