I'm not sure what this post will look like, but I'm quite confident that it will be a lot of babbling and have no defined direction of where it is heading, it's just a blind attempt to put how I feel on the page...
I read. In that past 2 weeks I've read a pretty massive series that follows Julian Delphiki, or Bean, through his short life. I want to avoid writing a book report here, so if you want to know more about it, email me and I'll let you know. He dies. It's a sad moment and his widow marries another man, and he dies. How much death can you really read about before it starts to effect you? I know that they aren't real people, but over several books, you get to know them as real people, you know what makes them tick, you KNOW them.
It's often the same in movies. You connect with one character that you root for over the course of the film. I've seen some that the better ending would have been the hero losing, but for the sake of the viewer, there is often some impossible string of events that leaves the hero with his heroine living happily ever after. There is a hug and a kiss and maybe a wedding, but it tugs at you that there is happiness.
Holding these thoughts in my head as I put down the last book that I finished just a few minutes ago, I couldn't help but wonder where my happily ever after is. What follows here isn't an effort to make you feel sorry for me, it's just truth. My life has been a string of disappointments and a few successes, but the success never lingers in my mind the way a good failure does. I try to learn things from them, but sometimes it just sticks that maybe there is nothing to learn from it. One demotivator I've read, reads "If at first you don't succeed, maybe failure is your style". I hate to think this is talking to people like me.
I wrote in the past about anguish and carry some scars that won't heal. When I get that little ache, is it those scars stretching because the rest of me is growing or is it just new scars being added with the ones that already exist. I carry a pang, right in the middle of me, some days I feel it more than others and some days I can make it fade to almost nothing, the way a mosquito bite feels like nothing the next day. What will it be that makes this pain go away?
Haven't read the series you mentioned, but can identify with the feeling of failures outnumbering successes. One thing I've begun to learn is that even the most successful people in the world deal with this same feeling, the thing that sets some apart is how they respond to failures, how quickly they learn from their failures and can readjust plans accordingly, and other signs of managing expectations and resilience.
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