life’s race
I feel like some people are just born with an innate understanding and sense of who they are. And I am incredibly jealous of them.
Obviously as a kid you don’t know what you want. You’re a young human experiencing the senses of the world, adapting to the life you are destined to live for the rest of your existence. But for some, when they reach maturity in awareness, it comes easy. They know what they love, what their passions are, how they emotionally process things, what they want to be and do and how they relate to other humans in this world.
And it almost seems unfair.
Because then there’s those who have a delayed start to the game of self awareness. In different ways, they may be more intact or vulnerable, but they have no clue who they are. What makes them, them.
It’s a weird path to discovering who you are. Like a hiking trail with various options of paths and difficulty levels, but they all ultimately lead to the same place with the same view. What’s different is how long it takes to get there, how hard it is to get there, and what you experience along the way. It would be nice if we had the option to choose how we get to our final destination, but alas, we do not.
I struggled with figuring out who I was for a while. And even now I become a bit confused. I feel like I'm in this never ending cycle of metamorphosis. Life is weird like that. The way it changes. It never remains.
But I think there is beauty beneath the chaos to that. A beauty that comes with the acceptance of that change, and an understanding of who you remain at the heart of it.
It's the getting there that is never easy.
I wasn’t diagnosed with, nor did I even acknowledge the fact that I had anxiety until about two years ago. I am 20 years old. I thought it was normal to think like this: always on edge. Acknowledging that that wasn’t normal was the first step to understanding who I was and how I functioned.
My lack of intuition provided an even bumpier road to understanding myself. I knew how emotional I was, and how well I could put those emotions into words, but honestly looking back on my younger self, that’s all I can really say I knew for sure about her. The sense of self is so cloudy, barely even present from that time. I never realized the layers to who I was or who I could be.
Even now I’m still figuring that out. And it’s hard to write about it because it is still a big unknown, just slightly more attainable.
But I guess what I’m trying to say here is… there is no set time frame to becoming who you are. You get there at your own pace, and quite honestly, you may never even get there. We are always changing. Even when we’re old, we will continue to go through new experiences that change us into a different person than we were just a few days ago. And while it’s easier to say than to live day to day by, the lack of self awareness just provides more and more room to grow into understanding that about ourselves.
I know now what sparks the light within me. The songs that make me happy, make me think, help me write as they are doing right now. The things I value in friendships, relationships. The weight of trust. The power of words. The power of being myself. And being accepted just for that.
But my place in this world is still a big mystery, and it takes more and more everyday to be okay with that. It’s one of the most important life lessons I think that we can learn: how to be ourselves - truly, fully ourselves - throughout everything we do. Some may get there sooner than others, but that’s okay. Life’s not a race… we should learn to take advantage of its unpredictable pace.
