I’m primarily a Tempura, or rather, I started off as a Tempura before I discovered the Tempus boys’ senpais. And yet when I launched this space and began blogging, I haven’t written anything about TEMPUS, haven’t I?
For this post, I’d like to write about something a little bit serious. It’s about ridding of your past in order to live the present you always wanted. When we are on our own personal journeys and discover who we really are, sometimes, we’d have to sacrifice and leave behind our past. The hardest part of the past that we have to cut off are your closest friends.
Our "great" alchemist, Magni Dezmond, shared us his story of what he had to leave behind in order to become a Holostar.
From what I remembered about Dez, he was raised in a family full of restrictions and expectations,1 and because of that, he spent most of his youth becoming perfectly prepared for adulthood rather than enjoying his youth like many other youths. Imagine, you end up attending college, and during college, that’s when you discover a plethora of subjects and topics and fields that may be new to you, but you find yourself attracted to these fields.
Imagine, you wanted to be a doctor, or a lawyer, or some kind of leader you don’t just make a difference, but to become wealthy and well-off. And then, early young adult days hit you and university hits you, you discover something completely out of your personal scope but you decide to invest into it. When that happened, you know then that you want to shift gears and aim for this brand-new goal and forget about your original plans. It’s normal. It’s natural for all of us.
When I was a kid, I wanted to be a dentist because of my (late) cousin. When I reached high school, I wanted to be a novelist or a journalist. But when university days came, that was when I discovered software development. And so on and so forth.
With this new path in mind, the first thing you would do is to concentrate in making into that field. But at the same time, you also need some moral support: your parents, siblings (if you have any), relatives, and most of all, your closest friends.
We will never know what exactly happened with Dez and his (former) closest friends during the days before his debut in Holostars, and we don’t have to know anyway. But I figured that his closest friends may not have the same interests as him in terms of vtubing or just content creation in general. And to think, after cutting off connections with his closest friends in order to reach for his goal as a Holostar, these same "closest friends" had the audacity to harrass him on his debut stream? Turns out that these "closest friends" were not really friends all this time, don’t you think?
Dez may have lost them, but upon making it to Holostars, he gained something a lot more valuable than keeping the "old"— making new friends among his fellow Tempus boys, his senpais from StarsJP, even some of the co-workers among the Hololive girls too. He didn’t just make new friends, he found himself a family— a family of like-minded and very supportive group of people whom he now finds himself belonging. And that is one happy ending that he truly deserves.
Sometimes, in order to make your dreams a reality, you would need to do some sacrifices to make way for your clear path. We all need to leave the past in order to live the present. We can move out and live somewhere where opportunities are available or cut off connections with the people you were involved with. Cutting off relations with your "closest friends" is the hardest you could ever do, but on the other hand, there’s something else in exchange that might be better in the end.
Remember how in school, especially high school, where we would always declare that we and the friends we made then would always be friends forever? Some people are lucky that they get to keep their friends from the past while making new friends once we reach adulthood. Others aren’t. But eventually in the end, the most important thing in our lives aren’t friends, but happiness and fulfillment in this very long stage of life that we know as adulthood.
For me, personally, I didn’t cut off my old friends from youth. But because we all became adults and we all have our own lives that we eventually drifted away from each other. I wouldn’t say we’re no longer friends, but instead, we simply became distant. We even follow each other on Facebook too, but how many of us actually hang out on Facebook regularly? I don’t.
Seeing this clip of Dez’s sad story of his pre-Holostars days and then sharing what he gained in exchange of what he left behind made me remember how I was when I was his age.((If you’re wondering, I’m one of the older Stars-min…)) That’s what kind of prompted me to write this blog post.
I know this is easier said than done, but for those reading this, I hope you are happy with your lives right now. I hope you are happy with what you have and not miserable with what you don’t have. If you aren’t happy right now, start planning on how you can find true happiness. Your happiness is there, and it’s waiting for you to meet it.
It’s a short Takes entry, so this is it for me. Till then, homies~
- You know, just like your typical Asian family where parents implant into your mindset that you must be the best among the rest… yeah, that kind of mindset. [↩]
