Paying a visit to my past self

Today's agenda includes going through all of my old things and throwing out anything that I don't particularly desire to keep or otherwise preserve. The point of this exercise is to help my mom cut down on clutter and prevent the onslaught of packrattedness.

The problem with going through all of my old things is that I always, ALWAYS find myself getting entirely too absorbed in everything I've ever thought and done. There's so much to be found in letters I've gotten, pictures I've been in, essays I've written, events I've attended...

As a high school student, I was extremely dedicated. I was articulate, thorough, detail-oriented, exacting, precise. I had a never-ending drive to succeed, and I had self confidence to the max. There was never a question in my mind of whether I was capable of achieving the highest quality possible -- only of whether I had enough time and patience to do it. I poured inexhaustible enthusiasm into the subjects that I loved (math, science, foreign language). I thrived on complexity and eagerly embraced learning as a source of life and meaning.

I had so much motivation and momentum...

And then I went to college. Gone were the days of required attendance. Of close student-teacher relationships. Of hanging out with classmates during lunch hour. Everyone had things to do, places to go, worries to take care of. I grew more and more detached from school with each passing day.

Not to convey a poor image of my school, but from the very beginning I had a hard time feeling intellectually stimulated both by classmates and by professors. People just didn't seem to get anything, I thought. But I reasoned that I was probably just experiencing the shock of taking mainstream courses again after having spent my high school years in honors and advanced placement classes. I decided that things would eventually look up.

But it all started going downhill when I discovered that I could skip class from time to time and still do just fine on the tests and homework. As an ardent supporter of efficiency, I did just that. I soon became identified by some of my professors as one of the class non-goers. Some even asked my classmates to encourage me to attend, and I started to feel somewhat self-conscious whenever I did show up to class. Eventually I stopped going at all unless I felt I really needed the day's lecture to understand the material. Class became a chore that I tolerated, rather than an opportunity to share the love and pursuit of knowledge with classmates and teachers. I never did have the chance to see if the intellectual atmosphere of my classes would ever shape up.

Once people think they've gotten you figured out, they help you impose that identity upon yourself. And I was a certified class-skipper. There were some classes that I did not attend more than 10 times throughout the entire semester, and while my grades did not suffer for it, I was seen as indifferent, unmotivated, and lazy. Uninterested. And I began to step into that role and identify with it, even telling people that "Yes, that is how I am."

"Perhaps it's impossible to wear an identity without becoming what you pretend to be." (Orson Scott Card's Ender's Game, page 163, Valentine speaking.) Indifferent, unmotivated, and lazy. Uninterested. By the end of junior year, that's what I had become. What's more, I had not been intellectually challenged for a long time, and I had thus become complacent and unimaginative.

In high school, I was a "100% is not enough!!" kind of person. I didn't want to simply score high, I wanted to dominate the material. I wanted to know how it applied and how it was useful. Partial mastery and achievement was as if nothing to me.

Somewhere along the way, I became content to fall just somewhere in the range of successful. An A was an A to me, whether 100% or only 92.5%, and to heck with whether I could apply the material or not. Too often I became inclined to say "I guess this is the best I can do" and move on.

Looking back on my old self, I wonder: Can I go back to the enthusiastic, motivated, incredibly self-confident and self-achieving individual that I once was? What is it that I had then that I have now lost, and can it be regained?