Earlier this year, a friend asked me a question.
I remember every word, and the look she gave me after I gave her an answer. “What do you want to do in your life?”. The question was somehow gave birth to a few thoughts that—in a way or another—could describe the general feeling I had throughout the year.
I shrugged, and said “I don’t know, yet”. At that time, I felt like that kind of question—the kind where you ask someone about their goals, their passion, their dreams—is not the one you could throw on a coffee table sipping a hot caramel machiato in a regular day. Sometimes I would just blurt a generic answer, the one that will stop the other person from asking follow-up questions.
Just like a hundreds of millions of babies that were born in 1995, I turned 23 this year. Not yet a quarter, but the crisis has definitely hitting on me—prematurely. But hey, maybe a quarter life crisis is meant to be there even before you hit the number. It is a life-shift from an adolescence period to adulthood, and most of the time it feels like unfolding a never ending layers or trapped inside a long tunnel. Maybe because the conversations during hang-outs were changing, promptly, from gossips, assignments, or movies; to engagement pictures, wedding organizers, babies, or financial plans. Late night phone calls’ topics were shifting from silly crushes, or outpour cries due to heartbreaks, to graduate school scholarships, an old friend got engaged, or moving away plans. It gets overwhelming, I had to switch off my Instagram for a month. The fear was inevitable, I began to let myself drowned in it. I haven’t gotten anything in my pocket figured out, yet, and I was panicked.
One of the books I read this year is The Bell Jar. In fact, I carried it along with me on every journey I took throughout the year. There is this one part of the book where Esther Greenwood—the main character—could see her life as a big fig tree branching out before her, with each fat purple fig symbolizes every life options she has upon her. The fig tree part hits me so hard, that I stayed up all night thinking about it. What if I had these handful of figs in my arms but I couldn’t carry them all with me? What if I’m too busy picking up the figs that fell from my arms, they started to rot even before I get a bite?
2018 is a 27 miles marathon, and I definitely wasn’t the winner.
This is the year I cried as much as I was a toddler. I took many flights and cab rides. I tried to hang my fate on a giant, sparkly, Christmas tree people built on the capital city, it fell—it couldn’t hang on for too long. I tried many times to the point I got nothing on my hands but a series of failure. I fell, I scraped my knees. I tried to whisper to the ground, nobody answers me back. I tried to flee, on a full speed—pack my bags and planning on never going to look back—but my feet were on chains. Nothing worked out, not even a single thing. And for the first time in my life, I googled the least painful way to kill myself. I reached the point of the marathon where I began to suffocate and had to stop.
“But when it came right down to it, the skin of my wrist looked so white and defenceless that I couldn't do it. It was as if what I wanted to kill wasn't in that skin or the thin blue pulse that jumped under my thumb, but somewhere else, deeper, more secret, and a whole lot harder to get.” — Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar
Then I realized that it was all me. I let myself drowned in a social construction the society made, I let it made me feel there is no way I could catch up. I let myself to live inside somebody else’s timeline. I was constantly at war with myself. The only thing I need is to tell myself that it’s okay—it’s okay to fail, you can always try again next time. I focused on my failures only, but I never really appreciate the trips, storms, wrong-turns, bad decisions, rocky paths, and heartbreaks that had led me here. I never took a time to reflect on what has gotten me here, how much I’ve changed. Therefore, I would try to make a peace with myself while I have to unfold more layers ahead. Maybe I don’t have anything figured out at this moment, and it’s okay. The figs will grow again, and it will be just in time.
2018 is a 27 miles marathon, and I wasn’t the winner. But I finished it. I decided to feel alright again.
