Living Pastiche.

I was originally going to call this post, Mid-Life Crisis? Essentially at the moment I have the feeling that I've done enough living, that I have pretty much seen what I need to see and done what I needed to do to feel that I haven't missed out on life. On the other hand I am forty years old, and so the chances are that I am less than halfway through my life. I look around for something new to grab my attention, but I don't really find anything. The things that give me pleasure are the same things that have given me pleasure, just that they are slightly more faded, slightly more comfortable. The alternatives that people might suggest are ones that I have considered and have little appeal, and I tend not to complete tasks that hold little appeal.

Then I realized that this wasn't a Mid-Life Crisis because I have thought and felt exactly like this before, in fact I regularly do so. This is just an aspect of my personality, just as being a hyper social fun-loving person in crowds of people is an aspect of my personality. The tricky thing for me, and even more for the people around me, is that I have so many aspects of my personality. This particular feeling will pass in time and at some point I will have scorn for those who feel hopeless and useless and just sit in their houses doing the same thing over and over again.

There is a very common personality test called the Myers-Briggs. Today I scored as an ENFJ but I have at various times had all possibilities except being an S or sensing. The chances are high that next week, on the same test I will have a substantially different result. Essentially, according to the most commonly used personality test, I can be a different person depending on the day. My existence is a pastiche, a combination of divergent ingredients, each day or week like a bite without knowing what today's flavor will be.

The thing about mood and personality is that it colors everything in your life. It colors what you remember, how you remember, and how you respond to that memory. It colors what you expect, what you hope, what you think might be for the future. While right now intuitively it feels as though my life has been a rather monotonous train, chugging along from suburb to suburb of minor disappointment, I know that this is not how I always feel, or even usually feel.

This change of who I am on a regular basis is what I believe has prevented me from actually achieving very much. Pretty much everyone who meets me sees great potential in me, and yet what I have accomplished in my life would not impress anyone. This is because success in the modern world comes from picking something at which you are talented, and then working consistently hard at it, something that generally only happens if you consistently derive pleasure, meaning or satisfaction from that task. I can, and do, have a million ideas of what I could do and do well, but by the following week I'm a different person with different potential and different motivations.

This leaves me as a living pastiche, something that it behooves me to remember as I work through the different flavors and textures that make up who I am. I think at least I can claim one thing with honesty, I am at least interesting.