Here’s to Never Discovering Who I Am!
Graphics by Maggie Harvey.
“Maybe I’m not destined to have a specific destination in this world. Maybe my uncertainty is meant to be the destination.”
When I think about the best way to describe my journey without knowing what my life’s’ purpose is, I think of a reptile I'm deathly terrified of:
I feel like a snake.
Consistently slithering in and out of ideas and interests, silently observing where to stake my next claim. I wander in and out of fashion trends, lifestyle habits, makeup looks, bangs or magenta colored hair, rarely stopping to observe my findings.
Hungry for my next prey, insatiable at most.
If you’re keen to a nomadic lifestyle, some would encourage this flippant approach to this dance of life. Although, I feel even nomads have a plan for life. I mean, their plan is to travel the world and not have a plan.
That counts, right?
I feel as if everyone in this world besides me has at least some eventual goal in the end of it all.
Even if it’s the smallest pontoon boat miles away from where they are lost in the midst of crashing waves, they still have sight of it. Even if it’s not in plain eye-view. They just keep doggy paddling through the resistant waves, pushing through the currents with tunnel vision, towards that life saving boat.
Most of the time, I feel like I am the boat. Lost at sea, at a standstill, rocking in an unsteady motion waiting for someone to come guide me to the direction wherever land is.
It seems so much more easy in your younger years.
The effortless confidence instilled within our little bodies surging through us, with a clean slate to be anything we choose to be. The cocoons you’ve been tending to successfully blossomed into beautiful butterflies and suddenly you’re going to be a butterfly tamer when you grow up. You steal some cotton pads and band-aids from the pediatricians office and tend to your “sick” mother, and now you’re the first 10 year old surgeon. You do a perfect hand tracing at arts and crafts as you run towards mom after school, thrashing the copy paper in the air, exclaiming, “I’m going to be an artist!”
That confidence in myself is somewhere at a standstill deep inside of me, lodged behind my keen awareness for the realities of life and its inherent need to take that glimmer of credulous hope away from me.
Maybe life is destined not to be an effortless flow of victories and open doors, but chapters of misdirections leading to eventual (maybe) direction.
Or maybe, just maybe, I can age regress and be a ten-year-old forever.
I’m banking on the latter.