I Am All Grown Up, Now What?

I seem to be having an existential crisis today. Questions keep popping up into my brain. Questions like, who am I? Where do I want to be in 5 years from now? What do I want to be when I grow up?

Ah, but I am all grown up and here in lies the problem.

I am 31 and I still don’t know what it is that I want. How can this be? When I was finishing high school, I envied those who knew what they wanted to study next, cause I sure as hell didn’t know what I wanted to be…I thought it was just a phase, I told myself to just get to work and the mystery will unveil itself.

I took lots of jobs and did the bare minimum really, just enough to make ends meet, sometimes, if I felt inspired, maybe a little more than the bare minimum. I figured it was a by-product of being in my 20’s. I went to school for various things, I had lots of ideas and plans that I followed through on till I got bored and realized that it wasn’t for me.

Fuck, I really squandered my 20’s away. Until that last year 29 when I gave it my all and got my business off the ground, worked like a dog and actually made it work somehow…only to realize that it was again not what I wanted, I felt like I was exchanging one mask for another yet again.  I didn’t want to be married to anyone let alone a fucking job!

I ran away to Thailand, convinced I needed more education in my field of business….but upon completion of the gruelling regimented 6 months of training, instead of opening up the school and going about the plans I had put into place, I put the brakes on again and did even less than the bare minimum to get by. Sleeping most of the day away, lost in a zombified version of myself…while pretending to live and going through the motions of eating and loving and really, working as little as possible and stilll complaining about it.

At 31, I am officially retired for a year and a half…which means, although I have a little money (enough to take this time off) at the end of this time, I will be penniless, jobless, carless, homeless, nothing but a few boxes of stored things and the luggage I bring back to Canada with me…I will have nothing! Weird, only 5 years ago, I had everything….and I felt the same as I do now…only with more stuff…I attributed the shitty feelings to having too much stuff and it was tying me down and ruining my life.

What is life? WHo am I, really?

I want to say that I should be grateful for the life I have been given and that I should show my gratitude by doing something fabulous with it but on the flip side, what’s the point? I mean, if I smoke or don’t smoke, if I am skinny or fat, if I win a fucking Oscar or I am a bum on the street, in the long run, it doesn’t matter!

Everything is Arbitrary! But living in this type of manner is really fucked up…cause it’s neither here nor there, not this or that…it’s an ambiguous mind fuck that leaves one with the feeling that one is endlessly chasing it’s own tail.  Leaving one exhausted and gasping for breath …with that all consuming question still lingering on the lips …what’s the point?

I used to walk through grave yards when I felt down…I would read the tombstones and cry over flowers that had been left, the notes people left to their loved ones, the saying ‘gone but not forgotten’ touches me so, dead flowers on top of living grass that hides the dead people buried below was some morbid type of poetry that somehow infused me with life, with feeling, with real emotion.

the park bench that is dedicated to a dead married couple that lived and breathed love…it’s a nice notion to read the inscriptions, it’s wonderfully romantic even…cause once you die, no one would put a tombstone that says here lies a dead beat mother who beat me all time…no they would say here lies a wonderful mother and we will miss her so …even in death, no one speaks the truth.

I went to a funeral once, for a man I never met but heard about. He was an asshole who abandoned his children, stole from everyone he knew and was a mean alcoholic who died at the age of 50 from alcohol poisoning. Even though I never met him, I cried so much, because there wasn’t much to say about this guy, the service was super short i mean what can you say about a homeless alcoholic without embellishing too much? I thought of the life he could of lead and where did he go wrong and how sad that he died with nothing…but then, you always die with nothing even if you have made something of yourself and you have everything, it’s still nothing. So, he could be me, maybe he realized this too and that’s why he gave up because of the pointlessness of it all, why bother to try and be good and be straight and sober? Who fucking cares? I totally get it!

Yet all of it makes me sad cause these people who were mothers fathers dr’s heros lovers, friends, junkies, assholes, con artists, no matter what kind of life they lead, it ended …so when people talk to me about long term goals I think fuck, why are we thinking about 10 years from now, how about the reality of 100 years from now when none of this shit matters, none of it! The majority of us won’t even be remembered in 100 years from now save for an inscription on a slab of rock where our corpses rot and become fodder for the bugs.

Sometimes, flashes of inspiration lifts me out of this deep inertia that I float in constantly. Like earlier when I got inspired to revamp my diet and exercise regime (which is pretty grim these days) because maybe getting a svelt body and eating organic healthy food, will make life more liveable? Or how a few days ago, I actually put up an online dating profile so I could take charge and find the love that I so deeply crave and therefore be fulfilled and live happily ever after. Or the compulsion I felt a couple of hours ago to really give it a go and follow my dreams no matter what because then I will have meaning and meaning will make me want to live a better life right? It has to make me happy right?

No! NO! and NO! This is not true…memories of getting my body skinny and fit to where I was proud of it, flash through my mind but I still felt the same as I do now. Yes, I have lived exclusively on a vegetarian organic diet but that just gave me more energy with which to plunge deeper into these types of thinking…I have been loved and loved another but still that hollowed out feeling remained, like there was something missing, something that I was incapable of grasping, of finding , of obtaining…a hole of insatiable hunger as if my very soul were the tapeworm itself eating through the love, the joy, the sustenance that life provides me.
I have followed my dreams and fulfilled them but they didn’t fulfill me back.

I have scoured the earth and have come back with nothing but shards of glass embedded in my body, reminders of the pain that fulfilling something that brings no fulfillment brings. An empty hole, a vacuum, I seek, I pray, I breathe, I keep living with the hopes that something will satisfy, that everything will stop cutting me and something will start healing me.

I don’t even know what I am writing right now, I don’t really have a point or anything to say, just the compulsion to keep my fingers moving, to put words onto the page. Secretly I think that one of these days I will reveal to myself, through stream of consciousness writing, the true secret to the point of my life, to the point of your life…

Hmmm, doesn’t look like that secret is going to reveal itself today…
Patricia