The cynical optimist

I am living in the pause.

I am living in the moment where you are waiting for the conclusion, afraid to move lest you change the outcome…

The last few years for me have been filled with more questions than answers and not the little questions, the big life altering ones like

Who am I?

              Am I happy?

                          What do I want to do with my life?

                Am I worth more than this? Less than this? Do I deserve to live in this limbo forever?

These thoughts have been paralyzing, I’m afraid to take the next step in any direction lest I screw it up.

           Do I quit my job? What if I fail at my next one? What if I can’t find the next one?

Do I take a leap of faith in other aspects of my life ? What if I fall?

             Is the risk of pain, of failure, of heartache and loss worth finding out the answers?

                      Do I give up on a life that WILL be good, for a life that COULD be great?

I’ve described the last few years as a feeling of being stuck as looking out into the future and seeing only fog and it hasn’t been getting any better.

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It’s been three days since I started writing this, three stressful, confusing, dark days where I’ve been trying to decide if I even wanted to publish this, If I even felt that this should be published, If I even felt the things I was saying or if it was just me trying to sabotage my own happiness, or just a bad day for my mental health overall, but the questions and the problems still persist so I’m going to do the only thing i’ve ever been able to really do and I’m going to write my way out.

As the beginning of this post says I have a lot of big decisions to make, a lot of potentially earth shattering decisions, that could change the course of my life and I’m TERRIFIED of making them.

Decision making has never been my strong suit even for the simple questions like what do I want to eat? or what do I want to do today? When at all possible I tend to defer to someone else because I’m terrified of making the wrong call, what if I pick something that others don’t like? What if everyone has a bad time and all the blame gets put on me because I was the one that chose it, and trust me I know it’s something I need to work on, and I’m trying.

Now if my thought process is that bad for simple, non-consequential things, imagine that ten-fold, 100-fold. These decisions that have been on my mind lately could change everything. Career, Love, Life, How do I make a decision when every path is fogged, every path seems like it could lead to disaster…

This might seem like a bit of a hard right turn here but hang with me, I promise this connects. There was a book series I read over 10 years ago called “The Power of Five” by Anthony Horowitz and without going into too much detail there is a library in that series that houses everybody’s life story. Everything that you’ve ever done, and everything that will ever happen to you, including how and when you die and it’s available to read, you’ll have all the answers. You’ll be prepared for your death, the death of loved ones, heartbreak, disaster, you’ll know because you read the book of your life….

Where I am in my life right now where I’m faced with some massive decisions whose effects could ripple outward for the rest of my life I sometimes wish I had the option, to read my own life, to read my own story…to be prepared for heartbreak, the pain and celebrate the good times but I also can’t help but think that maybe this is what makes life… well life. The not knowing all the surprises, all the twists and turns that you will face in your life because so many of the best moments in our lives are spontaneous, are moments not planned, but moments lived in the here and now… the moments where you break from the mold and do something a little different. Those moments shape who you are and what you become, so yeah maybe I could avoid some of the pain but maybe, just maybe I’d lose out on actually living.

And maybe right now I’m stressed about tomorrow because I don’t know what it holds for me, maybe I am living in the pause, in that holding of the breath moment, but it will pass, I’ll have to make a decision and in time I’ll find out if it was the right or the wrong one, but in the end I guess that’s just life.

Let me know in the comments below if you have any advice or if you are reading this from Twitter or Hive reach out to me on there, also I’m curious to know…

If you could read the book of your life, from beginning to end. Would you?