I feel like at 26 I am supposed to have my shit together. Or at least, to have a plan about where I want my life to go and what I want to do with it. Being past 25, the age limit that I had put myself a long time ago is making me both very proud and very disappointed in myself.
At the same time, I understand that my life progression is not exactly a straight line. I spent most of my teenage years depressed, and then most of my early twenties in a frantic search for ways to exist in myself in a way that felt comfortable. And then I spent the rest transitioning, introducing a new identity to the world, and trying to put out the fires that this created in all the areas of my life.
From a certain point and after, I abandoned any aspiration of being happy for the sake of being “content”. I understood that happiness is not something that you can achieve if you can’t first be content with the situation you are in. Being content is a very low bar in measuring life satisfaction because it’s a very passive way of being, but it’s a good enough point of measure for letting go of things. And that’s what I did, and for a while it worked pretty well. It gave me stability and a peace of mind that I desperately needed.
It’s just that right now I don’t think that being content is enough for me. I want more from my life. I want more from myself. I generally, want more.
And I feel that it’s too late for me to want those things, because I spent all this time building my life around being content, without having worked out what being happy could mean for me or where I should put my work and efforts in order to make this a reality.
I feel like I spent so much time trying to be comfortable, that I forgot how to be happy.
And I have no idea what to do to bridge that gap, or even, if it’s possible to do so.