Cristina yang once told Meredith something on the lines that - just because my life doesn’t look like yours (with a husband and kids) doesn’t mean I haven’t changed or grown. Although I am firmly team Meredith almost at all times, those words ring very true to me now. I am in this transitional period between college and settling down aka ‘adulting’. What are the signs of this dreary process?
- You’re tired all the time for starters.
- You enter the real world and it slowly chews you up -with sheer routine.
- You end up forgetting what your dreams and goals were.
- Your priorities shift. We just want to be peaceful now.
- You cringe about the missteps you made in your troubled teen/ cherubic childhood days.
- You realise you have maybe outgrown this phase and want to ‘settle down’
Atleast these hold
true in my case mostly. I was trying to maintain the momentum of college and
just have fun with my career of being an advocate. But after three years of
dealing with other people’s problems, I admit that I tend to ignore mine
blatantly and ‘go with the flow’. I realise now that this has made me stop
growing emotionally. I am afraid of making mistakes, I don’t even like risks
anymore yet I jump between one bad impulsive decision to another. That’s
because I push every thought to some deep recess of my mind and it just comes up when I’m vulnerable and I end up
doing things I regret the next second.
Yet people who are
around me have no clue about this because I do not give them a clue and then I
hold it against them without them having a clue about it still. I have words
like ‘strong’ and ‘robot’ being thrown at me and it cuts deep because I seldom
feel that way but always wear that mask. I don’t know if everyone else feels
like an imposter living their life, I certainly do. I feel deeply unworthy of
my life but hey I am atleast trying to face it and move on from this vulnerable
state by looking at it straight in the eye.
(368 words)
