I’ve sat in front of this Google doc countless times over the last few weeks, motivation levels have been low to say the least and I’ve written at least 700 words now that will never see the light of day.
It started as some thoughts about the fact a friend of mine had told me that sometimes it was best not to talk about your future plans because ‘you never know the intentions people have for you’. It is solid advice and I want to be better at it because I’m an endless oversharer and that’s fine except for the bits of my life I really could be flattened by someone’s opinion on. I will not be passive aggressive but I will say this: your twenties are hard and not everyone finds it as easy to be on your team as you (or they) might hope. People have their own version of you and it is sometimes a nasty surprise to find that it may not fit a life in which you are happy and successful.
I have, I hope at least, started to identify who I should be having those conversations with and who will just leave me feeling like I’ve just told them I’m going to donate my money to a charity which protects grey squirrels. The problem was partially how they made me feel, but also the things I thought they wanted to hear, which meant I was conveying that information hoping they would approve.
If they don’t want the things I want does that mean I’m wrong? Maybe everyone else does know better, and yet we are not the same people and I continue to make choices based only on what I want. I said I was coming here to do something and if it doesn’t work, and I come home, and I do something else then I’ll have to tell everyone why.
The problem with not talking about what you’re doing is that you would basically have to avoid human contact because everyone will ask what you’re doing. Out of genuine interest largely, and not because they’re trying to establish some sort of ranking of your success. I have no desire to maintain a level of mystery about my life but I do have a desire to not wrap myself in knots trying to pretend I have a master plan for my life.
The truth is I just don’t know. I just don’t know what I’m going to do or what I want. I don’t know where I’ll be in six months time and I don’t find any of this especially exciting as much as it feels like a lot of decisions I’d rather not make. I should find this exciting because it is exciting, but I don’t always.
I joke about falling into things but in reality so little of this is an accident and if I wanted certain things I know exactly how I’d go about getting them. Would it be so awful to just give myself a break and admit I might be kind of content with how things are? I mean I just spent a long weekend in Beirut and worked on a project I care about and now I get to live here and learn Arabic. I don’t know what makes a good life, but I feel okay about mine.
What I do know is what I think is important and I know it’s never been my day job. I have some things I’d like to do eventually, and I’m hoping I always make time to work towards them. I know I want to be better and giving these things space to actually take place. I know I want to think of my current situation as more of an opportunity to do more of what I want than a failure to have success in the way I thought of it. I know I rarely feel like that.
I know that none of this would mean anything without the actual relationships I have with the actual human people who make up my life. It isn’t very #girlboss to say, but I really hope there is never a time where the people in my life don’t get to have a good portion of my time, they are what makes me really and truly happy after all. Typing is wonderful way to spend your time but I categorically do not make myself laugh with the frequency my friends do - or ever, actually.
In other news, I have working shutters in my room which is exciting news for absolutely no one apart from a) people who want to hear me stop complaining about it, b) people who care about the impact of natural light on general health and well-being. True to form this problem has been replaced by the slightly more concerning one of discovering a series of rusted screws littered around my room, so that natural light will no doubt be put to good use identifying if I have tetanus in my foot.
Spellings of my name have taken a turn for the worse (see below). As a result of this continued confusion I have told my dentist my name is Clara which is less difficult on the phone but then I received a text from them saying ‘Hello Flora’. Time will tell how problematic it is to try and claim treatment when it looks like you’ve stolen someone else’s health insurance documents. Bad news for the oncoming tetanus.
Also just to address the big reveal of this piece, yes, I do write everything in Google Docs and then just copy and paste it onto this platform. It’s the only way I found to make sure everything is formatted correctly but it is also the reason every week we’re using a different font and text size. I could claim it keeps the writing fresh but it’s actually just that I don’t go back and check until weeks later and by then it’s too late and many people just have struggled through the sometimes minuscule font (thank you). I can be a bastion of professionalism but this is so not the place for it, pals.
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I’m on Instagram - clairegillesp - which is photos of my trip to Lebanon from now until the foreseeable future.
This week I’ve been listening to Corrine Bailey Rae because she’s from where I’m from and I miss home and if you don’t think Put Your Records On is a fab tune then please tell me what it’s like to be that wrong. I was inspired to revisit it by this piece on Dancing in the Moonlight which recently came on in a bar I was in and changed my life for 3 minutes.
xx
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