Project/Adventure: Ambition: the Hard Worker; 09.07.01

It was my senior year in high school, and i was 16/17 years old. the personality for this year was the psychotically ambitious hard worker.

Not schoolwise of course...oh hell no. Senioritis hit me hard within the first week. But I had something like three jobs, and gave all of my paychecks to my mother to help her pay for things while her business was taking a nosedive. I would go to school around 7 in the morning, stay there until 2, go to some clubs or meetings or whatever until 5, go to a tutoring job, go to another job, get home at 11, and sleep.

Thank god homework was never an issue

so my motivation for this personality, i suppose, was to put myself in my mother's shoes. Throughout my entire life, my mom has been working full days like these, working to support herself and her daughter, without vacations or weekends or any rewards. So i tried this. And you know, i think i did fairly well, even if i grew distant to my friends and my teachers. Because i was stressed, and i was harried, but i did everything.

i don't think i'll take this up as a lifestyle choice though. What this personality has taught me, is that ANY kind of work i ever do for the rest of my life, is absolutely NOTHING compared to the amount of work i did in that one year. I can now work 12 hour days without breaks, and not feel it. It made me tough just a little.

As i mentioned before though, it did cause problems between my friends and teachers. If my teachers hadn't loved me to death from the year before, they would have hated me after i graduated, as opposed to just felt some sort of sad indifference. i wasn't lazy in class, but i certainly didn't go out of my way. And i wrung out all the power and privleges i had earned the previous three years until the teachers could no longer stand me. i sort of just coasted on borrowed time and moral credit for a year. My friends were neglected, and it is a shame, since i moved away right after that. So i never really got a chance to mend any decrepit old neglected bridges between me and them.

I don't think i stopped moving that year. not once. Mostly working, but mostly...working. A search on docments written between june 1999 and june 2000 shows me less than 165 files were written, and 90% of them are school papers. That means I wrote about 15 actual pieces for myself. (This is opposed to the average, of about 200 works per year) I think this, is the only true quantitative measure I could use to demonstrate this, other than paychecks, which I don't know the balance of, since I never cashed any of them. All of them went to mom so she could pay for the car insurance...so i could drive to work..so i could get payed...to pay for car insurance...

So the good points of this personality: I'm no longer afraid of hard work, and if i am faced with it in the future, it won't create any anxiety for me, since i've known the true horrors and lived to face them. Also, i can sympathize with my mother, and whenever she says i don't know how hard she works so i can have a good life, i can say "yes mom, i do." I learned that playing is much much more valuable than work.

The bad parts: i lost a lot of good relationships with people. I grew a hefty fear of spending money (which i already had a little of an anxiety about before), and i lost a lot of ground on my writing, and other things i should have been doing my senior year of high school. like going to parties or to boston or just sleeping over a friend's house. I missed my prom because i was afraid of wasting money. I missed all the end of the year celebrations and i almost skipped my own graduation. These are all things I regret, and i can't take back.