Ruminations

I don’t know if I ever had confidence in the life-choices I’ve made. Though I have a fancy degree from a premier university, my heart was never in it, and I passed solely by hard work meant to spite the people who didn’t think I had it in me. But now that I’ve been out of the educational system (where I spent nineteen years) for a few years, I’m asking myself a lot of questions that I never did before.

At the same time, I’ve entirely mismanaged my lovelife. I’ve never given myself completely, I’ve always hedged and tried to protect myself for the eventual breakup, right from the beginning. Now that I’m in my early 30’s, I’m left with a job that I feel indifferent towards, and a desiccated lovelife; I’m lonely, romantically, as well as among my friends, who are all busy with their relationships.

I don’t want to become an old and bitter person, but I’m struggling to find out who I am and what I want to do; after 30-odd years, I still haven’t found anything that drives or fascinates me, what I could imagine doing for a living, that would keep me wanting to come back every due, and I find myself unable to pursue a relationship for as long as I feel unable to love or even like myself. I wasn’t entirely truthful before, I’ve twice felt ready to commit myself entirely to another person, but at both times my partners were unable to, and in fact took the opportunity to move on.

It may appear simple what I am to do, quit my job, re-educate myself, love myself, and use all of this new potential to sweep someone off their feet. But I’m afraid to, I’m shaking-in-my-pants afraid to fail at this just as hard as at everything else; for as long as I don’t act, at least I still have the potential to change everything successfully. At the very least, my current life is familiar to me, it requires no actions.

This approach though, guarantees just one thing, my everlasting dissatisfaction with life. When I only get one attempt, spending my life like this is abhorrently wasteful, and a shortcut to becoming that lonely and bitter person that I fear, though hopefully even more than I fear change.