There are people in this world whose laughter coaxes the sun up at dawn each morning, whose passion propels the Earth along its steady rotation. They are the people whose smiles spread to those around them; they reach out and touch the darkest corners in a room, the darkest corners in another human being. They are the ones who inspire you to be better, greater, bigger than the person you were 10 minutes before meeting them, because they are better, greater, bigger than anyone else you know. There are people in this world who find happiness as natural as breathing, who cannot help but let their own joy spill out over the brim of their existence in all of their pursuits.
I am not one of those people.
My personal gravity draws me not toward joy, but toward achievement. I am a cog in a machine, a competent and driven individual whose character has long been defined by an unshakeable work ethic. I feel myself, at all times, pulled into a vortex of shoulds and ought tos, responsibilities and chores on a never-ending to-do list. There is an unmistakable satisfaction that comes with the pressed line I etch across a task upon completion, a check mark as thin as the line my lips form in concentration as I work, and work, and work. I have the uncanny talent of magically transforming all that I love into a task — in life, there are goals, and strategies to reach them, and when I’m particularly non-vigilant, little else.
I lose myself in my work, and by that, I mean a quite literal meaning of the word lost, in which the moment I surface I am gasping for air and disoriented, wondering where I am and how I got there to begin with. When I eventually find myself, I am not where I set out traveling or intended to be. I am often turned around and much closer to the very thing I was trying to move away from, than I am to the place I had every aspiration of reaching.
