Some dreams deserve to die

I often say to myself, in this webpost or to other people that I am an ambitious man. That is undoubtedly true. I want success, I want influence, I want fame and a long and far reaching legacy. Most of all, I want power, beautiful, immense and utterly absolute power. Lately I have pondering exactly what this ambition means to me. It's this pondering that has led me to some odd thoughts.

One of the manifestations of my ambition as well as my love of stories and tales is that occasionally I play out in my head dramatic scenes of me acting like some sort of superhero or supervillain and often a part of that is the confrontation scene where I find my counterpart and stunned by my appearance he asks, "Who are you?" because no mere human should be able to do what I have done in this little story playing in my head.

Although the answer most of the time is simply "I'm Rand," I've played with a lot of variations on the question, such as "Who are you that you could survive my minions?" and "Who are you that walks through walls and controls flames?" (when I pretend to have superpowers), but one variation of the question bothered me profusely, I imagined a confrontation where my enemy said to me "Who are you that you controls the winds and the waves?" Now what bugs me about this is that this far too close to

'"Who is this? He commands even the winds and the water, and they obey him."'

A description of Jesus in Luke 8:25. These little senarios I make up in my head in a way sort of capture my ambitious spirit, it shows that I want to be something so incredible that anyone who opposes me will not be able to even understand who I am. But now I was comparing myself to Jesus in this scene, and in a way I was showing an ambition to be Jesus, and not in the way that I want to imitate Jesus' goodness but in a way that I want the power of Jesus, I want the power of God.

If this kind of seems almost blasphemous well, I didn't intend it to be that way at least consciously. Unconsciously I guess this was my desire. And to be honest this scares me. Am I really that ambitious to go to the point that I want to have the power of God? This really smacks of meglomania and insanity. Which really isn't suprising given that I have many symptoms of manic-depression and meglomania is simply another one. But that doesn't help the fact that I have this desire, and unlike my other symptoms of my mental illness which seems to come to me from parts of my brain that almost seem completely separated from the rest of my personality, this seems deeply engrained in my own self.

But in the end what I have to do is reject this. I cannot be a good Christian and harvest this ambition. Yes I can take advantage of my ambitiousness to keep me driven but I must always remember to keep myself in check.

And that makes me wonder. One of my common dreams is to enter politics, to become a political deal maker, to become a key person in international politics that makes the world tremble at his will. But if I am to keep my meglomania in check, I think it might be time to say goodbye to this dream.

Moreover, I think I must keep in track my cultivation of this alternate persona of Rand. I was planning to create a Randopedia, something like Wikipedia but based on my views on things with input from users but edited to keep my ideas primary. I was also planning to create Rand-centric productions for videos and such (not just like my comic and perhaps a spin off of that but cultivating Rand as a media persona). I was even dreaming of trying to create a sort of school of thought following of myself.

Even more sadly, I was pondering whether I should use the organization of Knights of Mars I was trying to start (based on the ideal of friendship) as an instrament of my ambitions and dreams.

It doesn't matter that all of these ambitions seem completely unrealistic, what I wanted was to complete them in part or bits, so I could taste power at the very least. It occurs to me that all of this is madness. And so perhaps it is time to throw that all away. Perhaps it is time to give up on my idea of becoming a high political official (although I'm not ruling out any involvement in politics), perhaps I should abandon the idea of creating Rand as a media figure and perhaps I should put the idea of the Knights of Mars on the back burner until I can truly concentrate it on the idea of friendship (or maybe given my bad organizational abilities and lack of concentration perhaps the better course would be to entrust someone else with the idea).

But then in the end what do I want for my life. Well, I want to write stories and I want to share my ideas with the world and I want to help people with those things. But perhaps what I don't need is to become powerful, it would be nice, but perhaps I just need to put that behind my writing and such. I dunno. All I know is I really don't want to be a man obsessed with ambition. I need to remember that and keep that in mind whenever I get the temptation to obsess over my lack of power. If I end up not powerful so be it, as long as I am a good man, it does not matter.