In the next twenty-nine years, between now and when you’re fifty-nine, you have some decisions to make about where you want to be, who you want to be, and where you want to end up, because those years will come and go, and they will do so quickly. It’s time to decide what you need to do, and what you want, before you reach the age where you can almost get a senior discount or would be welcomed to live in an “Adult Living Community”.
It seems exciting on one hand, scary on the other. You’re scared of asking for what you want. You’re afraid of disappointment, of making the “wrong” choice, of hitting the unforgiving wall of “be careful what you wish for, because you just might get it.” For you this fear is completely rational. All your life it’s just been easier to make decisions on the fly and too often do so without shrewdness or logic. Very much a case of “it sounded good at the time”-to ping back and forth through your life like a pinball, where one ping leads to another and before you know it, you’re flying faster and faster out of control, only there’s no points scored, just scars earned and the deep wondering if maybe you should have turned left when you went right.
Maybe you should have called off your wedding when you were way too young to commit to another person, when you barely understood the concept of committing to yourself. You and your self were as good as perfect strangers and you unconsciously made the launch into marriage with someone that was in no way right for you, but hey, he was there and he said he loved you. Isn’t that what love is? It is when you’re twenty-one and desperate for adventure and a fairytale only to end up moving back home four months into it, after realizing following your new husband to the East Coast was the worst thing you could have done, but now you’re pregnant and forever tied to this man you barely know and can barely stand. You hate hearing the sound of his breathing through the phone line as he forces you to talk to him from 3,000 miles away, though there’s nothing to say. You know you don’t love him, but are too scared to ask for a divorce. You think you hate him, but you don’t yet comprehend that it’s really just your poor decision that brought you here and you still haven’t come far enough on your path to forgive yourself. You hope and pray that he gives you a reason to file for a divorce, anything at all. Then finally he gets that you don’t love him and that separation is the answer.
You’re relieved, but still scared, a single mom at twenty-three, living with your mom again, who you love and call one of your dearest friends, but whose thumb you can’t seem to get out from under, and you’re stifled and depressed. You have no sense of autonomy, and deep down in the darkest recesses of your self, you know this isn’t right, none of it is. You’re not living any life you would choose, but because you still don’t know your Self at all, and the concept of finding out what you want is as foreign and as terrifying as hiking solo through Iraq wrapped in an American flag, you just keep stuffing your feelings of “quiet desperation”. You don’t have time to figure out what you want anyway. You have a child to raise, an ex-husband to fight with. And still the desperation remains, so far just constant white noise in the background.
You try to point fingers for your unhappiness, to blame your family dynamic, your ex, and your ex’s family, how the table of fate tilted left instead of right. Then you find someone else to love you, and this makes you happy because you feel validated, and you sacrifice your slowly burgeoning sense of self to save him. It feels good to try, even though he only sinks deeper and pulls you down with him, but you feel needed and loved, even though you get very little in return except his misbegotten concept of affection, peppered with snide comments and judgments about how you raise your challenging child, judgments that aren’t spoken, but emanate from him like a silent beacon that create a Gordian knot in your stomach.
