Tuesday, January 10, 2012

The Quarter-Life Crisis: Lost and Found

Hey all you twenty - somethings.  You know who you are.  Somedays you wake up and are like, "What am I doing here? Where am I going in life? How did I get here?"

It's common amongst medical students to have days like that: the days where the thoughts are, "OMG, you're going to trust ME with your life one day? aaaahhhh! I'm 24, still a child, how did I get here?!"

I'm over a quarter of the way through this campaign, and I think I might be in a bit of a pickle.

While I'm over a quarter way through, I am not even a quarter way to my goal, and that feeling of doubt is starting to sink in. I can't do this. This is probably just another one of my naive and idealistic stupid dreams.

You have them too.  They're the ones your older and more "wise" and "realistic" friends say are stupid but are really just secretly envious you have the guts to dream.

Heck, this world needs dreamers and people capable of doing big things.  The problems out there are enormous, and we need big dreams with the capacity to make them realized in order to address them.

Here's my dream.

I'm going to raise all this money for a legacy scholarship fund to give a girl the opportunity of a lifetime, and it will be my personal stamp on the universe, and I'll start it all by the time I'm 25.  Is that nuts? Who am I to get people to buy into that?  People don't care about Nepal and my personal emotional investment in this project.  I'm lost in my own head again. Who am I to think I can change the world?

Or...

...is it just so crazy, it might work?  I can calm down and remember that anything worth having takes an incredible amount of perseverance and work, and while I may feel lost at times, and mostly lost in my own dreams, I know in the end I'll be found. We'll all be.  One day, if we keep following where our imagination could possibly take us, into a land of blissful utopia, maybe others will feel inspired and decide to join us and support our dreams.

If you have a dream or feel like you have an idea that might seem completely nuts, get it out there.  Have a conversation because that's the only way you will be able to test if it's really nuts.  It might actually be brilliant.  You won't know until you get it out there.

If you're one of those realistic people reading this, I surely didn't mean to harp.  We need people like you too.  In fact, you're probably the one with the capacity to make the dreamers' dreams come true.

When the dreamers get lost, we need you to come and find us.  We need you to find us and support us in making that dream a reality, or else we might stay lost and spiral into the places where only dreams can take us and without sharing them with the world.

By the way, I would just like to give a quick shout-out to one of my supporters and grandmother, Bessie.  I am extremely grateful for people like you, and I'm so glad to have met you.

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