A Life That Isn't Mine
Hi. I’m coming to you from my couch, and with a headache after a day of feeling physically and mentally unwell. These days, unfortunately, are frequent for me in recent times, or at least more frequent than I would like.
I’ve gained a lot of weight over the past year, after losing a bunch, which makes it extra sucky. None of my pants fit, and I’m forced daily to squeeze into skin-tight leggings with no breathing room. I know my body well after 6 years of experimenting with different ways of eating and intermittent fasting, or I thought I did. Right now my body seems to be in its own journey and I have no idea where it’s going.
I hate to complain, because I know I am so blessed in so many ways, but frankly I’m just miserable. Not being able to travel — or at least having too much caution to travel — living alone, being in a job that’s okay, that I like sometimes, but that ultimately isn’t how I want to be spending my time, and not knowing how I DO want to be spending my time, it all just adds up to the feeling that I’m living a life that isn’t mine. Sorry to be so depressing right off the bat, but I’m guessing a lot of people can relate, so I thought we could explore this together.
What does it mean to feel like I’m living a life that isn’t mine? The quality of it is a tugging, almost like a tug-of-war, as well as a deflation. I feel that while my dreams and desires — the life that does feel like it’s mine — is calling to me from somewhere in the future, my current responsibilities (which, by the way, are few) are tugging hard at my attention and energy to stay with them. I feel deflated, defeated, and stuck, not sure which way to go from here. I am seeking a kind of shedding of everything that feels like it isn’t mine, everything that feels like I’m letting others decide my life for me.
But is it realistic to live a life completely of my own volition? Surely some responsibilities are necessary and unavoidable; living selfishly cannot be the move. Or so I’ve been told. Have you been told this too? And how can we differentiate between those unavoidable responsibilities and the ones we can avoid or choose out of. How much agency do we really have over our lives?
I know that the way I’m living is not healthy for me. In a way, I feel like that knowing is enough for now. To acknowledge that we deserve to be healthy is not always easy and it’s something of a revolutionary act. To know that we can be healthy and that we want to be healthy and to know that we are not currently healthy is a great first step. I don’t know where health lives for myself. In some ways that’s the frustrating part and in some ways it’s exciting. I’d like to give myself over to adventure and exploration, to learning how to be well as a human on the planet. Here is where I’m starting:
Nutrition in the form of food. Nutrition is a passion of mine, and I know a lot about it intellectually as well as how it affects my body. In general, I know that eating whole foods that I cook myself makes me feel the best physically, although I have to make allowances for eating out socially, which makes my soul sing happy songs. Right now I’m experimenting with meat eating and low carb, which is new territory for me since I was vegetarian for 5 years and for most of the time that I was exploring nutrition.
Place. I live in LA. I don’t like it. I’ve learned to like some things about it and to look for the positive. It’s a lot of work. I’d rather just live somewhere I naturally liked being. I don’t know where that is at the moment, so I’ve stayed in LA, but I am reaching the end of my tolerance. Hopefully.
Friendship. My friendships have been rockier than usual the last few months. I know this is probably because of the pandemic that ravaged the world and kept us cooped up in our apartments alone and struck fear in all of our hearts. But nonetheless, it’s made me think about my friendships, noting which ones I’ve neglected, which I have fed, and how we all affect each other.
Community. Community is like friendship but I can feel in my bones that they’re different. I have friends, but I don’t have community. I don’t have people I can geek out about nutrition with. I don’t have a hub where my friends can gather to have fun, support each other, and just hang out. My life is pretty solo. It’s not great.
Nature. Oh, nature. What can I say? I don’t prioritize it, that’s for sure — but I’d like to. I’d like to spend my free time finding any little hike but it’s not intuitive to me. I get lost and end up driving around forever. These are excuses, of course. I must prioritize nature.
Contribution. The hardest one of all. Some call it “work” or “career”. But really it’s contribution. How do I contribute to a world I feel so disconnected to? How do I find connection so that I can find my contribution? These are the questions I’m asking.
This is a journey. These are my thoughts. So far, it’s felt circular, like I have these thoughts and want to make change, but can’t and end up here again. I hope it’s a spiral and that I’ll find my way out eventually. But for now, here I am.