The more people I meet, and the older I get (because 22 is a year pregnant with wisdom borne of age), the more suspicious I become that "choosing your direction in life" is the excess, useless chemical byproduct left over from the transition from the Industrial Age to the post WWII boom when we saved the planet with elbow grease and propaganda. "Choosing your direction in life" is the depleted uranium rods of two generations past, a great fiction sold by our grandparents that died little by little the more choices we were offered. "Direction in life" went from the narrow "kids, job, retirement" to the "whatever the fuck you want. Weave baskets from your own body hair, no one fucking cares" and in the face of so many damn options, we freeze like deer in the headlights of out own impending futures. I'm also suspicious that this sensation of being ground under the wheels of not knowing what
What I'm doing - living abroad, teaching english, blah blah blah - is amazing. I know this because I am repeatedly being told it's amazing. Everyone in my life system, and I'm lucky that these people exist, has told me multiple times that I'm brave for having done this, and oh what a good time I'll have, and so on and so forth. But no where in there is my roadmap - my direction - to get wherever I'm going to. Because I don't know where I'm going. And while some nights this is a great, clutching terror in the dark, a scaly fist wrapped tight around my lungs and my heart, tonight the Great Beast of Self Doubt has manifested itself as eating a bar of Ikea chocolate (shut up, but it's my favorite kind) and writing this in bed in nothing but an old pair of boxers.
So my guide? Not actually a guide. Just a two paragraph verbal dump, because I am the last person qualified to write any type of instruction right now. This is literally just to say I'm tired, emotionally, and I'm only 22, so what the hell does that mean about the next 8, 88, or 8,000 years of my life.
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