Everything is so segmented and regimented, scheduled and penciled in to within an inch of its life. I feel like there is very little room for unconventional paths or timelines.
When I was a teenager, I believed that I had everything figured out. However, at some point, everything came toppling over in a wave of epiphanies and second-thoughts, and I entered adulthood in a wash of mental chaos and general uncertainty.
Suddenly, I didn't know what I wanted, or if I ever wanted all of those things I had been so sure of before. I felt incompetent, stilted, reigned in, and like I hadn't truly experienced a moment of my life since the summer of 2005 or so. I was terrified.
If I'm being honest, I am still terrified.
Going to college has been a lifelong goal of mine. Why then have I put it off for so long? Yes, I am able to come up with several reasons why I couldn't do it this year or that year, but are those actual reasons or merely excuses? Here I am, twenty-three years old, an age where many are graduating or already graduated, and I haven't even begun. What the hell is wrong with me?
I almost attended college in 2016, but right before I made the appointment for my COMPASS test and signed up for classes we decided to leave the state. Then I had a year to establish a domicile in a new state so that I could qualify for student aid.
It has been a year now, I established my domicile, and I'm sitting here wondering if I shouldn't put it off until next Fall rather than begin in the spring. More excuses, or do I have an actual reason? I can't honestly say. All I know is that I am filled with nerves and the idea of starting college does not strike me the way I had imagined finally setting out to accomplish something I had always intended to accomplish would.
In actual fact, nothing in my life now is how I imagined it would be. My relationships don't resemble anything I would have envisioned for myself, who I am, how I feel about so many things, I wouldn't have expected any of it.
My situation is partly liberating, but also mildly horrifying. I feel as though rather than simply skipping from Point A to Point B, I skipped over to an entirely different alphabet.
History sticks to your shoes, leaving ghostly impressions stamped all across your clean slate. The world is all out of fresh starts, we're too messy for those, our histories aren't the kind you can outrun.
The world feels simultaneously too large and too small, over in an instant and unfathomably long. I wish for everything to make sense again, to be less messy, more assuring.
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