What next?

There are so many things that one cannot be prepared for in life. And as many times as you might hear someone else say it, it never feels as though it applies to you. Like many others before me, I'm sure, I feel invincible to most things in the sense that "things happen to other people, but they don't/won't happen to me".

It's like reading some article on a new disease and refusing to accept that the symptoms that have been worrying you are exactly what you are reading on the page.

Or that relationship that despite the fact that logically you realize is the prime example of an unhealthy or abusive relationship, you are still able to make excuses for the other person involved (or yourself).

Because it is easier to believe that you are the exception to the rule and there is some way to out-think the inevitable light-bulb that will turn on after far too much damage has been done.

Or that person who consoles themselves by saying that though they are aging and all of their friends are long married, there must be someone out there for them. Someone. Somewhere. Hoping that they won't be that person they know of that spent their entire lives alone. And so spends their entire life alone and waiting for fear of missing something. Manifesting the thing that one is trying to avoid.

Or when it comes to facing your greatest fear, to whatever degree that it may come about... could you do it? Do you really want to? What is gained or lost in fighting or fleeing?

The more things that I face, the stronger that I realize that I am. And the scarier the things that come forward are, the less I seem to feel the effects. Although as an adult you have to learn, unfairly, that the world is not as good or as promising or as easy as it was told to you when you were young, experience in and clarity of the reality around you has no other equal. It's an awkward process but eventually you realize that it just doesn't matter. Not in an existential or nihilistic kind of way, but in a bigger picture sort of sense.

My life is nothing like I thought it would be when I was young. Things have never gone according to plan. But as many bad things that have come up in the process, there are certain things that I never knew that I wanted in the first place that were given to me in transit and transition.

As I make mistakes and choices, new ones arise and sometimes I am just lucky enough to be in a right place at the right time and meet the right person and it has a resounding impact on the entirety of my life. I follow the thread backwards through the last 8 years and I see this huge complicated tapestry that I could never have designed or sought out on my own.

That is not to say that I wouldn't do some things differently. In fact, I wince when I think of all the things that I wish I had handled more gracefully or with more strength. I have still had to suffer the consequences of my actions. I have still hurt people, whether intentionally or not. I am still selfish more often than not.

But I am learning to be grateful for the learning experiences I have had and hope that somehow I will be able to get it right and apply it to finding something really worth having, whatever that ends up being.

If I had been asked when I was 16, where I thought I would be... and again at 18... and again at 21... and so on... I never would have thought I'd be here. But I am and I am trying to make the best of what has been given to me and with what I have worked hard to earn so that eventually I can look back over my life and even without much to show for it, can say that I tried and at the very least, I enjoyed it.