It’s funny, I feel like I’m suddenly at a point in my life where I don’t know what point I’m at in my life.
There’s a number of different factors that have conspired for this, I guess you’d call un-tethering. Like, I always knew I was out in uncharted waters, but I thought was at least in distance of the shore, some shore, or had grown comfortable enough that didn’t mind endlessly floating.
Now I’m not so sure, at all, and I feel a bit like I’m going through the motions. I know the best course is probably to change those motions up a little bit, and I’m trying to do that. I just can’t help but remember the last time I really changed my life around, the last time I changed up the motions. That was when I quit my job in Pennsylvania and moved back home ten years ago.
Don’t get me wrong, I like where I work now, and I find it more fulfilling than where I was a decade ago. But back then, I felt a little like I was giving up, changing things up because I didn’t know what else to do. I wanted to work in publishing, but I wasn’t thrilled to be going back to New York.
It’s ten years and a little change since then, and I still don’t feel settled, or like I belong here, or I’ve found my place. Some of that’s living with my parents: I love them dearly, but I’m looking for a place to rent and will hopefully finally follow through. Part of that’s just loneliness: I have some IRL friends whose company I enjoy, but am I close to anyone? Part of that’s probably just the normal disaffectedness that starts sometime in your 30s but then really takes hold as you edge closer to forty.
Part of it’s I just don’t know.
It’s funny, again, how I was just talking in this post about falling a little in love with places and yet never following through on the impulse — my own, or that of friends urging me to do it — to move there. I imagine the different lives I might have led if I’d moved to Austin, or San Antonio, or even, more recently, Banff. If any of those had seemed like really viable options, or if I’d just said screw it with viable options and done something crazy.
I don’t know that I would be happy, or feel tethered — that’s the thing about roads not taken, I suppose — but those would have been decisions, at any rate.
Maybe that’s it, at least a little: feeling like I’ve gotten here, wherever here is, with its good and its bad, through no conscious decision of my own. When you aren’t actually plotting a course, it’s hardly unexpected that you’ll find yourself lost out in the woods.
I’m not sure I’ve found the footpath just yet, but I’m looking.