Passage.

I can't believe how much time I wasted--working office jobs, doing things I didn't want to do, being a masochist more generally--when I could have been ostensibly writing. Why all that suffering, really? To what end, for what purpose? Surely not money, as I made just enough to get by and keep doing the shit I was doing. I feel so behind, so at a loss, so threatened by the passage of time because I've wasted so much of it. I see these 22 and 23 year olds, straight out of college, doing MFAs alongside of me, and I think, fuck, they are so much smarter than I am. They went straight for what they wanted, while I went for character-building experiences in which I consistently placed myself in challenging and uncomfortable situations. I could've been sitting in a cozy, familiar room, writing. Why oh why oh why do I always take the more difficult road? What does character-building mean, anyway? It means I've suffered, seen the world, seen parts of myself that I frankly wish I'd never seen.

And yet I wouldn't take back a single experience. Not one, really. OK, maybe the last office job I had. Though it took that one to bring me here. It took severe disgust and fear of "this is it, forever and ever?" to make me apply to go back to school less than 6 months after graduating. So who the hell knows whether it's ever a waste or exactly as much time as it takes.