Wasting Time

 

I used to wonder how people would react if I told them I just spent ten years in prison. Having been out for several months now, I am somewhat underwhelmed by the answer. Now it’s a point of discussion I’d rather not waste time on. You get some people who say stuff like “Wow, you don’t seem like you were locked up” or, “Oh my god, I couldn’t imagine…” while others seamlessly direct the conversation to the first thing prison reminds them of. I’m so over it that I’ll just gloss over the detail of my incarceration with an offhand comment and a shrug. Then I’ll be the one surprised when I get a reaction as I remember this is not an ordinary remark.

I’m not shocked. Even when people act differently than I expect, I can still understand why. The world bombards us with information, fishing relentlessly for our attention that we might invest interest and contribute consumer data. My grand reveal is naturally drowned out in the cacophony. How self-centered of me to think otherwise.

Truthfully, telling my story is not the most important thing to me right now. Sure, when someone expresses genuine interest I enjoy relating my experience to them as lucidly as I can. I step up to the challenge of finding the right words. Yet, even those exchanges feel like practice right now. For the story to really have weight, at least from my perspective, it needs to be older. Either that, or my fear of wasting time is rushing me.

This fear is something that has actually taken up way more space in my head. Having lost so much time, I can’t shake this compulsion to make up for it. I obsess over catching up. Whenever I sense my life isn’t what I want it to be, or I am settling for anything less than greatness, I get a voice in my head saying, “If you wanted to do the same thing every day and just get by, you could have stayed in prison for that.” All those years I was locked up, I thought about all my compromises over and over. I regretted not doing more with the time I was free. I saw how quickly the face in the mirror gets older, and now I have a sense that more is at stake.

As I thought about these ruminations, I remembered a scene from the 1995 movie Mallrats, where Shannen Doherty’s character gives a speech to her boyfriend as she breaks up with him. She tells him she cries in the bathroom when she thinks about all the people living important lives, and how these people make a difference, and she cries because she has “nothing better to do than f*ck you.”

I can feel the gravity in this transitional time, that the decisions I make now will set the stage for the unfolding of my future. Whether I choose to strive for excellence or fall into a holding pattern may determine whether I find myself again wondering why I let so much time go by without living. Until then, it seems trivial to tell stories.