I’ve been so worried all my life about where I’m going, how I’m getting there, if I’ll ever amount to anything, how I can become good at everything, liked by everyone, and on and on...
But now I see that none of that matters if I’m not happy now. I’ve got to stop chasing a ideal that isn’t even mine, stop trying to catch up to an impossible image. I’ve got to find my own dream, even if it means doing something that isn’t that highly rewarded or acknowledged, even if it’s something I didn’t consider before, even if it means letting go of what I’ve been killing myself working towards for the last 26 years.
I don’t want to live on stress anymore, and I don’t want to keep trying to be everything anymore. I just want to be me. I want to figure out what makes me me, and just be that from now on.
I will have to go back to work tomorrow, as my all-to-brief 3 day self stay-cation comes to an end. But let me not forget what I've written here. Let me not lose this precious new nugget of my worth. Just be me, Rebecca, just be me.
Some people call it the quarter-life crisis... I think (after 26 years I guess b/c I've been going through the same thing!) we get to this point where we go through what ultimately could be a beautiful transformation (if only we weren't in the middle of it). Where the real world, once a blur in the distance called the future, starts to come into focus. And we realize it's not what we imagined it to be, and the person we see living in it isn't who we imagined ourselves to be. If we can "let go" of that old paradigm and embrace the new world we see through our disillusionment, if we aren't afraid to see things more clearly and accept a different reality, I think ultimately we'll start to see beauty in the sharpening complexity. More fascinating than the "ideal but boring" world we used to see. And therein lies a whole new adventure and a new kind of innocence. I guess alternatively, one could reject this transformation, forever thinking that who they are is different than who they should be, eluded by "happiness". Hmm, my deepest (and most rambling) thoughts ever about being 26.
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