I’m almost 22 and I think I’ve had enough life-defining years for a lifetime.
2016 was the year where I thought I had finally discovered myself. I turned 18, started taking anti-depressants and it seemed like my life was heading in the direction it needed to for once. I had finally fallen in love with someone who loved me back and for the first time, I was okay with it all.
2017 was the year I graduated high school and moved away on my own. Throughout my teenage years I thought I’d be truly happy away from my parents who lacked the understanding and acceptance I craved my entire childhood. For the first time I saw myself making friends based on who I was at the time and not who I had been in high school. Being a fish out of water is ironically refreshing.
2019 was the year I thought I’d found happiness in sharing my life with someone else. Those scenes in the movies where the characters are having a laugh over funny named pantry items at the supermarket seemed relatable for the first time in my life.
2020 shattered all the years prior. It’d be easy for me to blame it all on the pandemic we’re all still going through, but that’d be a cop-out for issues that were there before. Everything came together and erupted in a volcano of crippling depression and anxiety. I lost the relationship I held closest in my heart, realized it was toxic to begin with and in doing that, happened to stumble upon the fact that, as it turns out, I hadn’t been doing me any favors by living my life the way I was living it.
See, life is a bunch of waves hitting the rocky coastline of a fucked up beach town and I was riding them blind. I thought if I did this, that would happen, but life doesn’t work that way and it never will. A huge part of me was living life through someone else’s eyes and without realizing it, I was keeping myself locked up deep down in my psyche.
I’m fucked up. I think most of us are, but not fucked up beyond recognition. I’m still me. I just gotta figure out how to stop dreading myself and maybe indulge my lonely, fucked-up being for once. It’s what I thought I was doing in 2016 and it’s what I’m done thinking about. Happiness, whether it finds me before I find it, is not something worth chasing consciously.
The absurdist in me is done trying to find my way and is ready to just let the waves take me wherever they desire, so hopefully in a couple of years I’ll look back on 2020 and think “that was the year I finally let go.”