Preface: this is my series of RAW and UNEDITED daily posts for NaNoWriMo. It’s going to be extremely imperfect, lauden with grammatical and spelling errors, but brimming with potential. I post it mostly for myself, but invite any daring souls to try and keep up with the winds that blow me to tomorrow :wind_face:.

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Day 100 (NaNoWriMo Part 21)

The Gate and Tower

Recently, I’ve hit a wall.

The wall is built out of frustration, like something no matter what I do, nothing seems to change in the hearts of others.

It reminds me eerily of my phases of becoming extroverted to insular, because I felt like no matter what I did or how engaging something was to me, it wouldn’t resonate as well with the otherse whom I considered important in my life.

And if what’s important to me isn’t important to you, well… are you really important to me?

Hmm.

At face value, this juvenile school of thought seems completely justified. But the other me becomes a little more world-wary, and realizes that other humans are a complex blender of emotions, and why something doesn’t resonate with them could be due to any number of reason, not just the one or two-off unfortunate mis-encounter. Yet it’s funny, the times we had the best seem like sparkles and glitter dust in an almost dreamlike event, while all the unfortunate and painful elements linger in our hearts and mind like a thorny weight we can’t remove.

The frustration leads to short-temperedness, as the more I invest in the other directly around me, the less of the lessons seem to stick. It’s infuriating. But when I take breath, I breathe. And when I breathe, I take it slower. When I take it slower, the immediate field-of-view pans out. I see glimpses of the bigger picture, and in this bigger picture are truths that I ever so easily forget: my friends may not necessarily be my true audience, and if I REALLY believe in the works I put out, I will keep putting it out, even if it seems like all the effort keeps bouncing back at me. With enough forced, anything can bounce enough to break the enclosure they are placed into.

I start my journey at the bottom floor of my own personal tower. The tower is a artectural design that designates height and growth. As humans spread across the land and become densely populated in locales popularly referred to as cities, humans could no longer live by spreading out, so they had to spread up. Height is equal to grandeur in most intents, with the top-of-the-line toweres piercing the sky to reflect the heavens themselves to all the lowly plebians who could never dream of acneding to that height. Heigh is status, in those already wealthy towers exists a hierarchy of further subvision: the top of the tower is the penthouse suite, the only entity in the entire tower given a glimpse to view the horizon from the highest heights above all others who could not dare to reach these heights.

But in these towers lies a different sort of monster, one that the glass towers and sky-piercing natures could and shant ever reveal: the constricition of power. When you rise in fame and acclaim, so do your burdens. Instead of money being the key to your freedom, it becomes your jailer. The pursuit to please whoever loaned you the money to get to where you are, the people you stepped on to get to the top, and the everlasting pursuit for more when you already have more than enough will trap you for the rest of your days. In that beautiful penthouse suite overlooking the city, you stand alone because there is no one left you trust. They all want you for the tower’s prestige and privelilege, not you yourself. There is a study that follows the happiness levels of people from different economic brackets: it is reported on average people with massive amount of wealth are actually more depressed than those straddling uneder the poverty line, but why? Shouldn’t being at the top of the tower be everything you want and more? Why are people LESS happy at the top?

Maybe, there is some truth at being at the bottom of the tower. Real truths in finding and protecting what worth’s keeping.

Something real.

In an open field somewhere in between the realms of physical reality, virtual realty, and dream reality, I stand at the bottom of my own personal tower right now. At my own personal tower, I have the key, the willingness to be able to step into tomorrow, but what I don’t see is what lies above. I’m at the ground floor, and looking up, I can only see one or two floors above me. The rest is enveloped through a thick cloud of fog, and I have no idea how high this tower ascends or what’s waiting in store. But something tells me that the shape of this tower is not pre-ordained. It is shaped by the people I cross paths with and the ideals I carry myself with as I ascened every challenge to continue stepping higher. As I imagine what the journey could be like, I begin to lose what I felt was real: bonds, family, a simple life, and a healthy dosage of servititude without gratitude. To help others without expecting anything immediate in return, but instead an intangible ember of hope to awaken possiblity in the othersr whos paths you personally cross.

As I laze about in an uncertainty fashion in front of the tower’s engtrace, pacing back and forth nervously withm y hands clapsed behind me back, I envision my ascension to weath and financial freedom. What the techd giants of today do is very simple: instead of owning the means of production like the robber barons of old, they instead create, mainstain, and expand the means of connection over the world wide web. And how they make their profit is hilariously simple: sell the connections to the highest bidder in the form of targeted advertsing, all in the ploy of selling more things people don’t need but are convinced they think they must acquire at all costs. It’s kind of sickening when you see the whole pipeline of affects, and as someone who doesn’t own such a pipeline I can say from the comfort of my distance of the situatiuon that I am morraly upbright in my philosophies.

But what if, I was given the chance?

Suddently, this whole pipeline of events seems plausible, even ethical in some regards. If I were to create some sort of network of connection via virtual reality, suddently, I would have a whole tribe of people at my behest. And if a promising proposition would come to my doorstep, say, targeted adventising, selling out my people doesn’t seem so bad. It’s just advertistments, they don’t have to buy whatever is sent to them. Everyone benefits, and everyone is happy.

Eh.

The hardest part about being morally upright, is keeing to your morals when push comes to shove. When things go unexpecetedly well, but you must bend your morals just a tad so that you benefit just a smiegon betteri n the short term, it doesn’t seem to so bad. Eventually you keep bending away the morals that once held you up, and find yourself at the end of a forest of broken structures and a pile of material goods you never needed in the first place.

The hardest decision, is the active decision to stay complacent and humble, no matter what opportuntiues come and are beng sold for just a bit of your soul. A once famous entrepreneur turned teacher said that in order to live a modest live, all you need is 1,000 fans willing to pay you $100 dollars each per YEAR. That’s an $100,000 salary, for doing nothing but what you love! You are well above the poverty line, but still leagues away from ever being filthy rich. The trick here is, to figure out what you really need. And remind yourself time and again, not through a defeatist mentality, but a humble and appreciative mentality. To not feel jealous or FOMO (fear of missing out) is almost the same as not craving to basic human instinct, to go above and beyond your own humanity because you believe in something better and bigger than yourself.

When you build a tower, it takes people. How you treat these people will determine how your tower is built, whether shoddy and neglectful, or beautiful and (word-for-humble-but-elegant). How your tower is filled is depended completely on your acent to greatness: will you bring others up who have talent just to see how far you will go, or will you continue to step on others to your ascent in a senseless wake of bodies? When you get to the top, will you stop climbing and building? The higher a tower gets , the stronger the foudnation eeds to be to suport anymore floors, any more possiblities. Will your tower be construct on the hopes of many, or the will of one?

Then there is, the Gate.

What I’ve been stuck at is the gate of my tower.

The gate is the symbolis represenation of being at the bottom floor of the tower, which is to say that I recognize the tower exists at all. For most, this is a distant dream, if even a minor idea at the back of their collective minds. My focus on trying to push people at the gate who aren’t even at their town is foolhardy and quite frankly, annoying. What I need instead is to find people at their own gates, banging on the doors to open for their own personal tower and journey to begin. Our towers could even intersect, and we build a foundation together.

With these words in tow, knowing the existence of the grand tower, the wanderers at the gates, and the ongoing rememberance of being humble and nonsuceptible to the corruption of the human soul, I push forward and upwards. The wind blows over me, and a new floor reveals itself in the cloud cover that used to hang so low. I smile, knowing my reason, and take the first step towards the future.

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Today’s word count: 1,658 words
Total word count until today: 42,377 words

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