“You’ll be fine. Feeling unsure and lost is part of your path. Don’t avoid it. See what those feelings are showing you and use it. Take a deep breath. You’ll be okay. Even if you don’t feel okay all the time.” – Louis C.K.
I have always been a homebody. I have lived in the same house in the same state my entire life. As I grew up, I always had these two very conflicting perceptions of life. The stable, comfortable, predictable version, and the wild, adventurous, and unknown version. On both paths, the future is unknown but yet the first path seems more appealing for the fact that it’s comfortable, and your future abides by an unwritten plan which you decided upon long ago. I have always been of the mentality that one can achieve the same outcome by going different paths, but I myself have been too much of a coward to deviate from my cushy, comfortable bubble. I always said that if you had a circle and one person went clockwise and the other person went counter clockwise, that you would both eventually still reach 12 o’clock even though you went different ways. While I still believe this to be true, I have unfortunately suppressed my own desires and have succumbed to the ways in which our society tells us the correct way and the correct path to success. The very society whom I criticize because it is so structured and lacks open-mindedness. I have become a product, and in a sense, a casualty of the system. I have always vouched for exploring things and sometimes I get the urge to do something spontaneous, to do something that hardly anyone has the guts to do anymore, but then, I don’t follow through. I want to be brave, I do, but I just so happen to struggle with the fear of the unknown. The unknown that the second path of adventure undoubtedly holds. Because it’s all too easy to stay put in your comfort zone. A place where everything seems so meticulously planned and leaves little room for exploration.
As I reflect upon my own life philosophies, I realize which are true and my own, versus those which disguise themselves to be my own but are really the ideals of the society I live in. I am constantly at war with myself because I can’t shed these societal ideals which have been ingrained and almost branded into my mind and sub-conscience since I was a little girl. I believe in freedom, and I value freedom, but yet these are all only ideas since I don’t live by the words of freedom. To be truly free is to rid yourself of what society tells you that you should do, and how to do it, and go about choosing how to live your life in the way that makes you the happiest. Don’t allow anyone else to ever try to undermine your very own ideas of what happiness is. I, the very person who encourages people to take great leaps and bounds and not look back, is the very same person who is scared of deviating from the path most taken.
Saying all that I have said, I want to be able to look and reflect upon my life when I’ve reached a ripe old age, and tell my grandchildren of the many adventures I went on. That I was a pioneer for those people like the younger, scared version of myself who were too conflicted and too scared to go against what society told these people to do. I want to be able to look back upon my life and cry tears of joy knowing that I made the right decision, the best decision for my own happiness.
Don’t let the fear of the unknown defeat your spirits. Don’t go on thinking that a deviation and a change of paths is bad. While you might lose something good through change, you could very well gain something even better.
