On a related note, my workout is going well. I have added more sit-ups and push-ups, and I can now hold a plank for two minutes! That doesn’t seem like much, but three weeks ago, I could barely do one minute, and progress is progress (no matter how small). Little victories like these are always exciting, especially if you’re impatient like me and you demand instantaneous results. I might not have the body of a Greek god yet, but damn it, I can hold a plank longer now than when I first started!
All right. So, today I want to share something that probably seems blindingly obvious to the rest of the world, but didn’t quite hit me until today.
I can do whatever I want.
Let that sink in for a moment. Read that sentence once, twice, seven times. Allow the words to imprint themselves upon your mind grapes.
I can do whatever I want. Seriously! I just realized today that I have a whole life ahead of me, and a whole world surrounding me, and there’s no one to tell me what I’m allowed or not allowed to do. (Well, except for the law, but 1. most of what I want to do is perfectly legal, and 2. I suppose I can still break the law if I want to—I just have to pay the consequences. I am not encouraging anyone to break the law, however!)
I know this seems really, blatantly obvious. Like, duh. Seriously. As soon as you turn 18 and leave your parental units behind, the world is your oyster. We all know that. But do we really get it?
See, I’ve lived most of my life trying to live up to certain standards and expectations—not just those imposed by my parents, but also those imposed by society. I started breaking free from those chains around last year sometime and ultimately made the decision to take a break from college to explore the “real” world a bit earlier than planned, but it’s been several months and I’ve just now realized that there are so many paths open to me, so many choices available. I can move to Cali if I want. I can move to another country if I want. I can save up money and spend it on ridiculous things, or I can give it to whatever charity I choose. I can use my days off to sleep in and goof around, or I can use them to do something constructive and meaningful. I can spend my time learning to play guitar and understand ASL and make art and sing and read and all those other awesome things that make life worth living. (I’ve been doing that quite happily since leaving college behind, ha ha.)
Why didn’t I understand this earlier? Why didn’t I make the connection as soon as I was a legal adult that I had around seventy years of life left and I could spend them doing whatever I wanted? Why did I automatically think, “okay, time to adhere to the same old plan that every other person my age is following.”
It scares me that it took so long to reach this conclusion. I would like to think I’m just a bit slow on the uptake (don’t get me wrong, I totally am), but I suspect that I’m not the only one who spent several years laboring under the delusion that there are only a few paths available and that you can’t really do what you want—you have to do what’s expected. Even after I took the plunge and withdrew from OU, nervous as a cat and terrified of living on my own, it took me three or four months to grasp the magnitude of my decision to forsake the well-worn path.
Anyway, this realization has pretty much brightened my entire month. I don’t think I have words that can adequately describe the happiness bestowed upon me by this revelation. All I can say is that you have to remember that only one person can really tell you what to do. Only one person can really rule your life and make you follow a certain direction. Obviously, that person is you, and if you don’t like where you are right now, you have to start fixing what you don’t like about yourself.
See y’all next week, angel faces.
I realized this when I took a three-day bus trip to Seattle last semester to visit an Internet friend. Or, rather, when I started planning it. I said out loud to someone, "Man, sure would be awesome if I could take a road trip this Spring Break." And then it hit me like a speeding brick to the head that I TOTALLY FREAKING COULD. I mean, yeah, it took work - getting a job, saving up some, a lot of planning - but when I opened up a map of the U.S. and got to say, "So where in this entire country am I going to decide to go?", it was the headiest goddamn feeling I have ever had. And the trip itself was, I think, even more spectacular than it would have been anyway because I knew that I'd done it because I had a choice and I did what I wanted.
ReplyDeleteIt's not always feasible, and sometimes doing something extraordinary requires doing something expected first (as it turns out, you can't fix the justice system without going to law school first! who knew!). But the same friend I visited in Seattle is making plans with me to meet in Iceland this year, because even though we have no idea how the hell that's going to happen, shit just doesn't seem so impossible anymore. :D