Ghosts in The Attic

When you are young you often don’t spend near as much time thinking about the future as you should. Deadlines are a long ways off; pushed back into the recesses of our minds as we enjoy the here and now. The problem is, when you do that and you start to miss deadlines, you start to look at the past not with nostalgia but with anger at having squandered your time.

Time is a liar. It comforts us with a false sense of security. We think we have it in endless supply. Time is the place where the us of the future should have everything worked out, and the us of the past lives in stasis; frozen in both character and sentiment.

We look to time to change future us into the person we currently are not. And we’ve all done it when we set lofty goals with no plan of action, or made the assumption that the growth that we need to experience to be better, will just happen— as if we were a bystander and the change was some kind of software upgrade.

So when you’ve done both these things, overshot deadlines and forgot to put in the work to grow, you sort of try not to spend much time on either the present or the future.

The future looks bleak and you don’t know how to make current you align with the vision of future you; realistically you see that the future you are currently molding is not ideal and thinking about it is depressing. Then there’s the past where you can look back to old you and feel distain and anger. Why didn’t old you see the signs? Why didn’t old you step up and get things sorted out.

The past, for me anyway is a place I look back on in disgust. The person I see living there, I hate her. She’s such an idiot. A squanderer of gifts and talent. A life that could have been so different but was spent toiling on all the wrong things.

So here I live, in the now. I still have some hope for the future, but it’s being dashed against the rocks every day. Hopefully current me will somehow make future me proud with the course corrections I’ve made.