(posted by Stuart Ian Burns)
There’s no motivation as strong as love. When I was fifteen I used to leave the house at the same time every morning to make sure that I was on the same bus to school so that I could see a girl I was in love with. I would only every see her for about ten minutes, and she had no idea (unless she noticed me trying not look to look like I was looking at her). I ended up speaking to her twice and I knew it wasn’t to be – her ambition was to be a solicitor, mine was to even get into a university. Those measures of success were being drilled into me, and seemed to matter, at least at that age.
I suppose you’re expecting me to say that her ambition inspired my own and that motivated me to better things. Disappointingly it didn’t. Even now, I don’t measure my own success or lack of against anyone else. I have ambitions and dreams, a career I’m working towards but it’s on my own terms its not because of a road map drawn up by anyone else or because I see someone else’s life and want to emulate them. It’s too easy in this life to have a role model to aspire to be then to fail, wasting a life and potential you might have in other areas.
That said, I’m thirty now and I still don’t have a clear direction. I’m still waiting, what plan I do have in flux because of my own little long game. I’m not quite were I expected to be now, perhaps a touch behind, but no one gets perfection, there’s always a niggle. Is my niggle that I’m not in love at the moment? I used to get it all the time, the stomach cramps, the inability to form actual words when someone is around, the not knowing were to put my hands. Perhaps I grew tired of it not going anywhere; I hope my subconscious hasn’t decided that it’s had enough with all that and in the words of the song I’ll never fall in love again. I’d hate that.
troubled diva 