Thievery Of Youth

Have I reached a Quarter Life Crisis?
(Perhaps acceptance would be an ideal first step)

I'm assuming this has little or everything to do with turning 26 next week.
This assumption is safe. And in play.

Have I run into a blockade of relentless inquiries and personal endeavors?
(Of course this is a continuous struggle of sorts.)

Taking more than a mere glance at John Milton's poetic notebook, the Trinity Manuscript, Sonnet VII: How soon hath Time, he writes on something I have been musing as of late. I have long been manipulating an endless search and destroy of self fulfillment and promise.

At 24, he found himself having to prove himself. To his contemporaries, sure. To himself? You bet. Where was he at 24, and why wasn't he where he promised he'd be at this age?

Promises. You often make them simply to break them.

What is it about the need to be fulfilled? More over, the authenticity of the reasoning behind it? Why? And for whom?

I'm sure Trilling had it easy when he wrote Sincerity and Authenticity in 1972. Probably not. He was a NYC boy, afterall.

I've finished reading Lionel's book, and I'm sure if he were alive today we'd be on the colleague level of first names. Or perhaps clever nicknames. I'm sure his brilliance would have overlooked my fanatic charms.

Where has the time gone by? The countless pop songs on this should keep us up to speed, and if not, it still makes for a pretty decent journey companion.

I've wondered how long it will be until my insatiable appetite for answering questions that I, alone, cannot formulate solutions for will be put to rest. The need to want to know, and need to know are two different things. Know it. There's a bit of a difference between the two choices.

At 25, I feel as if I have been pickpocketed of a more productive young adult career. The things that interest me the most have been the things I have assimilated to as wearisome. I've long loved books. I've long loved movies. I've long loved performing. What has that amounted to?

Perhaps time is a thief as well. Where have my own promises gone?

On the creative tip of things, I know having a perspective has been the shield of fighting artists world over. Books, movies, art all have a direction. Some even lack one. Hence, a direction in itself. The creativeness of a genius isn't the ending product. It's the journey and path the artist had taken to reach that point of satisfactory choice.

Dorothy Parker wrote a Ballad of Great Weariness and a Ballad at Thirty-Five, both wonderful poems of her solemn luxury. At best, though often witty, were also spare and incisive, and more bittersweet than comic. Her friends found her both a source of fun and of tragedy; she attempted suicide at least twice.

Dorothy Parker declared:

People ought to be one of two things, young or old. No; what's the use of fooling? People ought to be one of two things, young or dead.

Dottie, as her friends nicknamed her, found comfort in concealing from the world, readily to accept the abuse than praise. Daring and quite waggish that woman.

There's a way of viewing life: Your way or someone else's. I open both my ears and heart to the world. I take what I'm given and go with it. If I can't creatively find who I am, the creativity will eventually find me. Whether or not I am still around for this acknowledgement, I have yet to accept a suggestion.