Did I answer the question?

I just turned 18, and yet I feel the weight of life fully already. I guess the only question I really have is, what is the meaning to life? 

Wow, what a question to ponder.

I wish I could tell you definitively what your goal in life will be...I think all of us at some time in our lives would have been either grateful or curious to find that out...and your situation where everything seems to be crumbling around you leaves very little room for hope or to catch your breath. Even the support you've counted on from a parent isn't what it appeared to be.  The teenage years are a difficult time already in terms of expectations and demands, not to mention the pace of life speeding up and pulling you along, whether you're ready or not...what to do?

Let me say this.  You may not believe this, but you've already lived long enough to have made a difference in the lives of countless others.  Your parents' lives were changed forever by your birth, and it does not matter if you were the first, last or whatever child...you were an element of change....whether for good or not, no one can really say, because it's difficult to measure something as nebulous as a life's influence or effect until you've reached the end of it.

Life has a way of using people up and then spitting them out like a discarded rind, leaving very little tangible in the way of satisfaction save for obvious financial, material markers.  Your mom went from a bigwig to "nobody"...little wonder why she's feeling exhausted or spent?  What does she have to show for all her efforts? 

What you need to understand is this: life is more than a specific goal or purpose...it needs to be lived in order to be appreciated, it needs to be shared in order to recognize its fullest potential.  Intangibles such as happiness, fulfillment, connecting, belonging, being loved and loving others, patience, perserverance...these all have a place in the picture that each of us is constructing that will at the end of our days comprise a life lived.

There was a old saying in the 1980s: "life's a b***h, and then you die."  I couldn't relate to it then, and I still can't.  It must be terrible to feel that there is no point to living life if all there is to expect will be grief, sorrow, disappointment every single day, every single moment.  I honestly hope that where you find yourself is at a way station, not a crossroads, and that what you're struggling with has to do with wondering what your real qualities and gifts are and how to look for them and recognize them when you do.

If your grades are that low and you need to graduate from high school in order to cope with things, then go ahead and do so, but move on with a different attitude: take some time to figure out why things happened the way they did, what could have been done differently, and what can be done differently now.  There is no shame in looking at community college or online classes as a stepping stone to higher education...there are many young people out there who might experience greater success later in life had they opted out of the typical college track and figured out first what was their best option.

Find out what truly excites or motivates you...don't be satisfied with what other people think about you; take the time to really come to grips with what is important and essential to you. Remember what was said in The Little Prince: "it is only with the heart that one can see clearly."  

Keep a journal and make entries every day, no matter how trivial or minor things may be when you add them...it's amazing what occupies our mind/thoughts when we stop to look back at the past week or month...and you may be surprised to find something in a thread here or there that resonates more with the passage of time.

Take the time to discover how fortunate you might be compared to others.  Volunteer for an organization whose cause you believe in.  Help with the Red Cross.  If you're good at science or math or animals, check out what's available locally in terms of outreach.

Whatever you decide, make a concerted effort to listen more than talk.  Instead of stating your opinion immediately, listen to what others may say...encourage dialog, conversation.  If your mother is truly burnt out, then you might be someone she can confide in and trust during this difficult time for her...you might be someone she needs other than just being a daughter or child...you'll never know if you don't try.

TS Eliot once wrote that "we shall not cease from exploration, and the end of our journeys will be when we return home and see it for the first time."  Sometimes, it's not necessary to know what our purpose is, so long as we remain open, hopeful, thoughtful, aware and caring...for ourselves, others and the world around us.

Give yourself the space and time to clear your thoughts and realize how many lives you touch every single day.  Think about your real blessings and gifts: being financially stable, smart or attractive isn't what I'm looking for, nor should you...I am talking about intangibles, things that cannot be seen but are essentially important to our well-being...this is the quest you find yourself on at this time.

If you give yourself permission to strike out on a path different from everyone else's expectations for you, you may discover what you're looking for...I suspect you're already perceptive enough to know this since you wrote and wanted some feedback. I know you have what you're looking for, inside your heart and mind...give yourself permission to be open, honest, caring and genuine, so that you can see yourself for what you really are.  From what you've shared here, I have no doubt there is a unique, special person who deserves to be discovered and appreciated for who and what she really is, not what others expect her to be.

Remember, look for subtle signs of encouragement and hope all around you...the Japanese view courage as a plum tree blossoming while snow is on the ground.

Hearsay-I

Lately, whenever I hear the most recent lauded composition by some up-and-coming composer that turns out to be yet another variation on the minimalist notion of "music" (repeat a basic motif again and again, ad infinitum), I recall that a major composer like Ravel thought his Bolero essentially an exercise in orchestration and crescendo...when you remove the orchestral fabric there still was left behind a melodic phrase long enough and interesting enough to qualify as compositional, not fragmentary in the way so much of modern music is being written these days.

I think that's what I find lacking so much in contemporary art, whether music, art, ballet or writing: a reliance on minimalism instead of cogent, coherent thought to convey an experience.  It's the reason why in spite of so much technical prowess displayed by younger and younger performers, I still prefer the work of artisans whose work has been tempered/enhanced by experience as well as the spark of that indescribable, elusive element that makes a work of art or performance more than the sum of its individual parts.

Whenever I get frustrated at life, I look to interests like music for a respite, and Ravel has definitely proven to be that for me throughout my life...it is ironic that someone considered as austere and "clinical" as Boulez could have been my principal avenue into this music.  It reminds me of the reason why I loved french in college even though my professor told me my Russian classes "ruined" my pronunciation (but she said it so sweetly and so echt-francais that I found it endlessly charming to this day)...the notion of french music performance has everything to do with understanding the cultural, artistic and stylistic approaches...a reviewer of a recent biography of the composer said it best:

...His capacity for the most beautiful invention distinguishes his work in all these genres: one needs to hear only the first few bars of the Piano Trio, or of the Pavane, or of the Chanson Hébraique, to be drawn in immediately to an intense, beautiful world. 

Ravel’s music evokes an atmosphere that is of the era of Proust, but not Proust’s social context, of somewhat depraved aristocrats and useless young women waiting for someone to marry them. It is a world of the refined bourgeoisie, the people who sought to hold things together during the Third Republic, especially after the war, and to develop further a distinctive French musical culture. Debussy was dead before the Armistice: Saint-Saëns and Widor very old; Les Six still in short trousers, or learning their craft. Ravel was the pre-eminent French composer of that era, and he made a statement not just for French music, but for the whole of French culture, and for France itself. 

Evocation instead of context: I could not have described it better.

One of the most revered pieces of music to me is the Fantasia on a Theme of Thomas Tallis by Vaughan Williams, and it is no coincidence to me that its unique voice was crafted in that curious alliance between Ravel and RVW where the latter sought the former out for instruction even after he had already begun actively composing.  To me Ravel's compositional style was only one part of his genius...another was his ability to "hear" in orchestration how to best present ideas with as little distraction as possible.

From Today's Quora Postings

What 5 rules would help me become successful if I applied them to my life?

(Jane Chin)

1. Nothing happens until you act. You can be the smartest most incredible reservoir of potential the world has ever known and this potential will die with you unless potential energy becomes kinetic energy.

2. Your ability to heal, to help, and to harm intercalates with the stories you tell yourself about who you are, why you exist, and the nature of the world you believe you live in. [I want to use a different word than intercalating but I am not yet decided on which is cause and which is effect, which is chicken which is egg.]

3. Your true personal power grows not from what you will do once you have arrived, but what you have been doing all the way along the journey, especially the really shitty parts where you imagine everyone's booing you and laughing at you and betting on you to quit or, making this life a perverse game indeed, betting on you to stay until the bitter deadly end instead of quitting while you're ahead.

4. There is a reason why the word "fulfillment" is written as "FULfillment" and not "FILfullment": you must identify what you already hold in full (abundance) and give this away as readily as you exhale your breath. Same goes for why the word "generous/generate" is stitched into the word "regenerate": you become renewed the more you gift of what runs through you, inexhaustible. The more you give to take from others, the more exhausted you become in giving. The more you give that comes from a place of "you cannot help but to give of this, as this is how you express yourself to life", the more you are given in return.

5. There is a critical lesson that the most favored Psalm in the world teaches, regardless of religious affiliation (I posit a similar lesson resonates in other religious texts only I'm not scholarly enough to know them) -- "even though I walk in the valley of the shadow of death I will fear no evil." notice how the song does not speak of "the valley of death" but instead inserts a seemingly clumsy extra appendage "shadow" as in "valley of the shadow of death". This is because we become afraid more of the shadow, which creates the valley, than of death itself, which we cannot know. But we who live all learn to know fear. Thus my final lesson is, correctly identify the shadow, and please do not mistake the shadow or equate the shadow for death itself. We fear the fear of death more than we can truly fear death.

Ironies

It was almost a month since I made a meaningful entry to this online forum, and while I kept meaning to write but never got around to doing so, it seemed odd that I didn't feel as guilty about not writing as I thought I would have...then this morning the realization hit me: the reason why I didn't feel so bad about not writing here was because I was fulfilling that desire to reach out and communicate through different forums, not just this one.

I joined an online volunteer network late in March that allowed me to respond to anonymous requests for advice.  While I thought it would take awhile to get used to what was being expected in terms of content, focus, etc., it didn't turn out to be as arduous as first thought...and then I discovered that there was a vast number of people out 'there' who wanted advice or at least a different perspective on their situation...so the minimum of two questions answered a week totaled 45 by the end of April...this in addition to the 100+ questions I've replied to on the other volunteer site I've participated in since the start of the year (Good Judgment Project) where a minimum of 25 was requested!

Now it's only been a month for one volunteer function and four months for the other, so it's hardly time to make any blanket assessments other than this:  when I consider what I'm doing in terms of work, add in these two outreach functions, and still feel as if I could be busier, then that says something about the kind of mental stimulation I need to keep from going crazy or feeling bored!

A principal frustration with my work's reporting has been the extent to which the basic content may be fine but the approach/direction gets tweaked to the point where the end result sounds less like me and more the kind of stylized, generic format preferred by banks...depending on whatever else was going on around me, that could either prove to be a minor annoyance or something more major when in fact it never ever really changed that much...what differed was my need to have it belong to me in order to maintain my sense of self-worth.  Whenever wholesale changes needed to be made (especially when recommended by people I did not really like), that would definitely do a number on my self-esteem.

Now though, I am regularly receiving positive feedback from one volunteering effort and not being questioned about my interpretation of world events in another, and it means a much more ongoing, sustaining realization that I may not be as totally clueless or useless as I might have felt in the recent past.

This is where hubris comes in.  Just because I've made some progress in developing a better self-image through outreach, I cannot stand on my laurels or strike out and attempt to do more...what I've needed to develop throughout my life is a sense of consistency; the kind of regular, steady sense of awareness and diversity I've felt in music, ballet, art and science...and this may be one of my last, best chances in which to do so. What I've told more people to follow is something I need to practice myself; namely, small incremental steps, advancing towards some distant goal that I will better understand some day but not now...that in the journey I may better understand something essential about life than I have to this point, and that meaningful growth does not have to scattered all about but can be focused and directed when we have the patience to allow it to be that way.