Gone Life-ing

As usual, I abandoned this blog for life.

Now I'm at a new beginning, and needing to write to sort things out and push myself back into a new experience.

Last year, I struggled through some dense moments of deeply feeling alone, and then sprung out of them to realise that I was living a life that brought me back in touch with the person I see myself to be. My job re-inspired me to fight for the future I see for myself. And I was so lucky to meet a few incredible people reached out to me to make me feel at home and to encourage me to listen to myself.

Before college, I remember every time heard the phrases "this is going to be really hard," "most people will fail doing this," and even "no one will succeed in doing this,"—whether it had to do with courses, music, or anything, really—a brave inner voice spoke to me saying, "but you could be different, you will be different. don't let what other people say bother you. just give it a try and see how it goes." And I never worried (..at least about things falling into place—but I worried about plenty of other things). Things always turned out okay. Usually much better than I thought they would. People took care of me wherever I went. I got the good grades. I got into the good college. I got my foot in the door here, I took it out just in time there. I said my humble thanks to the little voice that helped me to float above all the pressure and the discouragement.

Then suddenly that inner voice went away and the voices of everyone else took its place, and things started to fall out of place.

At this point, it's necessary to briefly touch upon what it's like to be twenty something in the 2010 plus somethings. We went to college. We got our degrees. We did our internships. We made our contacts. But we were we're told, and we are retold, and we saw, and we resee, that the jobs we wanted do not exist. That there isn't room or money to change the world in this way or that way. There isn't time to experiment and get better at something that attracts us.

There's no time for mistakes, or someone else gets your dream.

There are two ways to react to this pressure. Either, you take up something "useful" and fit yourself into the societal puzzle wherever you can find a place, and risk not being happy with that place. Risk spending the time you have on earth just making a spot for yourself to exist. Or you think—hey, everything is out of whack right now. Not many people are getting anywhere. So why not accept that reality, and use this time to do the things I want to do, since I know no matter what I do it probably won't be good enough and I probably won't be happy in front of a computer or behind a desk just trying to make myself "useful." It kinda feels a little to me like how people in the middle ages began to step out of strongly built societal standards during the Plague. People all around you were dying, so you either took the life you had left to do some crazy, out of the line things while you had the chance to do it, or you lived the rest of your life hiding in fear from the ultimate fear, death.

So in a way, this is all a strange way to try to explain, to myself, and to you, why I'm doing what I'm doing. And it's also because that voice that helped to carry me through my childhood has come back and life makes more sense when I follow it. I know that sort of sounds crazy, but it's not like "hearing voices" in the traditional sense of the term. It's not even really a voice, that's just the only way I can explain it in language. But it's more a feeling that's saying things to me like, "yeah, you can learn French. It'll take time, but you will be able to do it," "yeah, you could learn French well enough to take a competitive teaching exam that's even hard for French native speakers," "yeah, you'll feel lonely for a while, but then you'll find friends that will make you feel at home," "yeah, you can find a way back to teaching French kids your language and feel incredibly fulfilled doing so."

So—yeah.

Kayla


PS—I just came home from class to these two beautiful demonstrations of love, a letter from Marie & a card from my Nana :] Thank yooou!