What I Want

Prompt: Answer, “What do I want, what is my ambition?” Work with ideas in A Million Miles in a Thousand Years.

Donald Miller’s train of thought, if I understand correctly, sounds something like: If we’re all characters, then we all have stories. The stories are about what the characters want. Each story has two possible endings: we get what we want or we don’t.

I don’t really know what I want. I think it’s changing (see blog I’ll post after this one). In the very recent past, I knew I wanted to be good. That’s a pretty vague ambition, but it’s honest. I’m not sure how to be good. I figured out when I was about eight that I was broken somehow.

 I’ve had these moments where I just get confused with myself. I’ve thought, “Other humans couldn’t possibly be as bad as me, and they aren’t this dark. They aren’t this broken.” My conclusion was that other people had it figured out (at least some of them did… others, not so much), and I was doing something wrong.

So my ambition is to fix that vague thing that isn’t right.

I suppose that vague idea that I’m pursuing could be called “wholeness.”  I’ve experimented with a bunch of things that I thought would fix my lack of something, like good grades, and boyfriends, and daily bible reading. The results are pretty scattered.

I should probably define “good.” For the past decade or so, this has been my working definition: to be good means to be kind, generous, and to possess other sorts of virtues. “Good” people talk a lot less than I do. They are also talented and admired. They are loved, and, I suspect, they feel loved all of the time.

I’ve never written that out before. It sounds ridiculous.