Getting lost in idealism

I feel as if I am still constantly chasing after a bigger ideal that I just can’t ever seem to catch up to.  I often wonder if my goal is defined well enough and whether one of my greatest weaknesses is thinking about the ideal and not being concrete enough.  No matter how much I want to merge reality with my ideals, I admit that it’s still all a little murky to me.

Too often I chase after challenges I know I can’t handle.  It would be pretentious of me to say I doing it to test myself, see my limits, and then boast of it as if it was an accomplishment to have at least tried.  In the end, I find that even when I test my limits, there’s a certain amount of reality I should recognize.  After all, it wouldn’t make sense to dive into a battle knowing I would not only lose it, but the entire battleground itself.  Then slowly, everything becomes undone and the goal I once had becomes like a fragmented dream.  It takes a bit of realism to balance out the overall ideal or else the dream will only stay a dream.

Finding a place where I belong, that’s maybe something I still think about often.

I used to hate to be called a premedical student, to be associated with the kind stereotype that I thought I often saw in students in my own classes.  I did my best to distance myself from that kind of image, not because I felt like I was above everyone else nor was it because it was an excuse for the distance between my performance on exams in comparison.  It really was just because I felt I didn’t belong there.  In retrospect though, it was probably another pitfall resulting from my age old mindset: that I can only depend on myself and that in turn, I’d also make things happen on my own.  Maybe I did and do still need to grow up.