Growing up, I always thought I had a clear picture of what I wanted to be, and what I wanted to do, and where I would do it “when I grew up”… Although the vocation changed frequently, as it is wont to do when you are a kid, I was sure of the other things… I wanted out of that town, and I was going to work my ass off to make it so…
I wanted to go to college… to surround myself with other creative people… to draw… to paint… to graduate, and stand up tall, feeling accomplished and happy… I wanted a career… a busy life… I wanted to find other people out there in the world who were just like me… I wanted to fall in love… to get married and start a family (in that order… I was not going to perpetuate the cycle!)…
So here I am, with all but one of those items checked off the list… and that will happen when it happens… it is what it is… and has nothing to do with where I’m going here…
The thing is, I have accomplished all of my childhood goals… I have an amazing life… I have the most loving, caring, perfect-for-me husband… I have a home… I have a job that pays me well enough to do very little… I live a pretty comfortable life in a cute town, with the boy, our cats, and our crazy little pug… things are good… I am happy.
But at the same time, I keep thinking that this is not where I imagined I would be when I have not yet seen my twenty-fifth birthday. It’s as if I have fast-forwarded past a whole bunch of things that I didn’t really know I wanted to do until I passed them by…
I mean, I had an idea that I wanted them, but I saw them as a vehicle to get to final destination of happily-ever-after… I used to daydream about having a very specific lifestyle… I imagined myself an artist, living downtown(ish)… I imagined a studio loft apartment, full of light and my silly Ikea furniture… I imagined myself hoping on and off the subway… running to catch streetcars to go to my job at an agency, or to go to Kensington Market… I imagined summer nights spent on a roof-top patio… drinks with friends… live music… parties… the city noise… the people… the whole city surrounding me and enveloping me in its busy, noisy, urban-goodness…
I imagined a bustling social life that would eventually lead me to my husband… which would eventually lead me down the path that I am on now… just a few years later…
It’s funny… I think I just pretty much described my friend T’s life right there! LOL! She’s such a cool girl… She always seems so in control of herself, and sure of where she is headed… perhaps I can just live vicariously through her? ;)
Maybe it sounds like I’m whining… but I’m not… It’s not that I feel like I missed out on something… that’s not it… I can’t put my finger on what it is that I am trying to express exactly… I don’t feel that I have somehow missed things, because, given the choice, I would not exchange that lifestyle for the one I have now… I like my life… it’s that I thought that once I got to where I am now there would be some sort of a feeling of accomplishment… of having arrived… but in reality, it’s a strange mix of emotions… there is this over-whelming sense of responsibility, but it’s all so anti-climactic…
And sometimes I still feel like that awkward girl… just trying to fit in… trying to find where it is that I fit in the world… I feel like I should feel relief, and like I belong… and like I’m “THERE”… but I don’t.
I bet it sounds really selfish of me, to have so much, and still feel like there is something missing… only I could have so much happiness, and still somehow feel incomplete… I just feel as if I still have to prove myself… to show them all… to achieve something great… and I wonder if I would still feel the way I do if I had chosen the other path…
It’s pointless really… as is this post… and it likely won’t make sense to anyone but me, but it has been rolling around in my head for so long, that I just needed to attempt to put the words out in front of myself and try to make sense of it.
I am a work in progress… and I need to learn to be happy with that.
No comments:
Post a Comment