This past year has been weird. Not in a way that I struggled all that much, it’s just been a really big long learning experience. I promised myself this year would be about getting to know me for who I was. I promised to relax and be good, better than the good I was last year, and to try start my life out of school with all these amazing different ideas.
Plans change, I guess.
Without school to stress out over, I found a new way to worry, this time it was about something way more broad and way more brutal, my future.
I should’ve been that for Halloween.
It’s all I can think about. Who am I gonna be? How am I gonna get there? Who will be there with me? When will it all make sense? Where will I end up? How much will it cost? How much longer can I wait? Am I going to be okay? Will there be love when I get there? Will I have done all the things I needed to do before the opportunity comes around?
And then, in true, wouldn’t-be-a-Haleigh-blog-without-it fashion, a song came on the radio. One I’ve heard a gazillion times in this life, but never felt until that minute.
Billy Joel begins,
You're so ambitious for a juvenile
But then if you're so smart tell me,
Why are you still so afraid?
I vividly remember a night when I was eighteen years old. I was curled up in my bed, restlessly tossing around because of exams and studying and I was so stressed out that even the thought of going home for Christmas wouldn’t soothe it.
I remember thinking “four years from now, I’ll be done all of this worrying. I’ll be done school, I’ll be doing something amazing, and I won’t feel so stressed out.”
I was half right. I obviously didn’t predict a pandemic holding up like - all of my plans, of course. But now I’m done, and I was right, I don’t worry about school stuff anymore. But there’s always something. Nowadays all I think about is the uncertainty of my future. I still wake up sometimes feeling like somethings wrong.
Suddenly it’s not the excruciating slowness of my present, it’s the speed at which my future is flying towards me and I feel like I am missing it all.
You better cool it off before you burn it out
You got so much to do and only
So many hours in a day
When will you realize... Vienna waits for you?
Deep breath. Calm. I can’t be all these things by tomorrow or even next week. I can’t have all the life I want yet, then, because what would the rest of my life be for anyways?
Everything will still be there, next year, and the year after, and it was there yesterday and before I was even born.
The Vienna thing really hits home for me at this point in the drive. Because I’ve wanted to travel there all my life. All of Europe, really. And it’s been scary to think I need to keep waiting because of the pandemic, or money, or job, or ……… the list goes on. It’s waiting there. It’s not going to get up and walk away. I will see it all when it’s my time.
You can't be everything you want to be before your time
For some reason, at that point, I still didn’t feel convinced that I should put all this worry to rest. As part of my promise, getting to know myself, I said that I would learn to trust my gut and do what I know and feel to be right and good. I’ve found that’s how most people live, they just do and be and things tend to fall into place if you’re smart about it.
And I’ve always thought I was smart. Smart enough, at least, to figure out how to do life in the ‘right’ way and maybe even find some happiness out there too. It was always blatantly obvious when something felt wrong, but I always wondered if it was my own delusion that something would ever feel right. And in the car, as I was listening, I still wasn’t convinced that I was really able to trust that I was doing the right thing by being stuck waiting for my future to pass by, even just for a short time.
You're so ahead of yourself that you forgot what you need
Though you can see when you're wrong
You know you can't always see when you're right
There’s really a song for everything.
Trust. Your. Self. You know, you truly know what will unfold for you. You know with all the instinct you were born with, what you need to do. What you need to do is a trust fall into the uncertainty, and just know that it will happen for you.
I try to tell myself this now even when I’m doing little things at work, or whatever. You know well enough. You’ve learned, you’ve practiced, you’ve seen it done, you know it to be true. You’re going to do the right thing. And if it’s the wrong thing; almost every wrong thing is fixable.
So maybe Billy was right about one thing, I would probably get to see Vienna one day when I’m still young enough to enjoy it the way I’d always imagined.
But what does he know about everything else? Did he know I was also worried about finding love? Did he know I’d messed up everything up until now?
But don't you know that only fools are satisfied?
Dream on, but don't imagine they'll all come true
I’ve always craved the coming-of-age-movie type of love. The your-hands-in-my-hoodie-pocket type of love. The head-out-the-window-in-a-tunnel type of love. For some reason I feel like me at 22 doesn’t deserve that type of love anymore. That now it has to be dinner dates at 8, high heels kinda thing. Not that there’s anything bad about that but it’s just the thought of getting old that kind of makes my stomach do backflips. Like I’m running out of time to have all these great adventures and soon I’ll have settle for the dullness of adulthood as I know it.
And it’s hard when you’re constantly confronted with love. Love: the Instagram commodity. Love: the golden ring. Love: the inside joke.
I want in. Put me in the club. Let me know what it’s like at least!
Take the phone off the hook and disappear for a while
It's alright, you can afford to lose a day or two
When will you realize... Vienna waits for you?
Fine then, Mister Joel.
I did it. I finally booked my flight. A one-way ticket to Paris. I’m four months out.
After that song was over it was all I could do not to fall completely apart. I was relieved entirely of the burden of feeling like I was the only one on earth having this experience of impending doom.
My whole year, summed up in one simple car ride a few months ago.
Love is there, life is there, my future is there, Vienna waits. Here’s to hoping she can wait just a few more months.
That’s it.
No grand realization other than to have some patience and ignore whatever ticking time bomb you think you have living inside of you. Happiness and fulfilment exist at all points of someone’s life, it is your responsibility to find it. To look for it even in the waiting periods, even in sacrifice and suffering, even in doubt. As it turns out, life doesn’t automatically get better with each milestone. But I read something a few days ago that really made me put all the pieces together.
“Sometimes it feels like you haven’t made any progress, but you know you have - because when you look how far you’ve come, you realize you’d never go back.”
I wouldn’t ever go back. There’s nothing back there that I would change or fix. Nothing I need to relive, nothing I need to redo. It is your job, every day, to purposely decide that the waiting period isn’t even real, and that your life is unfolding right here this second, and you have to choose to be happy with it now even if you know there could be something better out there for you.
When will you realize... Vienna waits for you?
Among other goals from last year, I asked myself to never stop looking for things to write about. I won’t. I did all the things. Became an auntie, graduated, said ‘I love you’ more. This year it’s time to level up. To live by all the rules I tell you guys to live by. To sit with the realizations I have all the time. To name my feelings. To be bigger and better than I’ve ever been before.
And hopefully see Vienna.
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