The Count of Monte Cristo

If I wanted to base my life on a piece of fiction then, The Count of Monte Cristo would be the perfect example. In a nut shell, it is about a naive man (Edmond Dantes) who gets double crossed and is sent to jail for crimes he did not commit. During his time there, he meets a man that teaches him the ways of the world and helps him discover who his enemies are. Once he escapes his prison, he seeks his revenge on those that have betrayed him and nearly loses his own sanity in the process.

Now to be fair, nothing in my life compares to the extremes that the main character goes through during the often bleak story. Shades of the struggles and hardships that the protagonist experiences can be related in my own life in quite similar ways that I felt a special connection to the story the first time I saw it. What I most saw parallels in myself was the inner conflict and anger that had developed when he was in prison and had finally figured out who had betrayed him in the first place.

There was no person that betrayed me per se, it was more of a collective series of events that stymied and frustrated me as I grew up and forayed into the adult world. I believe it was the jarring realization that the world I was the taught and the world that actually was, were too much for me to handle. It can be summed as such, my expectation of the world was not in line with what I had believed and thus causing me to be disillusioned with how to proceed forward.

To understand me is to understand struggle. There is a need for me to continuously prove to myself that I am able to overcome any and all challenges in my way. With Edmund, his need for revenge against his former friends became an obsession that drove him to plot and plan with every waking moment that he had. I can see parallels in myself, when it comes to pushing myself to succeed and having wildly ambitious goals in life.

The fact is, my motivation to push myself comes mainly from proving to my high school classmates that thought so little of me all those years ago. Kinda sucks being marginalized all those years. It is absurd that events occurring almost 10 years ago could have such a huge impact me now. But as someone once told me, "we are our own experiences." Edmund spent 13 years in jail, learning and planning for the day he gets outs and starts his revenge. Likewise, I have spent most of the 10 year learning and gaining status so that one day I might come back and prove my worth.

I have thought about what this blog has helped me done in the past couple of month, which is to catalog my thoughts but also to grow as an individual. But part of that growth is to also realize that I must learn to eventually let the past go and look towards the healthy prospects in the future as Edmund finally did in the conclusion. Until then, the need to be better than my contemporaries is fueling the fires of success, but I must make sure that I don't get burned in the progress.