What I learnt after high school.

Skip ahead a few years. I am just finishing high school and I don’t really know what I should do. Life is confusing and the pressure to make up my mind on what career I want to follow is looming above my head.

Teachers, parents, family, friends and fellow students alike are all talking about it and asking me a million and one questions about what I would like to do. My answer is I don’t know. That got me about no-where and I had to make something up. I think I might have said I want to be a graphic designer because I liked to skip class, go and pretend to use the computer in the computer lab for schoolwork.

Choosing a life goal or direction is difficult. The environment that we live in the western world conditions us to choose a career, go study it at university, get a job in that area and work for 40 years until we are old.

I don’t subscribe to that philosophy and I surely didn’t when I had just finished school. Matter of fact I didn’t want to go to university. I didn’t want a career. I wanted to play music, computer games and hang out with my friends. I was still very immature but that was ok because I hadn’t experience the world yet.

I ended up going and studying Audio Engineering. I felt as though I hadn’t sold out and it kept my parents happy for the time being. In fact I really enjoyed it while I was there and could see myself working quite happily in a recording studio one day when my body will not let me be free to roam the earth any longer.

I also scored a part time job from one of my friends where I only worked one day a week (Sunday) and in between serving customers had a lot of time to ponder life.

In that time a got to listen to my mp3 player and listened to a lot of podcasts about all sorts of different subjects. These ranged from dating and relationships to self-improvement and business to hypnotism and sermons from my favourite preachers.

I tried to cover a large spectrum of ideas and to keep my mind open to the ideas that they shared. Some things were out there, others quite ridiculously inside of the square, all good and contributed along way to the ideas that I encompass now. They surely helped me to stay on track when things went to the dogs and they did that a few times in the years ahead.

So one good thing about studying further was that it gave me this job that I had a lot of spare time to think and meditate on the lessons that were pumping thru my ears.

I have one distinct memory of driving into uni whist listening to a guy talk about being a rock star even though you are a normal guy. He talked about how even though no body knows him he can still walk into a store/café/night club and have the attention instantly focused on him. That he commands attention wherever he goes and really enjoys the benefits that come with recognition even though he actually had none.

That day as I was working from my car park to class I implemented what he had taught in the interview. Shoulders back, chest out, look as though you are totally relaxed yet have an air of intenseness about you, talk load enough to be heard but not yelling, use a deep voice and several other small little techniques that he shared.

Well before this I was quite timid and held myself in a lazy slouch because I hadn’t really needed to command respect before, nor really cared. But after I tried this out and IT WORKED I got a little addicted to the feeling of being superior to other people. I don’t quite think that the word superior was the way other people where seeing me though and that’s okay, its just the way I saw it myself.

I started heavily researching all about body language and presentation. I started dressing exclusively in black, worked on my tone of voice until it was silky smooth and very deep and walked around like I was a rock star.

For a while it was excellent. I managed to get myself a girlfriend and impressed all my fellow students at university.  But on the flip side I was turning into an asshole. I treated people as if they were below me and generally pissed a lot of people off.

This continued for a long time and I wondered why my girlfriend dumped me, why my friends didn’t invite me out to gatherings and why people I met never became me friends.

It took a big change for me this fact to finally dawn on me.  I had to lose everything and abandon my country for a while to learn this lesson. Even after I moved over seas it took a whole two years before I truly understood myself and could comfortably be myself, the greatest me I could be.

Now I have moved back to New Zealand, my homeland, and am tearing it up with my new found self.

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Tags: autism, discovery, helping the world, Life, matthavok, mind, Mind wax, personal freedom, you mind, your mind