On uncertainty and quarter life crises [warning: long post]:

This post has been a long time coming and very difficult to write. Uncertainty as a broad theme is something that has been festering and eating away at me for years and years, though only recently has it sharpened and culminated into something that has shaken me so deeply.

I'm 20 tomorrow, and this is just so absolutely foreign and strange and unfathomable. I already find adulthood (which I feel I've long ago reached) so exhausting, which I imagine is a little absurd and insulting to those older adults that I know. There's just this constant, overhanging, aching lostness that's been floating around aimlessly in the background of my thoughts and actions that I had hoped would be gone by now.

Beyond that, I was and am still surprised and frustrated that I am still nowhere near being the kind of person I wanted and want myself to be, and I'm still struggling with basic, fundamental questions, questions that maybe should've been answered through socializations and childhood experiences:

• Does it scare no one else that we can never truly know what it is to be another person or to see from another perspective? Does it scare anyone else that our entire lives are singularly and uniquely our own, that we are can not even be sure of those close relationships with other people, because we won't ever really know exactly how another person feels pain, feel joy, feels love. People much braver and more courageous than me can put faith in other people, and I find that I can too in my clear-minded periods, but this question has been a shadow that has walked with me from youth-- I can remember the first day this thought first occurred to me as a 7 or 8 year old, lying awake in my bedroom in Barrhaven, realizing very suddenly that, though I could feel and touch the mattress I was lying on and see the light beginning to filter in through my curtains, that I could never be really sure that my own senses weren't lying to me and that I was in fact in the slimy fortress of a monster. And how could I ask my parents for confirmation, when I would never really know, never have any confirmation, that anything they answered would be correct and true? I wouldn't ever be able to slip into their minds.
• Doesn't it scare anyone else how circumstantial our friendships are? I love my friends and it is not the action of loving them that scares me, but in how we become friends with and come to love them. They've changed me, and they mean so much to me that it frightens me that a small deviation, a small choice in the past would've completely starved me of an opportunity to be close with these people.
• This is, perhaps, the immigrant's question--the one that I, as a first-generation Canadian, wonder as I lie in my bed on those nights when television screens of foreign lands and faraway countries imprint themselves in my mind's eye. Now I am able to look objectively at Japan and China from a distance, I know in my gut that I would be completely different had I have grown up there-- and that makes me wonder ho much of me would stay the same and how much would be better. Much of my me-ness comes from those breathless momentary experiences that I had in school, in at home, in this country; I have absolutely no inkling what kind of person I would even begin to be with these changed variables. And this is, by no means, unique to me--Nina sings about this in In The Heights in When You're Home, agonizing out loud about what kind of person she'd be if her family "had stayed in Puerto Rico with her people".
• What it is about us that compels us to be us and do things in this world, in this country? If I would actually be a radically different person had circumstances presented themselves differently, how much of my own characteristics and qualities are variables, subject to change from the inputs? Which are the constants? Inasmuch, how much of what I deem to be an essential "me" part is really, actually me and not just a result of our environment and our biases and cultural upbringing? Nate Silver, in The Signal and the Noise(which I'm currently reading) tells us that statisticians will never completely be bias-free, but that the victory comes in being able to "recognize these biases". He says this as if it's easy, but I am still struggling to recognize the words our minds and bodies are born with, and what is fed to us.
• If we are just an amalgamation of constants and variables and the outputs are themselves as flexible and changing from one day to the next, the changes come in the choices we make, and the options don't come in what they are, but if we even have them in the first place. In listening to my own friends think out their own decisions, I can hear their own thought processes, proposals, and how they seem to reason them out for themselves to what seems to be one direction and one point, and in my head, I can hear myself thinking that they already know their decisions-- but that they don't know that they know. But, as oft is when you're listening to someone else's internal discourse made verbal (like perhaps you are now with me), you are displaced from the individual's opinions and values and have replaced them with your own and you can objectify and intellectualize their decisions because they're of no personal cost to you. But we both know that it's so different in our own heads-- that these decisions are agonizing and anguishing in our own hearts and minds because our pasts, presents and futures are exerting massive downward pressures on our decisions.So, thus, are these choices supposed to be viewed outside of ourselves, away from the distraction of our emotions and hearts, and that they really are so easy to make? But because they're trapped within us, they're already made by our own pasts, our own experiences, our own values and and our preconceived notions of what's right and wrong? How much of our choices have been pre-told based on who we are and what we are, given to us by our pre-delivered experiences, rather than what we want to do or intend to do? Maybe in all our heart of hearts, we already know our truths, yet I hear myself screaming and screaming and screaming as I present this idea to myself, screaming like Larka did, falling to her death in the ravine, screaming like Harry did, lying on the floor of the Headmaster's Office, screaming like classical Greek heroes do to their gods and to the heavens, screaming "Don't I have a choice? Can't I have a choice?"
• Though, on those quiet days, those "day of days" when my heart and mind are still, dark water and seemingly absent of outside influences, the possibility of choice and its burden are suddenly possible and available. Without the overhanging pressure of any immediate decisions to be made, I can somewhat objectively look at and analyze the paths I've traveled, at the deviations and small side paths that might have become major roadways in my own life; I can face forward to see those winding roads that run beyond my vision in front of me and I am frozen at the choice, at the utter fear of a misstep, of a false start and disappointment. The fear makes me angry ("how ridiculous and utterly selfish to feel so!") and yet-- it's the first thing I can identify in the cluttered cloud of emotions and anxiousness and it's all I can feel and all I can know. I never seem to see or find other people frozen in the present and the past like I was and am-- why does it seem like I am the only one so terrified of the future when I have nothing but stability, a wealth of resources and a sturdy support system helping me ahead? Is there something inherently wrong with me that makes me unable to look forward to the future and instead fixate obsessively on the past and present (and is that thus an output of my childhood and growth)?

In all, I find that these questions personally find centre around fate and free will--two ways of thinking that are mutually exclusive and yet inexorably intertwined with each other. Maybe they're not separate entities though-- perhaps they exist as two extremes on a spectrum of blurriness, growth and influence like sexuality and emotion. I just don't know.

I think people with more grace than I have found their answers in a myriad of places, both inside and outside of themselves-- or maybe not. We could all be a little lost but unable to recognize it in each other because we're all lost on different roads. I think that I'll never fully come to a conclusion or an answer and that my mind's ears have only just been picking up this theme being whispered from my reflections on my own maturation patterns, reading, talking to people older than me, and trawling those hubs of collective cultural consciousness: that we all experience differing levels of being lost and of loss through our lives and that it never really leaves us.

I am just beginning the process to accepting that this possibility of being lost is indefinite. As a kid, I carried around this persistent belief that I would find "my fate" (which would follow somewhat of narrative structure and would be monumental and earth-shaking) like a shield: all the "scrambly madness" of my life would straighten itself out and align to form a timeline where I would be able to point out the foreshadowing, the major themes, the supporting characters, and on and on and on, but until then, I would walk with my heart light and head high.

In all honesty, there are parts of my childhood belief system that have never left me. Unhealthily, I obsessively compartmentalize and organize my cumulative moments and my personality in an effort to get it to fit into some story and trope structure (like one of Kurt Vonnegut's) and (more aesthetically) I like the thought of someone reading my thoughts and bits of my own life, which is one of the reasons why you're reading this right now. And I do think I have found some meaning, pieces here and there: I do hold things like my family and friends above all else, and I do feel quite certain that I do love and believe in the fields that I'm entering. But those fantasies of grandeur do swallow me whole in my occasional to frequent adult moments of weakness and ego.

I'm going through some tumultuous internal struggles with my identity, with my sexual orientation, with my raison d'etre, with myself: I'm experiencing significant deviations of my own thinking and actions from my perceived truths. I'm not sure who I am and from there, what I want, where I'm going, why I'm doing what I'm doing, and on. At first, I was terrified of the onset of these new questions-- did this mean I had been lying to myself my entire life? Were my childhood dreams really my childhood dreams or were they just pre-fabricated dreams thrust onto me by my family and culture? I could feel my life's backbone- my narrative, my fate- shifting and blurring in and out of focus and I intellectualized my own inner turmoil by stripping away every layer of myself right down to the core of my values: whether I could choose my own forward directions or if I really was led by decisions that were made eras before me.

I still don't know. All that I really know is that I feel sore and raw- like having a layer of skin peeled off and your underneath is suddenly stinging from the exposure to the elements- and tired. I think about how nice it would be to just not think for a little while, to have blurry white noise filter through my brain with no room for anything else. I think about how nice it would be to find a small wooded area on the edge of a looming suburban development, squirm an imprint of my body onto a padded bed of moss and soft earth, listen to the hum of the highway breathing like the ocean, and sleep for a century until the earth swallows me whole and my atoms scatter to the wind.

But that would be selfish. I've been given an enormous amount of opportunities and resources and it would be incredibly wasteful and incredibly selfish to just let it all go.

Sometimes I just look at it all and have nothing to say except to ask why me? I've won the cosmic lottery and I don't know why (which is of course the root to my fantasy of finding meaning). I almost feel that it's wasted on me because I still have to struggle so hard when I feel that so many other people- greater, more charismatic, smarter than me- could have and would have benefited so much more, gone so much further and contributed so much more than I have.

I still feel like I'm so far away from the person I feel I want to be, from the people I admire and the qualities in them to which I look up. I am continuously struggling to reconcile so much internal dissonance: the Western philosophy of the individual and the Eastern philosophy of society's whole; how, in spite of all of the meaningful connections and relationships I've made, people still flabbergast me and I still find making friends difficult; how I feel like I seemingly have to work so much fucking harder to put even the littlest piece of information in my brain (does this mean I'm not meant to be doing Economics?); how I feel like I'm lying to people when I just let myself go on autopilot in social situations and don't fight hard enough against my fear and discomfort to reveal the other equally valuable parts of me (like this one); how I feel like I'm such an intensely emotional person yet still find it so difficult to express my emotions out loud (which, to me, almost feels more real) and how I feel I can only do it in writing because of the distance and separation of the medium and in how I can aggressively edit; how I feel like I have a lot of opinions but have to struggle so hard to express them because I feel like I don't have adequate stakeholdership or research to back them up and because I choke on my fear of confrontation.

I just feel so guilty to be feeling any of this because, well, I feel like this lostness is a distinctly middle-upper middle class "first world" problem-- self-actualization, after all, is the highest level on Maslow's hierarchy of needs. To be feeling this way means I'm already more fortunate than many in terms of economic and emotional resources.

And of course I feel (selfishly) that these "fate vs. free will" questions- my own lostness- are coming from my own slow and ongoing conclusions that I am going to be middle class and historically forgotten: I feel myself trying to fight it, trying to fight against the cultural, emotional molds that have been shaped for me from birth, trying to scream to the world and the heavens that I do have a choice and that I will break free from them, that I will do something big and earth-shaking and tumultuous, but in reality, I know so many people much smarter, more successful than I, who are well on a trajectory to greatness while I'm still on the side of the highway, trying furiously and fruitlessly to fill my punctured bike tire with my own mouth.

I knew I had lost childhood when I realized I had no fucking idea what exactly I was meant to do and that that scared me. I still have no idea; I still have those unanswered questions. All that I know is that this vague lostness has identified a guilt, and this guilt has sharpened into some vague direction to give others those same opportunities and resources I received (the plain irony of which is that I'm seemingly trying to break free of the molds that I essentially want to give to others). But I do so in the hopes that these people, many of which will have steadier minds and hearts more open than I, will be able to use these opportunities better than I did to find and know what their truths and meanings are, succeeding where I've failed.

That's the general direction of my next 10, 20, 50 years: I'm going to follow that guilt into giving me something to do while I "fart around" on earth, with the hope that someone, somewhere will be able to know and do what they were born to do. But I'm a deeply conflicted individual (as the above attests) and these internal wars are barriers to completing these tasks. So I set on myself three goals to achieve in the next year, or five or 10: to spend more time outside of myself, to learn acceptance, and to find more emotional anchors (because I have very few right now).

Anyways.

What a huge internal barf. I wrote this over two weeks, slowly adding things that would occur to me riding the bus home, lying awake in my bed at midnight, playing Pokemon, jumping in puddles. There are some conflicting ideas and emotions tossed in here, but I imagine that that's just human nature-- always shifting, somewhat contradictory, never constant.

I wrote this post because I think better when I write (it's soothing and methodical), and because I know that I, personally, like a reminder that other people exist in inexplicable ways beyond the limitations of what our human flesh and five senses can feel (remember my fevered point on my fear that we never truly know what the other person is thinking?). I love reading novels where parts of the writer leech in (think John Irving and Douglas Coupland), those personal posts on tumblr and on blogs, conversations completely written down and non-corporate tweets because I see the words with my eyes, but I can hear other peoples' thoughts like my own-- it reaches past the boundaries of our wimpy human flesh. I remember my 10th grade music teacher telling us after we handed in our major written assignments that she "could hear our voices in her head" as she read them. I wrote this in case other people feel the same way.

I also love closure, and I'm hoping that writing something purging like this will help me learn to accept all this teen-ish dissonance and hold me accountable to my three previously mentioned goals.

Is this attention-seeking? Of course: everything we do is a cry for people to hear us, to see us, to justify us by validating our feelings and experiences. I know I've done this in my cruelty to other people: I've invalidated many out loud and in my own head though I working toward improvement. This is our curse of our own human, singular perspectives: we judge other people on their actions and judge ourselves on intention, trying to keep ourselves the protagonists of our own stories. I find it too easy to forget that other people are the "me"s in their own heads.

And maybe some of this will be helpful to other people too. I'm not okay with being lost yet, and maybe you're struggling too. I'm trying to be okay that I have no idea what my sexual orientation is, that I don't know what my calling is, that my future will never robust like I'd love for it to be-- I'm trying to learn to be, because I sure as hell don't have that talent by grace. Sometimes I have good days when the world is singing to me on-key and in beat, and sometimes I have bad days when all I hear is shitty dissonance that makes me cringe, but mostly, I have days in between, when everything is shades of gray. I go through cycles, but so too do ocean tides and housing markets and moon phases and the weather and political balances of power. Nothing is relative; everyone is an individual in our beliefs and feelings.

I mean every word I've said in this post, but some thoughts and ideas are more and less true to me at certain points of the cycle. These questions have bubbled up because I'm frustrated, angry and antsy: I'm stuck at a geographic and structural rut in my work, academic and extra-curricular careers, I have nothing to distract me from spending too much time inside myself, and I have very few emotional anchors (someone or some people to center me and give me perspective outside of myself). This has been the first time since middle school where I've had anywhere upwards of 2 months free to myself to do nothing in terms of extra-curriculars and school and things to occupy myself with and all of my emotional turmoil has caught up with me. Which begs the question of what my default state of being should be-- occupied and happy (but perhaps distracting myself from my internal issues) or without anything to do and home to utter inner turmoil. I don't know.

What I do know is this: I have been fortunate to have had experiences where I forget all of the above messiness and have nothing holding me up but utter, bubbling joy and a deep, glowing love that makes me feel like I've become one of those Hollywood searchlights beaming pure light up to the heavens. These have moments both big and small: smells and strings of words (said aloud and whispered), meals, bus rides, silences, photos-- I've been extremely fortunate to be privy to such marvelous things.

I am still lost and I am likely to be for the rest of my life, but this is what it means to be alive and living. I'm learning to accept this, and hopefully I'll have a day in my future when this becomes a lesson learnt.

- A