Wednesday 15 November 2017

To the Present and the Future Me

“The measure of your enlightenment is the degree to which you're comfortable with [your own] paradoxes...”
-Deepak Chopra

Here’s the truth:

The older you get, the more you’ll realize that you are such a tightly-wound tangle of contradictions.

You are deeply indecisive, and usually wait until the cliff is at your heels before you’ll decide whether or not to step off of it. But then, you never choose the land; you always leap, and not because you’re impulsive but because you’re so much braver than you think. In this way, you espouse self-efficacy, but are still mired in self-doubt. Every time, no matter how frequently you’ve taken flight, you unfailingly fear your wings won’t catch the air. And it makes you restless, not in the romantic sense, but with a terrible dread that you’re headed in the wrong direction. Some might say you don’t really know what you want.

And at your core, you don’t really care what anyone says, but you simultaneously let others’ opinions steer your choices far more often than is acceptable. You somehow manage to be one of the most stubborn, bossy people in the world and yet often turn a deaf ear to your own inner guide.

You’re impatient in the present, but spend forever reflecting on past moments you never savoured. You’re both pragmatic and heavily sentimental, prizing logic but regularly falling prey to your emotions. You’re dramatic and sensible as a consequence of reading far too many books− you learn life lessons from the pages, picking up ideas but applying them incorrectly like one who reads a new word but never learns how to correctly pronounce it. You’re hot-headed, and lose your temper over little things, but consistently stay calm in a crisis. You are at times full of selfish, arrogant pride, convinced of your superiority, and at others are terribly humble and in awe of your own insignificance.

You equally adore and distrust men, having grown up with so few to admire. And in that vein, you bloom at his firm warmth and rough cheek next to you in bed, at the feel of those arms that catch you in the night. But if we're being honest, you hate having to share a single square inch of sheeting. You insist on being treated with sophisticated equality, but can’t hide a little smile when he calls you “kid”. You crave love, but struggle to accept it when it’s offered, and argue for forgiveness despite having trouble ever forgiving others' mistakes. In romance, you’re excited by unpredictability, but acutely desire dependable guarantees. You have trouble staying still, but long for somewhere permanent to rest your head.

As a woman and a mother, you are like two halves roughly sewn together. You’ve always been softly maternal, and imagined carrying many children; after all, it is only in moments with your own that you think you might have an inkling of what life is all about. But at the same time, you crave the firmness of independence, the sound of heavy heels meeting concrete, and the youthful joy that comes from absolute, untethered freedom. You find both comfort and despair in domesticity. You seek responsibility and you idolize commitment and stability, but alight with a sip of something wild, and thrive when reborn from each husk of who you used to be. You are immoveable and flighty, glue and Teflon.

You both ache to build, and ache to burn, and you’re sometimes worried that your hunger for the flames might be hiding a craving for them to consume you, too. In this way, you’re empowered and self-destructive, always your own most enthusiastic cheerleader and coexistent worst enemy. You are somehow the happiest and saddest person you’ve ever met; the most sensitive and most obtuse.
You are ardently optimistic, and sharply cynical. Your capacity for judgment and cruelty sometimes shocks you, but you are sick at the thought of causing anyone else pain or suffering. Sometimes your heart feels like it’s going to burst, and at other times you think it might just shrivel up and disappear; because of all this, you’re never really sure whether to listen to that pumping, thumping organ or the one in your head. And that might be your fatal flaw.

But guess what:

You have to stop believing that your contradictions are tied to weakness. After all, none of us would be capable of true goodness if we didn’t first recognize our own propensity for evil. It’s okay to make decisions, and it’s okay to fail too. It’s okay to love anew after having lost, to take a chance on something again after publicly gambling it all away. You are not beholden to your mistakes, especially if you learn from them. And in these days of doubt, somewhere in between twenty-five and thirty, between year two and three of your degree, between jaded by divorce and joyfully in love, between being a stay-at-home mom and a kindergarten one, between living alone and trying to build a new family home, it’s okay to possess a few paradoxes. While they might never reconcile with each other, you may one day accept the inconsistencies as necessary pieces of your identity.  

Above all, remember that you're going to be okay. You've survived a few crashes in your day.

xxo
(Image via Google Images)