I still don’t know what I want to do. I don’t think my problem is unique: I don’t want to claim that out of the many people who have ever lived on this earth, I’m one of the special few who have experienced this, because I know that’s not true.
I feel like I’m in a strange time in my life where I’m stuck between two eras: my childhood and my adulthood. I don’t really feel grown up. In many ways, I still feel like a child, lost about everything, who needs guidance to navigate the world as it is, and the world is a mess. It doesn’t help that my life so far hasn’t really conformed to the formula that society has given every child born to this modern life — until now, I still haven’t met the milestones I should already have met a few years ago, no thanks to the unfortunate mixture of my personality, my anxieties and depressions and circumstances and my perfectionism, and my general laissez-faire attitude: I just don’t care enough.
I need to care about something. I want to be inspired by something so much that I can dedicate my life to it. I feel this sometimes in brief moments, when I get so consumed about a subject or a hobby or a person or whatever interest I’m into, but I want something beyond this. I want something that lasts for longer.
I have people I look up to and deeply admire. These are people who have dedicated their lives to community work and honest-to-goodness public service. I admire them not only for what they do, but because they are people who, in my eyes, seemed to have figured out their lives, that this is what they want to do. And they are doing it immensely well, because they love what they are doing. They have found their place. I want to be like them. I want to be sure about myself, too. How did they figure it out?
A lot of the time, I wonder how the people around me do it, the people who pass by me on the street. How do people function so easily? What do they live for, I wonder? The people who depend on them? The next paycheck? A TV series or video game releasing next month? Because they don’t want their loved ones to grieve? I don’t judge. I know what it’s like. I honestly don’t know how I’ve gotten this far. If it weren’t for small joys, I would’ve been gone a long time ago.
Maybe it’s because I spend too much time inside my mind, but this has always been my life. It’s part of who I am. And I know that the only thing that can get me out of my head is care. I need to care about something. I want something beyond small joys. I just don’t know about what. Maybe then, I would finally overcome the feeling of being eternally out of place that has always plagued me since I was young.