You can do anything in Paris


5-10% from world population is made out of prodigies. If we keep willing to be the best, the rest up to 90% are just losers. Therefore, I believe we should rethink failure. How do we see it, what do we think it is?

On Wikipedia, failure refers to the state or condition of not meeting a desirable or intended objective, and may be viewed as the opposite of success. On Earth, in our society, in occidental countries, failure is also considered to be that state of mind of not willing to be the best. In fact, if you ask me, I think this is the failure of our modern society.

Since you are little, they teach you to be the best, to be competitive, to be the first, the most, the bla, bla, bla-est. Like if you are a genius, you can’t just wanna be a sheppard. We need to accept there is nothing wrong in that.
And it is very important that we understand today that not everyone wants to be the best. What everyone wants is to be happy.
I think the happiness is just a simple thing:  doing what you want. Simple to say, extremely hard to do… and I have a long story about the way I’ve learned I should do what I want.It shows up that when I was in Romania I didn’t had the chance or the time to think about what I would have liked to do in my dreams. I started studying something I thought it will be interesting for the future employment market and myself. Then, immediately I found a job in communication and I took it as it was exactly what I was supposed to do. At that time, everything seemed to be fine in my life. Very soon I started to think I could have a successful career in PR and I headed that way. The problem appeared when I moved to Paris. I knew there was something inside me saying I was doing the right thing. It’s just that it took me a long time to realize which was the right direction and the best way for me.

Learning a new language from the beginning and moving to the other side of a continent may sound fantastically courageous. In fact it is. Is just that it is also a new beginning for your life and a new series of questions about yourself that maybe you have never had time to wonder about them before. ‘Who am I? Who am I?’, I was asking myself every day, walking the streets of ‘fucking’ Paris. Like Matei Visniec, a great Romanian play writer, has pointed out at the launch of his latest book called ‘Syndrome de panique dans la ville lumière’ when he said ‘Paris has always been seen as the city of love, of poetry, of famous artists, in the spirit of bohemian life we all dream about.’… and then easily turning everything upside down by asking the public ‘Why nobody speaks about Paris as the city with the biggest number of losers?’…it was sort of that feeling for me, during the time I saw Paris the awful American Dream of artists. A city where I’ve been through the hardest period with myself because ‘all I was seeing at that moment, was every negative thing 10 miles down the roads’.  Searching, always experiencing new things, people, places, tastes, thinking, taking decisions, learning that nothing and nobody is perfect, stop beating myself. Always blaming the city for my difficulties. It was easier to say that, then to admit how much it was the best place to find what I wanted to do in life. Now I know coming here was like having had the best live experience of a rock concert, where everyone in my head, would have been jumping and screaming ‘you can do anything, you can do anything!’

Maybe it is about being a stranger in a new country, maybe it is about not having a job for a period, maybe it’s just about being alone with yourself, but there is something magic that happens at a certain time in your life. This is the moment of understanding there is order in all that chaos out there. And that is when you know you can do anything and what is that you want to do exactly. In my case it took me a long time to realize what was happening. After 1 year, 4 months and 20 days, I know I have lived the best time of myself, conceived as a failure to some, but a great personal achievement for me.This very cool encouragement ‘you can do anything’ turned out to be very difficult to cope with in real day-to-day life. I had the chance to be completely free to think about whom I am and what I want to do. I could teach English to little children, learn French, work as a waitress, go to seminars about artificial intelligence, make photos, try to write scenarios, work in a brainwashing call-center, paint, carry on chairs for festivals, drink and watch lobbyists becoming disgusting about their interests, see everyone so different and so similar in the same time, work with artists, sell honey in a park, walk, dream, read, write, learn and so on. In the end of all these amazing experiences, I realized it is not that you can do anything, in the way of being the best, but having the freedom to choose to do what you want and enjoy your choice 110%. That was my burden and my chance.
So after this entire interior journey, I finally have this ridiculously simple answer I strove to find.I may not want to be the best, but I want to do the best I can to do amazing things and be happy.

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One Response so far.

  1. […] time I’ve written about my life here, it was about how you can do anything in Paris. At that time I had a feeling. Now, after 2 years, I have certainties. Fresh graduate from a […]

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