The pursuit of greatness is a monomaniacal curse. It is a constant, unending anxiety to do better - worse still, to be better. Being is an unfriendly state. I’d say I’m rather ambivalent to it on the whole. When the subject comes up, I tell people my dream death is walking into the street like an idiot and being evaporated by a bus I didn’t know was coming. It would make things simpler. But until that day comes, the curse to strive continues. Ceaselessly.
Oh, the places you’ll go. The depths you’ll reach. The Curse does not care about money, nor family, nor friends. Though they enrich your life, they do not satiate its hunger. The Curse has a singular, unquenchable appetite: your utter devotion.
A drop of its blood, and you are a thrall. Unable and unwilling to break the spell of your master. For there is purity in the affliction. A wonderfully complicated prestige that’s often reserved for men of gods long dead. For The Curse will strip away what is ungodly and unnecessary from its diet. It begs: How many hobbies do you really need? Feed me instead. How many people do you really care to know? Feed me instead. Leaving only what is needed for its survival. A simple, complicated, devoted life. It is a beautiful agony.
The Curse rewards your devotion with immense highs of self-satisfaction. Overflowing pride. Preying on man’s psychosis to achieve transcendence from the creature self to purely symbolic. Maybe he can pierce the heavens with his cleverness. Maybe he can fulfill the creative's oedipal complex and make something so awesomely useful, so stunningly beautiful that he eclipses the creator of the wheel.
And after, The Curse lays dormant in wait. The reversal of nutrients so quick and powerful it threatens its very existence. Slowly, regaining strength, it lulls you toward others with the same affliction. Showing you their peaks. Their pride. Enough to let the self-doubt and contempt creep back in. Feeding like a fetus on your neurotic brain placenta. Until finally, distaste: How did I ever think this was good?
When this question arises, The Curse softly whispers the answer. It does not need to berate or belittle you. You’re trained enough to know you must atone. That you want to atone. That you need to atone. With a low breeze through your mind, bubbling in intensity, The Curse murmurs: Be better. The worst thing it could say. It knows your predilection with be when it could say do or, in a charitable mood, try. But it says be. Do and try are not present. Do and Try leave room for error. Error which The Curse will not tolerate.
And so beckons. Back to the sea. Back to where you belong. Back to see if you can pull it off before Faust comes to make good on your contract. Back to waves of late work-nights and even later side projects. These are the waves of atonement. Waves for you. Waves for The Curse.