Snap!

Do you ever wonder how your life could change on different paths? Do you ever think of all the infinite possibilities that would be available to you? All the successes, all the failures, all the bliss, all the misery? Your imagination runs wild. You're a plumber, doing a dirty job for money you really don't want. SNAP! You're a successful businessman running a multinational corporation planning to kill yourself tomorrow because your soul has been rejected in every pursuit that doesn't involve corruption. SNAP! You're a clown who enjoys scaring small children. SNAP! You're a food bagger at Food City and you're the happiest person on earth because you've got your priorities right and so does she. SNAP! You're running for Senate and have a chance at winning if only you'll compromise your integrity and say that one, seemingly insignificant lie. SNAP! You're a homeless person who was once the most influential pizza delivery boy in the entire tri-state area. SNAP! You are the Messiah, but in a horribly unexpected riding accident you become completely paralyzed and can only communicate by very faintly wiggling your left ear. SNAP! You are a vagrant, a lost soul desperately seeking something to cling to in a cold, callous world that doesn't want those who do not fit the scheme to be a part of it. SNAP! You're a homemaker, taking care of 5 small children and hoping they can learn from your myriad of mistakes and have a chance to follow their dreams of being a forensic accountant unlike you. SNAP! You're an FBI agent who's sole job is to play politics in a tainted system using tainted methods to achieve goals that initially seemed pure, but each day you question more and more. SNAP! You're a brilliant novelist who has written works read and enjoyed by millions of people, endearing yourself to the masses and donating the vast majority of your wealth to charity and promoting causes of hope and universal cooperation where ever you go. SNAP! You're a mediocre poet who doesn't know it and constantly tries to become a success in a profession that you cannot understand and that even the best will not succeed in. SNAP! You are a nihilist, a person devoid of any morality or purpose but those twisted verisimilitudes that you fashion out of your hollowed soul. SNAP! You are the leader of a small, but powerful nation and gradually gather strength and form alliances you never intend on keeping to enable you to take over the world and establish an order that is a utopia to you, a Hell to everyone else. SNAP! You work in a fast food restaurant, serving overweight, self-despising people ugly boulders to attempt to fill the every-widening hole for 50years. SNAP! You are a peaceful activist, a woman who has truly seen the light and seeks to make a difference because you have the desire, the passion, and the dream. SNAP! You're a movie star who acknowledges your own superficiality and emptiness, but revels in the hedonism your short, but exciting life supplies. SNAP! You're a furniture salesman who, in your spare time, forms beautiful sculptures that you always destroy for they are not worthy of anyone but yourself and God. SNAP! You are a high school math teacher who could have been everything but failed. SNAP! You are a teenager, confused and alone when all you really want is a something you cannot speak of, cannot predict, and cannot understand but have to try nonetheless. SNAP! You are yourself, a vessel of Fate, a puppet of God, a ball of clay who is shaped by yourself with unmolded hands into some, none, or all of these possibilities each more fantastic, more miserable, more mundane than you could have ever dreamed.

As each second passes, the mold becomes more defined. Points that could have been smoothed out and done over rapidly harden to the point of no return. You are the potter, but so is reality, so are your friends, so are your enemies, so are people, places, and butterflies you have never met or will never know existed.

That is the point I find myself in. I could be so much and do so many things, or so people tell me, but I can't believe them. They have warped, bias viewpoints. If I do something, I want to excel at it. I want to be the very best possible. Perhaps not directly in comparison with others, but the standard of excellence and success that is commonly accepted, I want to pass it. With a high school teacher, that bar is rather low. Show passion, show interest, and show that you really do care and you've pretty much achieved it. I can do that. But I don't think I can do much else. All those realities, all those different paths that people claim I can go down are but pipedreams. The biggest problem is that I have no faith. Not just in a divine sense, but in anything. No faith in others, no faith in humanity, and no faith in myself. And thus far, I've had nothing to prove to the contrary.