The Year of Being Lost

I've decided to declare this The Year of Being Lost - retroactively affective since June. This year I don't have to know what I'm doing or where I'm going. I don't have to have a plan. Most importantly, I don't have to feel bad about not knowing what the heck I want to do with my life. I have a whole year to figure out what continent I want to live on and what I want to be paid to do.

I find a lot of people seem to have clear notions in their head about what I should be doing. Sometimes I find it amusing and sometimes I find it annoying. It's amusing when they talk about it as if it's clearly what I want to do. When they seem to think that the only reason I'm not doing it is bad luck or a lack of self-confidence. It's weird that they have these notions in the head of who I am. A fun exercise in your life would be to get everyone you know to write you a character description of yourself. Some of my friends know me better than I do and some people only think they do. It's true though, that sometimes I lack self-confidence...I'll give them that, but it's never held me back. I personally think I'm an idiot, but I have a Masters degree, have always gotten top marks, and people tell me I'm intelligent all the time...not to mention the fact that the reason my dating life is so horrible is because it's very rare that I meet people who I can relate to on an intellectual level (among other things)...which, I think is part of the reason I liked university so much, there was always someone to talk to. And man, when I want to be confident, a steamroller couldn't put me down. I might feel like an idiot most of the time, but I'm amazingly awesome and that's INARGUABLE. But I digress...

Sometimes people's ideas about what I should be doing are annoying, because they are things I should be doing. They are things I can do.  They are things that most likely would not make me want to kill myself within a week. What's annoying about those ideas, boils down to the perfect German sentence "Ich habe keine Lust," which, simply put, means "I just don't feel like it." And I don't know why I don't feel like it. It's like knowing full well that you love Thai food, but after walking the five blocks to the Thai restaurant, you suddenly realise that you'd much prefer to have pizza tonight and that you just walked five blocks for nothing. A lot of the times it's the commitment. Well, 90% of the time it's the commitment.

Anyway, the point is, I don't have to solve these problems overnight. I don't have to have a dream or ambition or life plan. It's the year of being lost, baby! It's the year of buying Canadian Geographics and wondering whether or not you'll ever get up to the Mackenzie Delta in your life. It's like a year of living dangerously, only much less dangerous (except financially).  I have a year to experiment with different ideas, and not feel bad about it. I have a year before I can start giving myself a hard time again. I have a year before I do one of the things that I should be doing, even though I don't really feel like it.

And yes, eventually I will start writing short works of fiction and poetry again. I think that the problem is that at the moment, the only thing I feel I can speak with any authority on is myself...so the writing is a bit slow to come. I'm going to Toronto this weekend to visit my lovely sister and her family, then I'm busy with my birthday, but somewhere in there I'll write something I'm sure. That way I can stop these stupid long posts about myself, because I'm actually quite sick of talking about myself and quite frankly don't like releasing this much information - I just have nothing else to say, so it's this or nothing, and I'm trying to stick to the "post every week" rule.

(and yes, it is 3am when I'm posting this...my sleeping schedule is, in an understatement, a little off - again. The trip to Toronto should right it.)