untitled

In my performing of life and restless struggle to finding the ego that didn't follow me here, this blue earth, may i become and may my become be grand. Like coffers, may i become a warehouse of values.

There are things I find easier to write than to say.

This is one of them.

I probably wouldn’t tell you this across a dinner table. I might laugh, change the subject, make a joke, ask you something about yourself.

Yet here I am, telling you anyway.

It is a strange intimacy, this distance technology has somehow learned to collapse. You are not sitting beside me, yet you are close enough to hear something I rarely say out loud.

I have been worrying alot lately, probably still the emotional climate of my twenties, but there’s something almost impressive about the consistency of it.

I can put my head on the pillow at night carrying one particular thought around like a stone in my pocket, turning it over, examining every edge, wondering what it means for my life. I can wake up the next morning and discover that the world has continued perfectly well without consulting my fears.

Still, I worry.

I worry about whether I am becoming enough of the woman I imagined I would become.

I worry about time.

I worry about decisions I have made, decisions I haven’t made, doors I walked through too quickly, doors I may have walked past without noticing. I worry about whether my life is moving in the right direction, as though there is an arrow pointing north and everyone else has been given a copy except me.

A few nights ago, I was sitting at a dinner with people in their sixties, fifties, thirties, people whose lives had already taken shapes I could recognize. Careers. Families. Businesses. Histories. Failures. Stories that had been there long enough to become stories.

At some point, the conversation moved toward our greatest fears.

If you started asking me to tell you who everyone at that table was to me, I would need a while.

I would tell you what they had done, what they had built, where they had been, the strange intersections that had brought us into the same room.

Then someone asked what I was afraid of.

I didn’t have to think very long.

Oh no. YES I DID.

I’m doing it again.

I tell my brain I’m not afraid of anything, but somewhere beyond the conscious mind, there are things I know I haven’t quite told the truth about. The strange thing is, sometimes the lies work. The brain doesn’t always know the difference between what is true and what it keeps receiving as feedback.

So I went deeper.

I asked my subconscious:

“Really, Fadey? What are you afraid of?” I am afraid I won’t become the peak of what I imagine myself to be.

It sounded reasonable when I said it.

And suddenly I thought:

What the fuck is happening to us?

When did becoming a person turn into a performance review?

Who convinced us that we are supposed to have reached some definitive version of ourselves by a certain age?

Who convinced an entire generation that success looks like making millions while we sleep, retiring at thirty, travelling constantly, raising a baby who apparently never cries and plays exclusively with wooden toys, living inside a beige house while wearing beige Pilates clothes?

At what point did adulthood become an aesthetic?

At what point did a life become something we could fail at by thirty-two?

I don’t think I am the only one who has absorbed this.

We have been handed an extraordinarily polished picture of what a successful life is supposed to look like. It comes with its own blueprint, its own colour palette, its own vocabulary.

Freedom.

Passive income.

Early retirement.

The perfect relationship.

The perfect body.

The perfect morning.

The perfect house.

The perfect child.

The perfect career.

Everything arranged so beautifully that you almost forget there is supposed to be a human being living inside it. Along the way, I began comparing my actual life to a life that exists mostly as an image.

That dinner made me realize how absurd this is. The older people at that table did not look like people who had followed a single immaculate plan.

They looked like people who had lived. And living is a much messier activity.

People change careers, fall in love with people they never expected to meet, move to cities they once swore they would never live in, They build businesses accidentally, They lose money, They make money, They have children, They don’t have children.

They become different people from the ones they were at twenty-five.

They wake up one morning and discover that the thing they spent ten years chasing no longer interests them.

They start again, They stay, They leave, They change their minds.

Maybe that is what success is, not the achievement of the person you once imagined but becoming of a person who is actually alive. Someone who is Present in the NOW.

Success is less like climbing a ladder or waiting for Godot, i suspect it’s more like becoming fluent in yourself. And fluency takes revision.

I have changed my mind so many times these past few months.

There were things I thought I wanted, things I thought I should want, things I had convinced myself would make perfect sense for my life.

Then life moved one chair over and showed me something I hadn’t considered.

I took a project in a town. I still remember the feeling of taking that step.

Holy fuck! There was excitement somewhere underneath the fear, though fear was louder.

What if this is the wrong decision?

What if I have just ruined my life again?

What if everyone else is moving forward while I am moving sideways?

What if this isn’t where I am supposed to be?

I know that voice and I’ve heard it before.

She is very committed to her work. She comes whenever I make a decision that does not resemble the original blueprint.

She brings charts, predictions and has a frightening amount of confidence about things she cannot possibly know.

Yet I started noticing something about her.

She is almost always wrong about tomorrow and that part I keep forgetting.

My life has been evidence against my own anxiety.

The places I have lived were not all places I planned to live.

The people who changed me were not people I could have written into a five-year plan.

The work that changed my life was not always work I knew I wanted.

Some of the most beautiful things in my life arrived without an appointment.

And still, every few months, I sit down and worry that my life is not going according to plan.

Which plan? and Whose plan?

The strange thing about being alive is that you can spend years preparing for a life you have never actually experienced.

You make a list.

You give yourself dates.

You decide what should happen first, second, Then third.

You imagine yourself arriving at thirty with certain things in your hands.

You imagine thirty-five.

Forty.

You imagine the person you will become.

Then life starts happening.

It turns out you are not shopping from a catalogue.

You are walking through a market.

You might enter looking for blueberries, chicken and an MBA.

You leave carrying a kayak, a pair of jeans that fit suspiciously well, three flowers you have no idea what to do with and the beginnings of a business your father absolutely hate.

You might go in with a list, but your heart fills the cart.

Someone hands you a sample. You take one bite and suddenly you’re thinking about moving to Costa Rica to follow a woman named Naomi who has somehow shown you what love feels like, and now your carefully constructed life plan is looking slightly ridiculous.

This is how ridiculous life can be.

This is also how magnificent it can be.

You can make a list.

Please make a list.

Dreams need somewhere to begin.

Direction matters as well as ambition.

I am not interested in pretending otherwise.

I want a large life, to build things.

fuck! Money loves me.

I want to see places.

I want to become frighteningly good at some things and completely useless at others.

I want experiences I cannot currently imagine, to wake up and recognize my life as mine.

I don’t want to become so devoted to the blueprint that I fail to notice the life taking shape and growing around me.

Because sometimes the thing you were looking for is not where you thought it would be.

Sometimes it is two conversations away, it is the person sitting across the table, the strange job you almost declined, or the city you only moved to because circumstances forced your hand.

Sometimes it is a friendship, a business, or a road you took because you missed the turn, the version of yourself you meet after something doesn’t work.

There is a particular cruelty in being young and ambitious.

You can see so many possible versions of yourself that every decision feels like an elimination.

Choose this career and you lose that life.

Move here and you lose what could have happened there.

Say yes to this person and perhaps you miss someone else.

Take this opportunity and perhaps another one passes quietly behind you.

We imagine life as a sequence of doors.

Choose correctly.

Enter.

Do not look back.

Yet perhaps life is less engineered than that. Perhaps the doors keep multiplying. Perhaps we are meant to become people capable of opening them.

I think this is what I am learning about myself Now

I am not late, not finished.

I am not even certain I am supposed to know exactly who I am yet.

There are parts of me I have only just met.

There are desires I have not given names to.

There are places I have not seen that may change me, people I haven’t met who will one day be part of what will shape my memory.

There are versions of myself who would probably find my current worries almost adorable.

See, I have survived every version of tomorrow I was once terrified of reaching.

That matters.

I keep an archive of disasters in my imagination.

My mind is extraordinarily talented at producing them. One unanswered question becomes a prophecy. A wrong turn becomes evidence that everything has gone wrong. One difficult season becomes a prediction about the climate of the rest of my life.

Yet reality has repeatedly embarrassed my imagination.

Things I thought would destroy me became transitions, endings became entrances, things I was terrified to lose sometimes made chances for something I could not yet see.

The life I have is full of things I did not know to ask for.

If I had been allowed to design my life completely, I doubt I would have designed this one.

I would have missed too much.

I would have edited out the accidents.

I would have removed the uncertainty.

I would have chosen people before knowing who they were.

I would have selected destinations without knowing what they would teach me.

I would have made the story far too neat.

And a neat life, I am beginning to understand, is not necessarily a beautiful one.

There are things you only find while wandering.

A forest does not ask a tree whether it is growing according to schedule.

The ocean does not appear anxious about reaching the horizon.

A river does not spend the night worrying that it has taken the wrong turn.

It encounters stone, It bends, It disappears underground, It widens, It narrows.

It reaches places it couldn’t have known existed when it began.

Maybe consciousness is like that.

Maybe becoming yourself requires enough courage to let the shape of your life surprise you.

I don’t mean surrender or becoming passive.

I don’t mean sitting around waiting for fate to make all your decisions. But leave a little room in the cart.

A little room for the thing you didn’t know you wanted.

A little room for the conversation that changes your mind.

A little room for the stranger who becomes a friend or lover.

A little room for the project that scares you.

A little room for the country you never planned to visit.

A little room for the version of yourself that has not yet had a reason to exist.

I think I need that room.

Especially now.

Because I have something troubling my mind at the moment.

Of course I do.

I am still me.

Tonight, there will probably be a moment when I put my head on the pillow and the problem returns.

It may sit there beside me in the dark, tell me I am behind, remind me of everything I haven’t figured out, ask me whether I am becoming enough.

And perhaps I will listen for a while.

Then I want to remember this:

I have lived long enough to know that my mind is a terrible fortune teller especially if its wants to doubt itself.

Again and again, life has taken the things I was certain would go wrong and turned them into something else.

Not always immediately, pleasantly, or in a way I could understand while I was inside it.

Still, the pieces kept moving.

A door opened. A person appeared. A place became home. A failure redirected me. An ending created space. A decision became a story I now cannot imagine my life without.

I don’t know whether everything works out perfectly. That would be too convenient a thing to believe. But I know something far more interesting.

Things have a way of becoming meaningful after we have lived through them. The path makes more sense when you look backwards. The map appears after the journey.

Maybe that is why I keep worrying.

I want the map before I walk, proof that the road leads somewhere worth going, to know that the woman I am becoming is the woman I was supposed to become. But maybe there is no supposed to.

only becoming.

Perhaps the peak I am so afraid of never reaching is not a mountain waiting somewhere in the future with my name carved into its summit.

Perhaps it is a horizon.

You walk toward it.

It moves.

You walk again.

It moves again.

Not to punish you, but to keep the world larger than the version of it you already understand.

So, if you are reading this while worrying about your own life, I am not going to tell you to stop.

I know better.

I am writing this to myself too.

The woman who worries.

The woman who plans.

The woman who wants extraordinary things.

The woman who sometimes mistakes uncertainty for failure.

The woman who has spent so much time trying to make sure her life turns out beautifully that she occasionally forgets to look at the life already happening around her.

Look.

There is something here.

There is always something here.

Maybe it isn’t what you ordered. Maybe that is the point. You came looking for one thing and found another. You thought you were taking one road and ended up somewhere you could never have described beforehand.

You thought you were falling behind.

You were becoming someone.

So keep your list.

Keep your ambitions.

Keep your impossible plans.

Write them down.

Build toward them.

Want things fiercely.

Just don’t grip the list so tightly that your hands have no room left for what life places in them.

Leave some space.

Take the strange road sometimes.

Talk to the person you didn’t expect to meet.

Try the sample.

Enter the shop you were only passing.

Say yes to the project that makes your stomach turn a little.

Go somewhere without knowing exactly what you are supposed to find.

Laugh more than you worry.

Get a little lost.

Let yourself change your mind.

And when you wake tomorrow with the old fear already waiting beside your bed, remember the evidence.

You have been here before.

You have worried before.

You have been certain that something was going terribly wrong.

Then you lived another day.

Then another.

Then, without asking your permission, life became yours.

Maybe that is what I want to remember now.

I don’t need to know what my life is going to become.

I only need to remain awake enough to recognize it when it arrives disguised as something I never thought to ask for.

I ask myself a different question now,

What if my becoming isnt’t about reaching the woman i imagined, but about becoming a person capable of containing more?

In thought,

The Cocktail Reader