This is it. And that's intimidating.

I feel like I'm buzzing with potential, yet not going anywhere with it. I want to be creative. I have the desire, but I lack the inspiration.

I frequently feel like I'm wasting my time. I'm wasting my life. I'm not living in the moment. I'm sort of... waiting. Waiting for life to start. 

I don't want to look back on these years, the years that everyone calls the prime of my life in so many ways, and feel as though I've wasted them on the internet, or laying in bed, and waiting for life to start.

Life is here. Right now. It's happening as I sit here in my newly laundered sheets, wearing my college sweatpants, drinking a makeshift blood orange cosmo at 11:30 p.m. on a Friday. I'm 26. I'm almost 26 and a half. This is it.

All we have is the present. This is it. We don't live in the past. Or in the future. I'm trying, every day, to live in the moment. And it's so much harder than you might think.

There is a man (as there always is) who I've spent a great deal of time thinking about, and who has influenced me in a lot of ways. At the beginning, I thought, "This is it. This is the man I'm going to marry." I'd never met anyone who I'd felt so connected to on so many levels. Same sense of humor, same thought patterns, same neuroses, similar interests... and of course, a wild physical attraction.

Sadly, marriage was not in the cards with this man. He didn't have the strong feelings that I did. And he was completely honest about it.

Now, usually when I receive clear verbal communication that a man is not interested, I'm able to move on. I'm sad for awhile, and then it's over. With this man, I've struggled more than I ever have to move on. For a long time, I was unable to stop thinking about him.

Being the natural-born analyzer that I am, I've asked myself why this man has had such a hold on my psyche. Part of the problem is that I've remained "friends" with him. I was unwilling to relinquish all contact with him. So we're Facebook friends, and we talk on occasion (although only when I initiate).

However, it's more than that. Because of the connection I felt with him, my interactions with all other men (at this time) seem, well... insufficient. It's not that the men themselves are insufficient. It's the feelings. The connection... or lack thereof. I feel as though I've had a taste of what I'm supposed to feel like with a man, and anything less is just not gonna do it for me.

It's like I've had Ketel One, and now Burnett's just ain't cutting it. I've splurged on the $200 hair salon, and now I can't bring myself to return to Hair Cuttery.

There's also a third part of this man's hold on me that brings me back to the original point of the post. This man is talented, driven, and tireless. He has a great job, his dream job, in fact. And yet he pursues additional passions on the side. He's a tremendous writer and performer, and he actually brings his creative ideas to life.

When a man is worthy of admiration, the saying goes that men want to be him, and women want to be with him. In this case, I want both. And since being with him is not an option, perhaps his role in my life is to inspire me to be the person I know that I'm capable of being. To help me figure out my goals, and then go achieve them.

When I think about what he's accomplished, it makes me want to write. To perform. To create. To be worthy of the admiration that I (and many others) feel for him. To stop waiting and wasting, and instead achieve greatness.

I have hope that one day I'll meet someone else who makes me feel the way he did. Until then, I will try to concentrate on myself and my goals. It's a hard thing to do. Something I've struggled with a lot. But since all I have is now, I'm trying to make now count. Because this is it.