It doesn’t take much to make me happy. Stability, peace, some good company. I don’t think that’s too much. Yet I struggle to think of many times when I had all three.
When I was younger, I had so many dreams. I wanted to travel. Not just to see the world, but to fully immerse myself in foreign cultures. I wanted lots of money, to buy myself the nicest of all things that I desired. I wanted respect; at that point I was already tired of being overlooked and under-appreciated. I wanted a full life of experiences and romances that I could remember even when I was old.
But life comes at you fast. Faster than anyone can prepare you for. I had a lot of momentum, and rode that through my early 20s. I still felt like an outsider mostly, but at least I had a positive trajectory. Then I messed up a couple opportunities, lost some of that mo. I spent too much time trying to improve social elements of my life, which I was never very good at, and not enough time working on myself and my own long-standing issues. Things were already stalling a little, and then my entire life got turned upside down, all that inertia I had coasted on disappeared overnight. And I spent the next few years wallowing in the fact that nobody really cared as long as they still got whatever it was they wanted from me.
Now, I just feel alone and hopeless. Like my life has already passed me by. I never questioned my capabilities to overcome any obstacle in my life, but now I find myself gripped with the question: can I summon the strength to start over completely? Or is it already too late for me? Do I need to adjust my expectations for a life of total mediocrity? No one is going to help me, it’s all up to me. I have never really had much confidence, but now I have none at all.
Still tho, I can’t just completely give up, right? The odds may have never been so stacked against me, but, what if I could still have 10% of the life I wanted? What about 50%? What if, I could just get over this mountain, and my life is better than I could have ever expected and this looks like a little bump in the rear view? I have to tell myself that. False hope is better than none at all.