Quarter-life crisis

The depression sets in like the fog of the city. It settles over me and sticks like a plastic sheet that suffocates and contains this fierce restlessness that keeps wanting to come out.

I need to get out, to move. More than anything, I need to move. Everyday I sit, I stare, I think, and role into the mundane mess that is my every day “work”. I am restless. I sit in front of my computer, like looking though a window at the world, watching everyone and everything move and evolve faster and faster. I see all the things that I could be doing and want to be doing but have chosen not to. Yes, it is a choice. A choice that feels like a masochistic pull into the world of the “musts” and “shoulds”. It is a force that holds me back and grounds me, pins me down, as my soul runs around the peg, runs in circles, looking, rushing, unconscionably panicked. For what?

I want to shoot responsibility in the head. I want to shake it and shout at it, yelling to leave me alone and that it doesn’t matter. I want to be reckless. To live every day recklessly like it is the last day of my life. But everyday becomes more and more similar. And I get tiered. I am tiered out by monotony. Everyone keeps saying they are tiered. 

The body is fragile. It is already starting to deteriorate and I want to beat it out of weakness before it is too late. I am only 26 and the dread and asphyxiating feeling that there is never enough time creeps up behind me and every time I look back, it creeps closer and closer. My body is yearning for freedom, for the freedom to move, roll, jump, dance, combine acrobatics with climbing and going downhill, fast. It wants to be strong to support the sickness and cruelties that the outside world and the mind inflicts on it. But mine is still weak. I am letting it waste way. It is good, it could be great, but I am not using it.

And then I turn to the mind for comfort. But I get none.

All I think about is: what have I accomplished? What have I done that is significant? Where am I going? Am I being useful? Am I doing what I love?

The questions these days are endless. They were never few. But now, as I pass the first quarter of my life, there are fewer and fewer answers. I can’t help but feel like something is dying. 

Transitions

Since I left high school and my home country, I have been living my life in phases, in moods, themes and emotions. I can remember very clearly what happened when…

Everything is coated in a taste, a feeling very different from anything I felt before. The first time coming to America, the first time going out West, the first time seeing a trestle, a prison, a corn field…
And I realized that the reason why I have such distinct memories is because they have been tainted by art – a movie, book, a song, some kind of magic that draws you in an blurs the lines between reality and some other fictional world that you somehow have been drawn and tempted into and stained with.

Starting a “new” life has really been the onset of my initiation into the world of adulthood. I have grown up. I have finally arrived. But I wasn’t graceful. In fact, I crashed into adulthood, loudly, clumsily, throwing a fit. Looking back, I realize now how lovely it was. How twisted and violently absorbing it was to swirl, to willingly let go and be pulled into fiction, into romance, into deep nights of thinking, endless car rides – the scenes rushing past the window like my thoughts rushing through my mind, pulling, having the feeling or being sucked out of my body into my soul and out of my soul into my body. And, my aura. The aura of adventure, of change, that aphrodisiac, the zenith and culmination of energy that makes feel so ALIVE. So FREE, so absolutely mad with sanity and insanity, intertwining people into the sheath of relationships and connections. So many connections were made during my fantastic years.

And then they were gone.

They stopped.

I stopped it.
I stopped them because they dragged me back. You see, they were selfish. They didn’t want me to leave them. They fed on my emotions, they fed on my vulnerability and my lack of confidence and in growing conjured up voices of control and fear.
         
I was afraid. I sometimes am still and afraid. Of life. Of things, of the fantastical world that captured my heart and my mind and fed me romantic daydreams and molded my realities, the stuff of great stories. But when I crashed into adulthood, the sharpness slashed me naked. Meaning that I would walk into a new phase, a new chapter shaper, more structure, motion-less, emotion-less. And yet, now, I am not lacking in emotion. I am happy. In the strongest way I have happiness in my life and although it is a boring happiness, it lets me breath.
But in being still, the whimsical fantasy has caught up with me, and Oh! How glad I am to see these old companions. They have changed too. In breaking through, they too have lost their fierceness and possessive desire of me and my attention.

Yet, thank you for coming back. I am melancholically glad to see you…

Either she has had too much, or not enough.