When you were young, you wanted to be great. A famous person. A legend. A craving, yearning gnawed inside you. You believed that you had an indomitable will, a sign you were meant for true greatness. The fires of life that was spoken of and celebrated.

And then you entered the academy, you did not realize how utterly dull it would be until three years in. You were bored by the monotony, the awful teachers, the lame classes, and you felt so exhausted. You just wanted solitude. You cherished your solitude. The world would bow down to your greatness eventually. It was destiny, after all . . .

Your parents kept hassling you about your laziness, over and over and over and . . .

It became too much. Every time you never got completely perfect scores, when you failed to prove how much better you were than everybody else, when you failed . . . .they would always talk about how you were acting like a delinquent. Comparing you to that friend of your father's who specialized in psychologically evaluating delinquent children. You felt angry, annoyed, and hateful . . . and blamed only yourself. You wanted out. You contemplated freedom through death, more than once. Being free felt better than being a failure. But in your cowardice, you never bestowed death upon yourself.

Why am I imperfect? Why am I defective? Why is nothing good enough?

One day, you wake up feeling numb. As if you're living as someone else, as if your eyes are just a recorder on constant rewind every school day. Suddenly, everything became a pain. All of it was a annoying and difficult. Tests, listening in class, talking to other schoolmates, and then you began questioning God because of the world around you.

Culture shock was underestimated. Visiting a palace of people who have their own culture, despite adapting some parts of your religion, was eye-opening. Some of these people believed in a different faith entirely, and openly expressed it!

Who is right? Who is wrong? Who can say?

If one religion is true, then all others are false. You're aware that people know this . . . but they honestly don't understand the depth of that meaning. They only think of themselves, in their own little speckled zone of comfort. It means millions can have true faith in a belief, and be utterly wrong. Does violence prove a religion is more wrong than another? Why should it prove anything? Why can't a long dead religion be the true one? How can we then know right and wrong?

You question it. And your questions offend, inciting angry shouts and rants about learning proper respect for others beliefs. Nothing you say changes others contempt for mere questioning.

But why?

You never receive an answer. Just nonsensical self-reverence, patronizing rants, and self-justifications. And suddenly, you question the meaning of life itself. After all, if people unquestionably believe in only one faith and ignore the fact that millions of others believe in a different faith and each side believes the other is wrong . . . well . . .

Don't they realize how stupid that is? What's the point of believing in any of them? No matter what, millions are condemned into ignorance and possibly eternal suffering.

You simply receive jeers for openly voicing these concerns. You are being labeled childish, or trying to be cool, or looking for attention. Absolutely no one answers or takes part in answering your doubts. Nobody to rely upon . . .

Like always . . . Nobody cares about what I really want.

You learn to keep it to yourself, to maintain the facade that has been growing. You've internalized it all, anyway. Everything feels fake. Nothing in life feels like it truly matters. Why should it then matter that you haven't received any answers?

As you graduate from school, you begin to realize the obvious.

I'm not special. I was never special. I just don't even care half the time . . .

You don't have the best grades like the boy who is the last of his family, you're no prodigy like the angelic girl who radiates a cold demeanor inculcated by her clan, you have nothing to strive for like the deadlast who radiates a calm hope, and you don't see a continued reason for your own existence or any meaning in your own life. And nobody wants to hear it from you.

You take it in stride, it's all a part of growing up, right?

The adults should know better. They'll teach me what I need to know.

But it never happens. Your instructor is decent but nothing special, your teammates are boring. You find no joy in any of the excursions or activities and everyday you just want to gaze at clouds and forget everything that makes you miserable. You forget your questions, you temporarily forget the gnawing need for something more, for something greater.

Hate swells, the gnawing for something more cries out, and you do nothing but stand still, stuck in the same repetitive day for years and years. You don't know what you want or how your life should be and the years are catching up.

I thought I was better than them . . .

But you're not. You barely make it out of the forest of death and you're hurting bad. Silently, you think over the contradictions of an exam meant for teamwork only to change to one of personal aptitude without any consistency. How many potentially great shinobi are being denied because they're stuck with cowardly teammates? At first, you believe there is a reason for this beyond your knowledge, then you realize you're using an argument from ignorance similar to religious believers, and then a dawning horror comes to you.

All I do is whine, complain, criticize, and get angry . . . and I'm just too lazy to change. I don't know what to do with myself. I feel like a failure.

You never push yourself out of fear of failure, you don't take stress well because you hide your mind in the clouds - foolishly thinking that you're looking at the world from a greater perspective, and you don't see any point in your life anymore.

So you wait, and watch, and struggle with this yearning that has driven you to utter self-contempt.

Why were humans born with desire? What does it accomplish?

You never make it past one level in your shinobi career and you stare as a spectator, mystified by the one you thought would be in your shoes.

You realize that this gnawing pain will never go away, that you're too lazy to do anything about it, and you don't have any real desires because everything feels like a pain. You get angry and frustrated all the time, with everybody, but because you're not loud and obnoxious about it . . . nobody notices, nobody cares.

Everyone has their own problems. Everyone is out for themselves.

Nobody needs me. I don't even matter to myself.

You watch, with the same hollow detachment, and inner deadness as the deadlast awakens the eyes of God Himself.

And then you realize, as if an epiphany or a revelation . . .

I was never meant to be anything more than a spectator. I'm just average . . . and I loathe it. And I can never do anything about it.

You could never be perfect, you could never face failure, you could never be what you wanted, and you don't even know what you want anymore.

Was there ever a point to being me?