How Personal Passions Can Serve As An Outlet For Pathological Deficiencies
At the grand and ancient age of nineteen years old, I have already reached a stage in my life where I feel I have experienced a considerable brunt of the brute force of the imposing oppression that the adversities of life can accost any individual with. It is not out of the gullibility and oblivious naivety of only having been subjected to the preliminary phase of the tenured endurance of human mortality, or out of some misappropriated sense of self-pity and pleas for sympathy; but instead just the ubiquitous cognisance of the fact that the world is, for the most part, not a particularly pleasant place. Family and friends have lamented my bemoaning of the environment in which we all inhabit-deeming me “pessimistic” and “unwilling to acknowledge the beauty of planet Earth” and all the virtuous luxuries that it can consist of.
There may be some validity to the verity of those proclamations, but I would refute that I am more a “realist” and that my despondent disposition is merely a reflection of all the transpirations that have befallen me in the past few years. I would claim most fervently that I am an eternal advocate of positivity and literally any trivial cause for celebration that can be capitalised upon. My philosophy subscribes to the age-old teachings of “you are only as old as you feel”, and while my ambition in life is not for a happy one(simply one of purpose and the facility to cater to the whimsies and desires of those I love and care for), I am subsequently in constant pursuit of the youthful exuberance and joviality that seemed to have escaped me somewhere along the way.
I openly accept and relish the fact that there are extensive troves of delightful pleasures to cherish and mine the resources of for derivable gratification in the ecstatic inebriation of pure leisure. And it is not a foreign concept to me that these are communal between people and also contemporary to the autonomous ardency and personal preference of one person. While in my pursuit of the retention of ebullient euphoria that life can yield, I have strived to broaden a versatile horizon of personal proclivities and passions, and have come to the realisation that the exclusivity in the segregation between the youth and the adolescents, and the juveniles and the adults of the human race is such an unnecessary dissociation that could be averted. It is tragically futile however to find the perfect equilibrium between the two. Throughout my early teenage years, I resented the cop-out generalisation that people purported with the dismissive and ignorant phrasing of “Oh, he’s just going through that phase”. Yeah, you know-that phase. What is that even supposed to mean? I continue to resent it in my preliminary phases of adulthood, but am beginning to develop an inadvertent tendency to have the urge to utter those despicable words when in reference to younger siblings and their friends. And I just feel like a hypocrite.
It has to be acknowledged that categorising adolescence as a highly zealous and manic stage in any being’s personal progression is an astute recognition that is undeniable; but the issue is that, in my experience, it lends itself to negative connotations far more frequently than positive ones, and despite the triviality of the concentration on this element of societal concern in contrast to the far more significant quandaries of ethics, the morality of politics, sustainability in the energy and mineral crisis afflicting the planet, perhaps it is the basis of commencing with the foundational groundwork of these “first world problems” that may permit more attention to be allocated to those more pressing matters. But I digress.
However, like everything in life, there are pros and cons to everything, and the beneficial virtues of that intense time that is extraordinarily manic and insane are the realisations of the passions and profound ideological convictions that can be discovered in the process of self-identification that the so-termed “age of discovery” that it is entails. For me, my passions have only exponentially flourished in parallel to my mental inhibitions, and in the most fortuitous of instances, have actually complimented them. I have found a penchant for music(specifically singing, playing the guitar and listening to rock and metal on vinyl and digitally), maintaining a healthy lifestyle through a diligent and conscious supervision of dietary consumption and a fitness regime, indulgence in video games, film, television, YouTube and comic books, and of course writing expressive, creative and hopefully informative content.
They are equally as informative of my character as those deficiencies. And they themselves shouldn’t necessarily be something to be ashamed of anyway. In fact, while the amalgamation of my depression, anxiety and OCD in particular, can becoming overwhelming and intolerable to the point that I’m lead to a state of despair and paranoia-where I just need salvation from the incarceration amongst my twisted thoughts-the consequent self-awareness it has granted me has eventuated in me becoming an incredibly self-motivated person and a perfectionist. And again, while it is definitely to a fault in certain instances, I could not imagine and would not rather a condition where I would be any other way.
I can only accredit the revelation that this has been to those passions discovered in those naive but crucially formative years, and it was only through the tutelage of bands that I listen to, like My Chemical Romance, Slipknot and Metallica, the video games I play, like Call Of Duty, Assassin’s Creed and FIFA, the media I consume, like Doctor Who, Batman, and The Walking Dead, and so much more, that I have been able to derive what little sensation of inspiration I have within me from. The vicarious experience of escapism is something that should not be over-cultivated, but should certainly be lauded and commended for the imperatively critical role it plays in essentially enabling the continued existence and sanity of anyone. Life is a perpetual cycle of vices and virtues, and while a perhaps cynical observational standpoint to take would be that the inevitability of the inconsequentiality within the grand scheme of the universe renders these plights futile, any lesson of what is intended to be an admissible insight of perspicacity that can be extrapolated is that positivity will prevail. Eventually.
What has been a rambling and protracted prolix to ultimately lead me to the conclusive point of this discussion has finally ended though, and so the enlightenment to take away from it is this postulation; maybe-just maybe-if we as a species were not so focused on the horrors of the world and only take positive cues from an excessive indulgence in social media and superficial and temporary fixes to placate our inner demons, we could sit back and appreciate the therapeutic elation that the forms of art already alluded to, and possibly even contribute to it in a union of peace and tranquility. I speak from personal experience, and while it can feel isolating at times, myself and anyone in a similar position can take solace in the fact that it is a fact of life that we all experience this in some way, shape or form-whether afflicted with mental or physical liabilities or not. It could always be a lot worse, so smile.
With pertinence to the aforementioned “first world issues” and the evolution into the person that one would ultimately become for(ostensibly) the majority for the rest of their lives that transpires in those formative years, there can also be the development and/or exacerbation of inherent or environmentally-impelled deficiencies and pathological neuroses and the implicated accompanying eccentricities the are a mere organic reaction to the internal conflicts and convoluted thought processes that are virtually intrinsic to the very compacted time of life. In my case; mild autism, OCD, depression, anxiety, mild dyslexia and ADHD. So yeah-I’m pretty messed up. My idiosyncrasies have only magnified in their disproportionate absurdity, especially recently. And they’re all with the function of serving as coping mechanisms that I am hopelessly dependant upon and compulsively obsessed with. There are far too many intricacies to elaborate upon concisely, but to summarise a succinctly as possible; they have dictated who I am for years, and have lead to a sensation of ambivalence over whether I love living my life in adherence to them, or despise the very premise of submitting to the very harsh limitations of my own mind-being a self-professed non-conformist.
