While rebranding, I opted to delete these older posts and repost them with photos. Many of these come from my year living in Scotland and the travels I had while there. This particular post hit home for me, even now. It deals with my struggles of self-acceptance, travel, plans, and life. What do I want in my life? Why do I always feel like a failure? Who am I trying to impress? I’m struck by how my feelings haven’t changed… seven years later. I just seemed to forget this for a few years.
Originally posted March 2008.
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It’s my last night on Spetses tonight. It’s beautiful out, not a cloud in the sky, so I wrapped myself in a blanket and lay out on the balcony looking at the stars and the lights of the planes and the town below. And I had a realisation. I was watching the planes flying overhead, and I was thinking to myself “I wonder where they are going? .. Maybe that one is flying to Italy .. Maybe that one is coming from London, or New York .. ”
And then I started thinking, where am I going?
I have to live in a place near water. I know that. Two of the things really make me happy: the sound of water and the smell of the sea. I started thinking of my plan, like where I’ll move after leaving Scotland and what sort of job I want .. Boston, Maine, Seattle, Australia, retail, design, building rehab, who knows … then reality hit. I thought, screw a plan. Plans never work out. You think you have your life sorted and then fate intervenes and says, ‘ha ha sucker! You’re not gonna get away with thinking you can plan your life!’
SO.. no more plans, no more planning my life, no more thinking more than a week in advance about what I should be doing. Work can wait .. schoolwork can wait .. I should be living .. meeting people, having new experiences, learning by making massive mistakes, falling, falling in love and falling out of it.
Maybe this is a plan in itself.. I ‘plan’ to stop planning.. how the heck does that work?!
I can do whatever I want, whenever I want, and I’m going to make mistakes along the way, and get hurt, and hurt people, but that’s what life is all about .. Its about finding yourself .. and I’m finally going to start out on that path .. I have no idea what I want to be or do when I grow up .. and for once that is perfectly okay with me.