I’m 41 now and this entire year I've been thinking about my legacy. 'Thinking' might be too soft. 'Panic stricken' is more appropriate. I thought by now I'd have written a book or two; owned a few buildings; and been married at least once. None of those things have happened.
Every time I think about how old I am I think about how close I am to 60. I think about how little time I have left to make a living or an impact. Remembering stories about Julia Child and others who weren't successful until their mid-forties can be a little encouraging. But, only a little.
Then I think about my parents who've broken 70. They've been together longer than I have left to be alive. Their 50th anniversary was this year and I missed it. Not just because I live across the country, but because I never learned when it was. I felt terrible. So, this year, I finally put it in my phone's calendar app. When I told my mother she offered up a hope that they would have a few more to celebrate to make it worth doing.
My raison d'etre has always been to have a family and, unfortunately, I've never felt like I could support one. Instead I've spent more of my life than I care to admit teetering on the brink of financial disaster. So focused on surviving the moment that I never spent much time building moments that matter or doing the 'right' things to move me forward. Either financially or romantically although in my mind they are inextricably linked. When things are dire and my mind is on survival, which is almost always, I get depressed and brood. I get defensive and lash out. Its been decades since I've felt like I deserved any gifts or real recognition around birthdays or holidays. Both because I could rarely financially afford to reciprocate and because I'm otherwise uninvolved. Generally due to being resentful of my own inadequacy. I've even been thinking of moving closer to home because I miss everyone so much, but that's predicated on being able to make a living.
I’ve started a couple businesses over the years. None successful yet. But, I haven't run out of ideas yet either. I even started a couple over the pandemic. Those are still in progress, but the bulk of my efforts across that time were soon derailed by my injuries and only now am I getting close to trying to think about how to pull them off again. Even with a degree in business I have stumbling blocks I need help and guidance to navigate. Where to find that is still a mystery. One guy stepped up and offered to start trying to help, but I almost don't know where to start with my questions and how not to either make myself a bother or feel like one in the process.
Writing has been something I always aspired to. My excuse this time is that most of the things I do end-up getting down run out of steam fast. On top of that I have a hard time forming the habit. I’ve been keeping a journal lately and even those entries aren't daily.
Owning property hasn't happened because I can never rise above 'broke'. I pay off my debt and then a slow few months happens or I have medical problems or even on occasion I invest in a business idea and it goes tits up, generally due to some bit of poor planning, cash flow, or both. Imagining having 20% of any home price in addition to all the other fees and extras that happen when buying property is beyond me. Years of scarcity has trained me to be scared of big numbers. Even most of my other business ideas suffer from small thinking. The prospect of raising enough to scale up to a functional enterprise is severely overwhelming given how much I struggle just getting by. But at the end of the day that struggle is why I want so badly to have income above and beyond what I've been able to get from a day job. And soon enough I'll be looking at the end of my working usefulness with an empty 401K and no one to help me up the stairs.
My sense of time has never been great. I lose days frequently and the past year felt like a span of a few months. This makes scheduled things difficult sometimes. Every bill I pay feels like it just came and went already. Even this blog post has been in the works for about a week; let alone how many years its been since I opened the blog until this first post. I never feel like I have anything to say or there are too many other "pressing" matters at any given time. Or, like earlier I was trying to make some progress on this while sitting backstage and I couldn't keep two sentences back to back because I'm surrounded by other people talking. Not surrounded, but there are people on stage, people on my comm headset, and the occasional walk-up request. Always some excuse.
Anyway, they say it's better to finish something imperfectly than to never start a perfect plan and I could spend the next few weeks trying to narrow down and expand my thoughts on how my legacy is non-existent. This blog is rambling and I think I'll leave it here for now. There's more to say. About my mental state, how it fells to have gone back to work for a few days, upcoming projects, and other things; but think it's best saved for other entries.
