The blinders snapped away from the race horse, he is now aware of his surroundings. His gallop gains pace as he looks back at the distance he’s covered, his heart beats faster at the sight of the path yet traveled. Gripped by a foreign feeling of anxiety he grows excited, confused and worried. Everything slows down, he slows down. His vision swallowed by the darkness.
I set my expectations through the ceiling in teens, I knew the life I’d just get, and even though some people did their best to put a cap on these high expectation my arrogance led them to a feeling of surrender. Everything, well almost everything in that point in my life went the way I expected so why listen to the opinion of others? I am good listener, I tick all the boxes: the maintained eye contact, the periodic slight he nod, the empathetic comments after a vital sentence. This skill helped me sit through advice that I knew from the opening line that I would discard immediately, most of it was a consequence of habitual assumptions based on appearance [yeah go read “Assumptions” btw]. I would look at your life and decide “hmm nah I’m not listening to this, they’re not taking their own advice” absent-minded to the fact that knowledge comes in any vessel. My teens were my peak know-it-all years, I thought I knew everything sports, music, girls, life in your 30’s, the brand of stoep polish they use in heaven, the direction to the Smith residence in a gated neighbourhood in Lithuania, I thought I knew it all.
This period I’m in life is strange, really strange. I had to learn to be malleable and gain the ability to be molded the lessons of life. Mahn it’s a period of learning and unlearning, the hard part is that you have to do everything at almost the same rate. Okay imagine a suitcase full of clothes stashed haphazardly and you have to choose which clothes to keep in there and which to remove. Easy? Now try having a basket full of new clothes that also have to be added in the suitcase at the same time. That’s how I see my early 20’s, sharpening your best traits, discarding the ones you have outgrown and adding new traits that may or may not benefit you in the future… at the same time.
The thing about the teen years and earlier is that everything is uniformly structured. You progress through life at the same rate as your peers regardless of the fact that you may not be mature for the each stage. Everything is one size fits all and all who don’t fit in are shamed. You enter your 20’s and the uniform structure is snapped away, everyone is on their own journey. You can’t help but look at other’s timelines and start comparing, emotions oscillating from feeling grateful for your journey to completely doubting and feeling unfulfilled about your journey. It’s the age of silent comparisons and gaining a new perspective. With this new perspective your eyes are now open to you relive the past through these new lens and find dark memories previously sugar-coated by nostalgia. You find joyful memories used to cast a light of traumatic ones.
This period in life has me yearning for a pretty future imagined and sweet the memories in the past. But why, why is my interested split between the future and the past? Why not be in the present?