It's incredible how much of a contradiction I am. My neuroticism and religion of planning sit like a sliding tectonic plate to my inconsistency and ever-changing heart and I don't know if mountains or schisms will form.
I have proclaimed my five and ten year plans so loudly that the reverberations are confusing my brain, like a story evolving and changing every time, a game of telephone through my own memory.
Maybe I need to shift my vocabulary of wants. I don't want to be a writing teacher for depressed people. I don't want to work for the Moroccan embassy. I don't want to teach English to girls in Africa.
I want to love and be loved. I want to drink wine. I want to eat — feel myself full — fill myself full. I want to write poetry that people read and close their eyes at. I want to get on planes. I want to roll French R's in my throat until I have a permanent sensual rasp. I want to do headstands and handstands until my face turns purple and I laugh dizzily, shaking my head at my shaking hands. I want to eat lunch with my grandmother and speak to stars and wake up to sunlight bathing the person I love.
In hard moments that can last days and weeks, I tell myself one day at a time. I thought that meant I was just pushing on to the next day. No. I am here and I am taking today as today. I'll dance in the kitchen and check my emails and feel important when I make phone calls.
I'm supposed to be working toward my degree and then my career, but I already want to change my minor and I haven't even started taking the first class for it. I already want to shift my career path, and I haven't even given myself an alternative.
I love my generation. I love our technology. I love how underestimated we are. I love how nonconforming we are. I love the idea of life — family with rented house and career until retirement — maintained by Baby-Boomers disintegrating in our reaching fingers. Maybe I'm just being fully hit with adulthood, but living of my own faculty makes my plans more than wavering; buildings shaking in the quake of my obsessive control over the details and my unpredictable desires.
Maybe our goals are attained by accomplishments of the wrong category. Maybe the only things I should plan and pray for are happiness and love and opportunity to explore. Maybe I should keep myself from making decisions until I have my options in front of me and it's time to make a move.
We don't take things one day at a time to survive the day. We take things one day at a time so that we may feel each thing in each moment. I think if we can figure out how to not have it figured out, we will be much happier. The laundry will pile up and we will work weird shifts but we will mold our days around the FaceTimes with our nieces and takeout shoveled down with our best friends. The anxiety of keeping up with our 10-year design will dissolve into last-minute plans to ditch everything and drive.
Here's to small adventures that whisk us away in unsuspecting moments and big dreams that are altered a hundred times before sudden fruition.
