At the moment, I am obsessed with a little show they call Doctor Who. This post isn’t quite about the show, as much as it is about me and where I am right now. Consider yourself warned.
So, one of the things I’ve been thinking a lot about are the Doctor’s companions. They are women that in so many ways seem to be stuck. I mean, there was Rose, who worked at a shop, Donna who was a lowly temp with no real prospects and the latest, Amy, a kiss-o-gram living in a sleepy (too sleepy, really) village. There have been others, but for the sake of my argument these are my examples. They are women who move through life, but aren’t really living it, or rather can’t really live it. Women that I can’t help but relate to. Eventually the Doctor shows up and whisks them away, gives them the impossible.
Impossible. A word that has haunted me lately. My life, at this moment, seems so possible it hurts. Now, I’m not saying I wish the Doctor would show up in his Tardis and steal me away– well, to be truthful, that would be kind of awesome, but what I’m trying to get to is that seeing these women in these extraordinary situations hammers in even further how much of my life is being lived because of a sense of duty. I want more, I always have. What does that say about me?
So much of my time seems to be spent living in a fantasy, a mechanism I’ve used since childhood to forget that the life I live is fucking boring. I don’t mean boring in it’s conventional sense. I go out. I have friends, a family. I laugh, I dance. There is sex and good memories. Still, it’s in retrospect that it hits me. How empty my life feels, devoid of purpose, cliche cliche. Right now, I’m at a loss, in what feels like an impasse. I am 25. I am not old, but the fear of old age is there. A fear made even stronger by the fact that I don’t know what the fuck it is I’m doing. Where I want to go. What person I want to be.
Perhaps 12 episodes of Doctor Who over the past three days has left my brain a little fuzzy, but tonight, all I can think about is everything I’m missing. Not in outer space, but in my own world. Is all this introspection just another fantasy, a buffer between me and the life that fails to satisfy me? Is that failure my own fault? When is it okay to say screw you to responsibility and do whatever the fuck it is you want to do? If I do my time now, will I be able to get out later? Is this a trap? Is this how they get you? Fuck, that’s a lot of questions.
