Lately, I've been feeling like I'm having a bit of whiplash about my life.
It's all been quite confusing. I began this year thinking that things were going to be a lot different than they are now. A lot of things had settled into place for me. I did well my first semester of law school. I received an offer at a firm I'm really excited about for next Summer. My aspirations of being a future healthcare law attorney have all seemed to align. Law school, in truth, has been a dream: it seems like all the right doors have opened, I feel a sense of belonging I'm not sure I've ever felt before, and I feel surrounded by limitless opportunity. This time last year, I was definitely feeling a lot of questioning. I would lay in bed wondering, "Am I really doing this?" "Is this really right for me?" It was such a risk to choose to give up my career and go back to school. But I'm grateful every day for it, and it's felt like life since then has reinforced this belief that I made the right choice.
And yet, in February, maybe March, life started to feel a little bit like a scab I was tempted to pick at. I've felt this disconnect between the life I'm living and the life I'm headed towards. Without saying more, I guess I'm writing because I've felt frustratedly disconnected from my writing lately, and wanted to push myself to write a little to try to reclaim that. I struggle to write when I'm not truly honest and candid. I have always tried to be candid, and yet, for maybe the first time in my life, I'm struggling lately with the desire to curl up into myself and be more private about my life. I'm going through some really heavy things, and I'm not really ready to be as open and honest as I usually am right now. This has created an odd conundrum for me as I'm struggling to find outlets to process how I am feeling and what is happening in my mind. I guess I'm writing to try to push back against that a little, to "get myself back out there," so to speak.
As I am waging this internal war with myself, in truth, I'm also struggling a lot currently with a great deal of self-doubt and disappointment. At the end of last year, I don't think you could have shaken my confidence about the state of my life and my future path. Now? I'm feeling a bit silly that I dared to think I knew more than I actually do. I have started to believe that I don't know as much as I thought I did at all. And it feels like a lot of things I didn't realize I pushed down years ago have bubbled back up to the surface. I feel disappointed with myself. Is my life just a series of patterns I continue to follow? Am I actually learning anything?
What does all that mean? It's hard to say while being vague, but I do plan to take time to reconnect with myself and the core of who I am. In all actuality, I'm not sure who I am has actually changed that much--I think I am actually really confident with my values and who I am. I think I've just woken up and realized that what I want is now different, and realized I want to reconnect my life with those values. I've stopped doing so many things I loved over the last few years--swing dancing, painting, writing, hiking, teaching myself music, taking myself out on solo outings. I'm not sure why I ever stopped all that, but this year, I want to get myself back out there and remember how much I love those things.
I've also felt a lot of frustration with myself. This isn't new. I've often wondered if there's something wrong with me. I look at my friends and peers and they seem so grounded, so sure of the path they're on. I, on the other hand, can't seem to pick one career and stick with it. Or pick one life path and stick with it, for that matter. I've found a great deal of contentment, and still, I feel so unsettled. I wonder if this is all just a trap: Is being unsettled something we all feel, and some people are just better at dealing with that? Am I really supposed to be learning something from all of this, or am I making a mistake in entertaining my nagging sense of unsettledness? This uncertainty has shaken my confidence a little.
What's more, I feel I've gone through so many deconstructions and reconstructions of my life at this point, that I have to wonder if it ever ceases. It's hard to ever feel truly settled in my life when I've willingly sought out so many life changes for a relatively young age. When I was a teenager, all I ever though I wanted was stability. This was something I felt I lacked in my teenage years, and I wanted more than anything to build a life that eschewed the very opposite of that. Yet, I seem to have pursued the very opposite, through some form of irony, and to the point where I wonder if I ever really wanted stability at all. After all, didn't I choose to go to law school because I was bored? Because I felt like there was something more for me out there? Because I once again found myself wondering, "is this all?" It can all be very exciting, but I think as I near my mid-30's I've had to start to reconcile with the fact that I don't think my life is going to be what I imagined it would be when I was younger at all. And I have to learn to be okay with that. I'm at the age now where constantly changing your mind and seeking change and redefining yourself starts to near a point where this has very real ramifications on the trajectory of my life, and I am running out of what formerly felt like limitless time in my 20's to choose these many iterations of myself without thinking too hard about how it would impact my future. After all, if I didn't like a change, I had plenty of time to do something else. Mentally, I still feel like I'm wandering around in my 20's, except now I'm not. Which means that eventually, sooner rather than later, I will have to reconcile with my path and where these choices have led me. (This is a really complicated way of saying I'm realizing I'm probably not going to have a "traditional" life in the sense I thought I was going to). I think I'm going to have something very different. I think I'm going to have to start reimagining what I thought the rest of my life would look like. I think I'm going to have to start reevaluating what my dreams for the future are.
And I'm going to go through many more changes before it's all said and done. Life is going to look completely different for me by the time I'm done with law school. I started law school with a very specific plan and idea for how I would go about things. Through this process, I've gained so much. The cost has also been really immense. I didn't think law school was going to change what I wanted so much, but it did. I didn't think it was going to shake what I thought was an infallible sense of certainty about my life. It has. I don't regret any of it, not for a second. It's just taken me a little by surprise, to watch these changes unfold.
Right now, I'm living in a weird liminal space and I'm struggling to let go and let life lead me to wherever it's going next right now. I feel like a current is tugging at me, and I just have to let it carry me into whatever this next phase is.
Aaaaaanways. If you've stuck through all this rambling, congrats. I've probably confused you immensely. But, all that to say, if you do happen to feel like me in that you don't have it all figured out right now, just know you have some company. Part of me is always a bit excited to see where uncertainty will lead me, and I do think periods of life like these are immensely important and ones we should slow down and listen to. I'm looking forward to a slow summer of doing just that. Taking it all in and seeing where I end up. In the end, I know it'll all be okay.
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