SUCCESS TO ME (Part I)

What are your goals?  How will you succeed? What do you plan to do once you’ve achieved it? 

I heard these questions so much in high school and by the time I had turned Nineteen I was flat out sick of it.  19.  The number, that age seems so foreign now.  All through my teens, and afterwards every college mock interview, the same thing: “So where do you see yourself 5 years from now?” in one some variation or another. When they finally stopped asking that told me two things:  1) I was finally “grown” and 2) No one cared.  I’m sitting here now, practically punching my keyboard because I’ve finally made a choice. What that choice is…I don’t know.  Not completely anyway. But it has been made.  Ironically, it started with the aforementioned dumb-ass question:

What would happen if you succeed?

Age 35 I realized I couldn’t answer that question.  I didn’t want to.  I don’t mind feeding bull-shit to the stuff-shirts, but I’m not about to kid myself.  Life is WAAAAY too random, and your mindset can change without you even knowing it sometimes.  Whenever I try to capitalize on an opportunity (and believe me I’ve had plenty), something comes along and kicks the chair out from under me;  Finances, family, some hang-up that I can’t deal with, or I just flat out got passed up.  Self-sabotage isn’t out of the question, a while back I wrote about being afraid of success.  I just expect to come up short now, ever since I moved to North Carolina it’s been one ‘L’ after another; after 13 years, the upshots of living here can be counted on one hand.

Success is a foreign tongue to me.  I don’t hunger for money the way much of the world tells us we should (financial stability yes, but money for money’s sake, never.)  That kind greed is a trait I despise and tends to breed cruelty along with the reptilian instinct to fuck over just about any and everyone in an unending, unwinnable contest for resources, money and any kind of fame.  People don’t have names anymore; they have brands and corporate identities. That’s not the success I see for myself.  Never have.  I’m not a ‘boss’ or ‘shot-caller’, I’m just a dude who wants to do what he’s always done.  I want to tell stories; JK Rowling, Jack Kirby, Stephen King, Jim Lee…any person reading this recognizes at least two of these names.  My goal is to be numbered among them.

A similar question proved to be fairly profound, probably because it was the first time I had asked it to myself and really REALLY thought on it:”How would you feel if you reached that success?” 

How would I feel? Proud maybe?  Dumbfounded?  Totally numb to it?  How did Superman feel when he learned he could fly?  How did T’Challa feel when he became King?  Anxious maybe…  As I said before, it’s not a taste that I’m used to.  I once wrote of the possibility that I may be afraid of success.  The kind of success everyone wants an educated black man to have, where you carry everyone until you break and when you finally do, there’s no one to pick you up.  No.  I’ve decided that my success would be the weird and nerdy self-indulgent success I knew as an athlete.  That taste of personal accomplishment, knowing that I can do it because I’ve done it.  That’s the success I want.  That’s the feeling I love, when someone asks me “Hey can you handle this project” and I can say, “Yeah, no problem…" with no problem.

I think I’m gonna stop here for now but I’ll definitely be writing more about it. 

A thing I wrote (Should've-Could've-Would've)

Every now and then I’ll have a moment; a breakdown, an outburst (getting triggered as some would call it) or I’ll just find myself in a funk.  When this happens I’m lucky enough to have one or two friends who care enough to say a little bit more than "Pray on it" and are willing to tell me in no uncertain terms “STOP LIVING IN THE PAST!”  I try, but I can’t always get a handle on my thoughts.  More often than not these walks down memory lane aren’t always pleasant, but once in a blue moon I find a few roses to smell along the way, experiences that often make for writing exercises such the one you are about to read.

(For the sake of privacy I’m changing the name of the few people involved)

Wingate University. Fall 2007:

I met Dina on campus a good week before class—that four or five days students have to move their shit in, make sure they’ve got their classes added, dropped, or at least have a portion of their tuition paid.  My friend Drew was giving her the 10 cent tour while I was hurrying along to do whatever was on my to-do list that day.  He introduced me to her as well as two other young women.  As most people tend to do we spent the first few seconds sizing each other up.  Safe to say she was pretty easy on the eyes:  A tall (5’7 to the best of my recollection), willowy, ebon-hued woman sporting deep brown eyes, a mini-fro and a rather dignified gait.  (I admit to having a fondness, hell a weakness for this particular look!)

Classes began soon enough and the first week ended with a movie night in the quad.  All the adjacent dorms were camped out on the lawn to watch a film on a theatre-sized screen, and I got an opportunity to become better acquainted with Dina and her suite mates, a happy-go-lucky Asian girl and a shy but cheerful white girl, both of whom haled from upstate Carolina.  Within a week she had given me a pet name (an inside joke based on a picture I took that same evening).  That should have been my first clue.  The rest of the semester plodded along; I would spend the day on campus, go home to sleep, get up and do the whole thing all over again.  Dina began to express further interest after discovering I lived off campus (albeit with my sister).  We spent a great deal f time picking one another’s brain and I found she was a Linkin Park fan much to my elation. She even let me borrow their most recent album at that time for one of my workouts.  I enjoyed passing the time with her and it showed plain as day.

Sometime later (coincidently after the death of a family member) she proved to be a source of comfort.  That same day she invited me to a movie; it was a student group activity but in hindsight I probably should have read it better:  She had taken the time to ask me, sit with me, and share the Oreo cookies she had snuck into the theatre with me.  I can’t remember who asked first but at some point we had dinner at Tokyo Bistro and came to find out one of her suite mates (whom I had as also began becoming more acquainted with) was a waitress there.  Throughout the meal and conversation I had been under the impression that we were on a date—WRONG!  As things wound down I was all set to pay her way (a blatant attempt to impress her further) and to my utter shock she pulls up right beside me with her card.  This earned her a SOLID 8 on the crush-o-meter.

By the end of the academic term she had made the decision to transfer to another university.  At some point she opened up about being as attracted to me as I was to her during our time together and all I could do was shrug and feel some pity her being fearful of the opportunity we both missed.  Anyone who knows me knows I’ve never been too keen on marriage, but if given the chance at that time, I’d have surely given this woman my last name.  This is hardly a lovelorn exaggeration, but a statement of sheer fact.

--Ryan, April 2017

Things I would tell myself if time travel were possible

We all have those moments where we think about our lives in hindsight.  We ask ourselves, "Where did I go wrong?"  A decision we made, an opportunity we missed, a person we allowed to come into or leave our lives.   "If you could go back in time and tell change anything/tell your younger self anything, what would it be?" is question we find ourselves asking often in these moments. Well I finally had a chance to sit down and think on it, to ask myself where the key turning points were.  I managed to narrow it down to a few.  There are probably more, but I feel like these particular points are the most relevant, the most impactful.

That being said...

Things I would tell myself if time travel were possible:

-In your junior year of high school, Christina Rosado will actually have the hots for you. She will throw out all the signals and you’ll be totally clueless. Keep your eyes open and enjoy that shit for as long as it lasts.

-You’ll do everything in your power to keep your parents from habitually criticizing you, including going to a school you’ll wind up hating; it will be a hopeless endeavor. The only person worth pleasing is the one you see in the mirror.

-Take your time picking a school. Many of your relatives have never been to university and don’t what they’re talking about. As time goes on you will develop a healthy dislike for their intellectual ineptitude and eventually come to hate them for it.

-Ignore women when they start crying. It’s just a form of manipulation.

-Avoid living in the south at all costs. The stupidity alone can kill you.

-Losing your mom and dad will be a slow and ugly process and there isn’t a damn thing that’s going to prepare you for it.

-Terrorism, republicans, bible thumpers, and social justice warriors, along with the countless other shortcomings of your species, just might bring you to tears.

-Bruce Lee was, is and always will be the man. His words will give you immeasurable strength.