Wow, I sure seem to be updating often recently.

This time I wanted to share some thoughts about myself in the hopes that writing them down might somehow help me understand myself and the choices I've made. So here goes.

I've always been the sort of person who gets extremely enthusiastic about things that really interest me. In most cases my enthusiasm ends up lasting only for a short while, but in few special cases my enthusiasm has lead to me to dedicate years of my life to those interests, namely Harry Potter and anime/manga. The only problem is that once I'm interested in something, I want to concentrate on only that one thing and cast other interests aside. I don't even know how to obsess over more than two or three things at a time. For example, my interest in Harry Potter dwindled immediately when I found manga and anime. But I'm not going to talk about those two. Right now I'm much more interested in contemplating all the other short-lived interests that I let slip by. I sometimes wonder what my life would be like today if I had chosen to pursue some other interest instead of the ones I did pursue.

When I was really young (around 5 or 6), people often told me that I was good at drawing. I was about to start elementary school and my mom decided to enroll me in a special art oriented class. But then we moved before I could begin that class and I enrolled in a smaller elementary school in the countryside that didn't have an art oriented class. I always got high grades on my drawings throughout my schooling (I did pencil drawings whenever I could since I totally suck at coloring), but I never dedicated myself to learning more techniques. Even now I often have the urge to draw something (mainly human figures) whenever I see amazing art made by others, but I always stop from trying because I know I would have to spend a lot of time studying different drawing styles before I could find my own. And learning how to paint properly (I'm most interested in watercolors) would require a lot more time on top of that. This is the point where I always stop myself and decide that there are other things that interest me even more and which need my full concentration. So I never learn how to draw well.

Next, music. Aside from the recorder, which everybody had to learn to play in elementary school, I have at some point tried to learn how to play the piano, the drums, the trumpet and the guitar. I also used to love singing until it came very clear that I have no talent in singing whatsoever (or a sense of rhythm for that matter). I gave up on the last three instruments on my list in a few weeks, but played the piano for two years or so until my teacher tried to teach me how to play harder pieces which I never seemed to get any better at. I also didn't like the teacher so I decided to quit. I wonder if I might have ended up in a local band if I had continued learning (some girls in our year actually did start a band). Nowadays I sometimes dream of taking piano lessons again in the future, just for my own amusement. I have no idea whether or not I ever will.

I tried sports too. I was especially good at the shot put and used to get the gold metal almost every time (I can now admit that the only reason that happened was because there weren't many participants in our small town competitions and I was the only one who was actually interested). That interest lasted until I tried to compete in a much larger district tournament and I didn't even make it into the finals. That's the point when I decided to quit.

Back in elementary school I used to act a lot in plays and things like that. That ended when I developed a bad case of stage fright that is still a huge problem for me.

Other very short lived interests include for example pesäpallo (the Finnish version of baseball), fishing, math, songwriting (don't ask...), knitting (I still knit occasionally), image editing, and aikido (the most recent addition to my list).

And finally, my biggest regret of all: writing. I used to write a lot when I was younger and my most productive season was around the time I was 13. Becoming a writer has always been a dream of mine and back then I fully intended to continue writing fanfiction until I felt ready to try writing something original. But guess what? I stopped. I suddenly developed this very bothersome sense of self-criticism which made me unable to be satisfied with anything I wrote. I also stopped actively reading Finnish books around that time so there was no way for me to learn new ways to express myself through writing.

So what does this all boil down to? In the end I always realize that if I want to truly become good at something, I need to give that something my full concentration and cast aside the other, less important things. If I had tried to pursue all (or at least a larger number) of my interests, I don't think I would have ever become truly good at any of them and I would just have become frustrated and stressed out (I know the limits of my attention span). My current main interests are learning Japanese (which is so connected to anime and manga that I'm not even mentioning them separately) and translating. Both are things that I don't want to do halfheartedly and that I want to become truly proficient in. Japanese especially will take a lot of work to learn. That's why I'm trying my best not to let other potentially interesting things distract me. My recent interest in cosplay is already taking away a lot of studying time (especially because sewing everything by hand takes so much more time than doing it with a sewing machine!).

Honestly, it all comes down to lack of time. If I had all the time in the world, I would love to pick up my piano lessons again and start learning how to draw and paint. I would like to go hiking and skiing many times a year and travel to countries around the world. I would like to write all the time, even if I never published anything. I would like to read all the interesting books that I can find and afterwards go back and reread all of them. I would like to spend more time with my friends and do all sorts of fun things with them (things that preferably don't involve alcohol...). I want to date and get married and have two kids who'll demand all my attention for the next twenty years. And so much more.

But I have to think of my future. I only have a couple of years left before I have to start working so that I can make a living. And then I'll have even less time for other things. And before that, I'm in a great hurry to become as good at Japanese as I possibly can since I probably won't have that much time to concentrate on learning it after I start working.

I feel like I've wasted so much time. I could be totally fluent in Swedish by now if I had taken my studies more seriously. Instead of once wasting a whole summer vacation on playing Rollercoaster Tycoon (another short lived obsession) I could have been writing. Or drawing.

I don't ever want to go back to being the lazy old me who wasted time on things that I don't even remember anymore and who never became good at anything. ((And just for the record, I don't consider watching anime a waste of time. However, watching the same anime for the fifth time because I'm too lazy to do anything else is a waste of time.))

Life's too damn short.