Lost and found.

"Eccentricity is not, as dull people would have us believe, a form of madness. It is often a kind of innocent pride, and the man of genius and the aristocrat are frequently regarded as eccentrics because genius and aristocrat are entirely unafraid of and uninfluenced by the opinions and vagaries of the crowd."


- Edith Sitwell


Now that I'm approaching thirty, I've been sitting back and really taking stock of my life. Where am I? Who am I? What do I love/hate/need? What do I want to do with my life? All these questions become 3am conversations with myself, keeping my up and exhausting me until they've drained my brain like an old kitchen sponge.


The answer to all of the above is that I don't know. Where am I? I guess that depends on who you ask. To most people, making under 30k a year isn't anywhere palpable at all. Who am I? God (if I believed in one) only knows. Today, I'm a student. Tomorrow, a gym rat. It's fluid. What do I love/hate/need? Ever-changing. And I have absolutely no idea what I want to do with my life besides write.


To my excitement, though, I've realized none of that is directly related to what other people think of me. Do I care what my next door neighbor thinks of my blasting Florence and the Machine's cover of Halo at 9am? Nope. It makes me happy. Do I care that the head of the PTA is upset with me for not volunteering? No. In that regard, I've found myself.

Not ready.

"If we were not all so interested in ourselves, life would be so uninteresting that none of us would be able to endure it."

- Arthur Schopenhauer 

I run this weird borderline between being totally obsessed with myself and totally disgusted with myself most days.

It's an oddly irreverent feeling.

I often internalize and think, then there are other times that words exit my mouth before I've had a chance to ponder them at all.

I've felt old lately. Muted. Like a faded watercolor painting. I wonder if this is what getting older feels like, putting away childish things and assuming more mature responsibilities. I worry that I'm going to die like this, never fully touching anything, never rolling it over in my hands and feeling the textures and patterns and life.

I thought I knew what I wanted. I thought I had it all together. Child - check. Family - check. Pets - check. School - check. 

Turns out I don't even know myself well enough to know how unhappy I've become with the status quo, with the normalcy that life often inflicts upon us while it's telling us that this is the way it should be.

I'm not ready for this to be my life. Staying in Friday nights. Not driving to another state in the middle of the night because people just don't do that. Not writing at 5 in the morning because I can't sleep.

I'm not ready for this mediocrity.

"To love. To be loved. To never forget your own insignificance. To never get used to the unspeakable violence and the vulgar disparity of life around you. To seek joy in the saddest places. To pursue beauty to its lair. To never simplify what is complicated or complicate what is simple. To respect strength, never power. Above all, to watch. To try and understand. To never look away. And never, never, to forget."


-Arundhati Roy


Simple words to say, yet difficult to live by. Although I'm Buddhist, I find my practice minimized to yoga/meditation for a quick 5 minutes in the morning. Being mindful? Living in the moment? Forget it. I'm so stuck in the past, the present and the future at the same time that I feel like three separate people.