The cynical optimist

It’s been over two months since I last wrote one of these and it feels weird to be back after some time away, but a lot has happened these past two months, and there’s still a lot going on so I don’t know how long this post will be.

My family moved recently. Not far or anything, but we still had to do some cleaning and we had to see the house we’d been living in for around half my life be empty for the first time since I was in high school, and seeing all those old toys and stories, and pictures of my life got me thinking of my past and the visions I had for my future.

When I was younger I had a plan. I wanted to be so many things growing up, I remember telling my parents that I wanted to be a firefighting, baseball playing astronaut at one point in my life and when I look at what my future will look like, I can’t even tell you what tomorrow will bring, nevermind, 5, 10 years down the line. My future feels both limitless yet profoundly limited.

All of this is compounded by the fact that I turn 30 this year and while I never thought turning any age would bother me there is something that has stuck in my brain about this birthday where it feels like I should be connecting the pieces by now, I should have a plan, I should know more about who I am and where I belong in this world before I turn 30.

I also understand that no such deadline exists and that nobody is going to pop up on my 30th birthday to call me a failure and shame me for not knowing these things yet and that there is no age limit to reaching goals in life but for some reason it still feels real.

These last 2 years or so I’ve felt scared and confused and worried over what I thought was a wide variety of things, leaving home, getting married, a pandemic, but all those things have one thing in common. The Future, a future that I always felt that I could more closely examine tomorrow, and now, well now it feels like tomorrow has shown up in the form of turning 30, of getting married, of leaving home, of living through a world changing thanks to a pandemic, of trying to find a job and define my place in the world.

I don’t know what the world will look like as we transition into a normal that is still being defined, and I don’t know what my future will look like as I am still defining it. All I know is that everything seems to be going through a time of change and I am excited, nervous, worried and curious to see what we find when we emerge on the other side.