A Place to Land

I feel like I’m falling.

Adulthood—and the reality of it—makes me feel like I am falling.

It never stuck with me how much of luxury things are. I think the world kind of sells you onto them, giving the illusion of how attainable it all is. And it never occurred to me just how many things needed to be in order for you to indulge in those things.

Maybe it’s dawning on me how much I’ve been taken care of. An ode to my parents, I guess. How little worries I am to have because of them. And how scary problems are with the thought of no longer being eligible for their help. Because maybe I should be setting that date far more in advance than when life makes it for me.

They say no one really knows what it is they’re doing when it comes to growing up. Putting on your big girl or boy pants and going out into the world to make something out of yourself. So I start to see how easy it is to be lost in the current of life’s many riptides, clinging to whatever seems to work.

And maybe you stay there.

Because you’ve built a life there.

And the rest just follows.

I thought of this while sitting in a tow truck tugging my broken car along the 405 freeway. I looked at the office buildings and the beautiful apartments along my path. It made me think of all the lives inside them—the suits, ties, skirts and dresses neatly laid out for the next day’s work.

I wondered how secure these people maybe are. And how a weekend does permit a day of leisure. Once something was turned in to grant that access.

I started to realize just why my parents led me down a path of education. Why they encouraged a stable and plausibly successful career, so long as I was willing to put in the work.

Yet, I’ve been straying from my path. My career path.

I’ve been thinking of all these creative outlets that genuinely make me happy. But on days like the one I spent sitting in a tow truck, it starts to feel like I’m gambling.

It’s like I’m taking each day for what it is, and sometimes it doesn’t feel like I am investing my time properly. Maybe just on paper it looks that way. Because emotionally and mentally, I feel so much lighter. My smiles have become so much more prevalent.

But the risk of not having a secure place to land on whenever obstruction hits has me thinking completely different. There has to be a balance between getting what I want and meeting all my needs.

I’m in this headspace of thinking that everything my parents taught me may have had some fear laced in it, but there is also the validity of safety within their precaution. My youth makes me think I have time. And in it, I am permitted my right to experience risk. But standing at the border of my late twenties is starting to make me feel like I need substance. I need a backbone to jump off of whenever I do decide to put a creative project out into the world. Because one day my safety net is going to inevitably be myself. And I don’t want to feel like I don’t have my own back.

So I guess I am declaring war with myself.

Denying myself certain privileges in order to accommodate my basic needs. Setting a foundation with myself because the real world is very scary. That night, the world never looked so gated. With all its nicely lit homes, and me on the outskirts with my dysfunctional living arrangement. I think it’s time to become my own savior. Saying it and portraying it are so separable, but there comes a point when you just have to stop lying to yourself.

Maybe I just broke the code of that saying: You got to get sick and tired of being sick and tired.

Yeah, I did.

Only now I’m tired of feeling scared. Likely, this fear will always be an underlying worry. But I know that my level of preparation and output will drastically alleviate this tension I have with going out into the world.

I am truly caught between a place of I can’t believe this is my life, with two directions coming into emergence.

One asks:

How did we get here?

What problems should I fix?

The other asks:

How beautiful are these problems and epiphanies?

And how lucky am I to have the support and space to solve them?

I’m going to run with both. They say that life is about solving problems. I guess that’s true. Maybe now I’ve just gotten accustomed to the tools that have always been provided to solve them. And somewhere in the realization, my mind has begun to shift. I’ve decided that I can no longer let my chaotic internal dialogue dictate how I move through life. I want to meet it with a new approach—to prepare, to act, and to establish authority over my own life.