Last Saturday was my friend's 20th birthday. She's not alone. So many of my friends are having their birthdays come up and mine will be up soon. I'll be twenty years old. That doesn't sound like much. That's still pretty young. But it's odd. I don't feel twenty. Nowhere near that age.

I remember when I was a lot younger, I always saw people who were twenty, twenty-one, as so much older, so responsible, so mature. Now here I am on the verge of turning twenty, and I don't see that anymore. I feel so young, yet so old.

How old do you feel? I don't mean physically; I mean mentally. I feel... sixteen. You know, I feel like I don't have to worry about so many things, it'll all be taken care of for me. Every time I get that feeling, I hate myself. I know I shouldn't be doing things like that. I know I need to be more responsible about my life. Instead, I end up screwing around instead of taking care of my business.

All my friends are turning twenty. I look at them and I can't see it. I still imagine us in high school. I still see them as the same guys I knew eating lunch together, hanging out after school, and all that. It is so hard to imagine that we're growing out of our teen years. In a little less than two months, I will have ceased to be a teen. How odd is that? Me! Little ole me. The guy who still plays video games. Who still likes cartoons. Who still wants to stay in bed until ungodly hours. Thinking of myself as an adult completely undermines my idea of adults. Weird, is it not? But then again, there are a lot of people who are older than me that I know, who act completely childishly; even worse than I do!

All this makes me ask myself one question: Do I hold too high of a standard for myself?

Okay, the leap in logic is little off, but that's how my mind thinks. What kind of standards do I hold for myself, anyway? When I look at everything I do, I realize that I'm close to being a perfectionist. I always want it done right, yet if I can't do it right then I seem to just leave it in whatever way it stands. My room is a mess. At first, I was fanatical about keeping things in their place, but after I realized that I didn't have separate drawers for certain types of papers, I just let them collect on my desktop. My martial arts is pretty good. People tell me that I'm pretty good. I can't see it, though. I only see how much more I should be able to do. I only see a standard that I have never attained. In everything I do, I always strive to achieve more than what I am or have. This may sound good. Usually, it is. However, the way I view it, I tend to lose faith in myself because of it. I tend to belittle my talents in my striving. But that is the only way I know how. And in failing to achieve my goals, I end up damaging my self-image, which further brings me down.

Well, that's one way to think of it. What if, perhaps, I don't hold myself to too high a standard? What if my standards are fine, it's just me that fails to meet those standards? When I do martial arts, I see in my mind how it should be done. I know that I have so much to learn, so much to work at, so much to improve. I know how abysmal my skill is when compared to what the martial arts embodies. When I play roller hockey, I always see how good my friends are, so I strive to be as good as them. When I go snowboarding, I see how much more I need to work on and how little I truly do.

The quote above came out from a long night of talking between my two friends and I. They, however, cropped the quote to fit the image. "From the mountain, you can only see the sky above you. But from the valley, you can see the mountain." When I said this, I meant that looking from the heights of accomplishment, you can only see how far you have to go. Yet, looking from the depths of defeat, you see how far you've already come. I guess this is how I felt about my life. All my life, I've only seen how much more I need to go. When I thought about knowledge, I always thought about how much I didn't know. When I practiced my martial arts, I always thought about what I had yet to learn. When I thought about snowboarding, I always thought about where I had yet to go. I never really thought about what I already knew, what I already learned, where I'd already been. It was only in the sadness of my defeat that I realized how undefeated I'd been.

And in looking back at this, only one thought comes to mind:

That was random.