I Don't Know Yet

Every year around my birthday I feel this overwhelming sadness or disappointment, the Birthday Blues, if you will. I think it has to do with my expectations for the day and all the build up that surrounds an annual event centered on you. In reality it’s just a landmark for my annual trip around the sun, but as someone who gives too much weight to everything, it’s a momentous occasion. I keep expecting myself to drastically change from year to year, expecting that maybe by next year I’ll find myself or know who I want to be. That doesn’t happen though. I’m just the same as I always was and I feel like I always will be. 

My life has changed so much--the people, the events, and the places are always changing, but I feel like I’m not changing with them. The world keeps turning around me, and I’m standing in the same place, watching everyone run circles around my progress. Logically, I know I have changed. I have different types of friends than I did two years ago, my laughs are louder, and I know more about myself than ever before. However, I still feel like I’m not there yet. Whenever I see someone just a year older than me it always looks like they have their life so put together, they know their style, their personality, and who they should be. So, I’ve set up this timeline for my life in my mind where I expect myself to achieve my goals or “have my sh*t together” by certain points, and of course I’m always left disappointed. Life doesn’t work that way. Everyone’s progress and lives are different and no one really knows what they’re doing, it’s all a show to convince other people. I apologize for my utter stream of consciousness, but as I’m writing this it feels like some thoughts just need to be written down y’know? 

Basically, this is all to say that “Still Sane” by Lorde is the anthem for these periods of my life. At first glance, this might not be obvious, because she’s talking about not quite being used to her life of fame--something I could never relate to, but she’s also talking about all the hard work she’s put in throughout her whole life and still not quite getting “in the swing of things”. That is my experience down to a tee. The phrase “all work and no play” is quite familiar to me, and it seems like it is to her too since Lorde says it keeps her “up a level”. I’ve been striving for something for so long, though I still haven’t found what that something is. My life source is competition, I think I’d die without it. For a life source, competition is pretty self destructive. I’m constantly comparing myself to others, which means I’m constantly losing and breaking myself down. My only real and constant goal in life has been to be the best at whatever I do, I don’t think I have ever achieved it though. Sometimes that statement feels like the least relatable thing ever, and I think everyone is going to think I am a narcissist. The thing is, I don’t actually think I am the best, or that I ever could be, but I just want to be proud of myself and I want people to be proud of me. Maybe it’s my culture, the way I was raised, or the effect of the pressures to be productive in a capitalist society, I’m still not sure yet. I don’t think there is ever really a point where you “find yourself”, our lives are always changing, so to be completely honest finding yourself at 16 feels a bit boring. However, I’ve always associated “finding myself” with finally being sure of what I’m striving for. This chapter of my life would probably be called “I Don’t Know”. 

Recently, I read Michelle Obama’s Becoming, and while I can’t relate to all the events in her life, I can certainly relate to the way she thinks about them and her standards for herself in her adolescence. She mentions that she had always been ambitious, though she didn’t know what for, and when asked about her goals she would just say what other people wanted to hear. I find myself doing the exact same thing, or at least I had for the past 15 years of my life. This year though, in an effort to normalize this disorienting confusion that is a teenage right of passage, I have started saying “I don’t know yet” to all questions about the future. There’s a lesson about living in the moment in there somewhere, although I’m not sure that’s really my intention. Part of adolescence is not knowing, being anxious, and wondering what the future holds. Maybe knowing everything all at once isn’t as fun as everyone thinks it is-- and this is coming from someone with extreme anxiety. 

Whenever I hear other people get asked these questions, they always have the answers. Whether it’s what college they want to go to, what job they want to have, what they want to major in, or even how many kids they see themselves having. My brain is buzzing all the time. Sometimes I can’t even keep up with it, but I still haven’t even had the time to sit down and process how many kids I want to have! I didn’t even know I was supposed to be thinking about that. The question is now: Does everyone actually know the answers to these questions or are they just pretending? My verdict is that it’s all an act that we initially put on to impress older people, even though they had gone through the exact same thing one too, and now we just put it on for each other because we think it makes us seem wiser or better than each other. Now, there is no shame in that; I am a firm believer in doing whatever the hell you want as long as it doesn’t hurt anybody, and I am also sure that there are some people who really do know what they want in life. However, like I said, my answer to these questions would be an “I don’t know yet,” with some elaboration if I felt like it in which I would probably unload all my stresses and worries on the person who then wishes they never asked in the first place.

To continue my trend of allusions, in the song “I Love Play Rehearsal” from the musical “Be More Chill”, the character Christine sings the line “Most humans do one thing for all of their lives, the thought of that gives me hives”, which is similar to the way Michelle Obama describes her life as being many things and yet still all of these things at the same time. That is really what I am striving for, to not be one thing but everything at once. I like being too much. I like being a whirlwind of things. I like letting people get caught up in my storm. I am slowly realizing that a career is not your life, and that won’t be all that you are. It is still a daunting choice since it feels like I am passionate about absolutely everything I encounter, but I am slowly narrowing down my lists. The good thing is that I know what I don’t want to do, which is a start. 

I hate to break it to everyone, but we live in a society (I hope everyone can recognize the sarcasm dripping from that statement, I swear I’m funny in real life). The world runs on systems that were constructed before you were even a thought, but that are still changing every single day. In a way, it’s like when we would play jump rope or double dutch on the playground. The world is turning the ropes and you have to match the rhythm before you let yourself jump in so you don’t fall flat on your face. I expect to face-plant a couple of times, in fact I think I already have (both metaphorically and literally) but I think that’s what makes it fun. So, I don’t know yet and maybe that’s more than okay for now.