An entire semester came and went. I voted in my first Presidential election. I survived yet another holiday season. My band put out a record and then broke up. And, to some extent, I've come out of all of this with more realistic expectations about life than ever before.
I've struggled with this notion of being a realist. I suppose it's nice for some to live with high hopes and a strong sense of faith and optimism, but it's never worked for me. Society probably expects me to be idealistic. I'm a college student at an art school, a musician and writer, a left-leaning feminist, a product of a fairly cozy suburban upbringing which many would assume left me with the distinct impression that everything will work out if you let it, that this world is a generally nice place to live. But I've never subscribed to these idealistic concepts.
Being a realist has its pros and cons. Because of your realistic expectations, you are rarely devastated when things don't pan out quite perfectly and you are uplifted by the more pleasant surprises. The problems really only rear their heads in interactions with idealists. Idealists think of realists as cold and pessimistic, the bearers of the bad news that "real life isn't like that." In this way, realists become the bad guys, the anti-dreamers, the folks idealists blame for the world not living up to their expectations. Of course, realists retaliate with the sentiment that idealists are immature and impractical.
In a way, this is why my band broke up--the age-old idealism vs. realism debate. I think my comrades believed that the band could be our own microcosm of holistic democracy, that we could all be best friends and band mates at once, and so any tension or disagreement was highly upsetting to them. I knew better from the beginning and many of the predicaments we experienced along the way involved me trying to demonstrate this idea to the others. We were not all equally invested, and so we could not all have an equal say. In the end, they could not understand, acknowledge, or accept this and I had to walk away.
I always end up falling on the side of realism and practicality. Believe or not, this often involves a leap of faith and ambition (but that's for another day). It also involves a kind of emotional distance or detachment, something that comes more than naturally to me. After the initial breakup of my band, I wrote this in my paper journal (old school, I know):
I don't know how deeply I am really affected by any of this. There was a point where I tried to--and for a moment even thought I did--feel something like genuine suffering, but I doubt the possibility of this ever actually occurring, since I am always at a remove from own life. I am more likely to observe than to experience. Any emotional effects I endure are usually the result of my detached reaction to the circumstances and not the circumstances themselves. That way, I never experience genuine pain, but, of course, this comes at the questionably worthy price of never experiencing genuine... anything. I feel like a fraud. Most of my interactions are forced. Not in a sociopathic way, but in the way that means you never really experience anything first-hand because every moment of your life is infected with some self-reflexive virus, some spectator impulse, some echo breathing meta, meta, meta.This also has its pros and cons. Ultimately, I think it depends on how you choose to live your life and how much value you put on experiencing strong emotions. Some people crave strong emotions--they thrive on drama. In many ways, I am the anti-drama queen, with the one glaring exception of my long-time conviction that life is, essentially, theater.
