Hands off the fast forward button.
I will be dead honest: for the better part of my life, I genuinely thought, deep down, that I wasn’t gonna make it. I don’t know exactly when or why that thought grew roots and decided to become a cold hard fact, but what matters is that it did.
I carried that knowledge with me as I tip-toed through my teenage years, then young adulthood, and every little milestone that I would reach tried to prove me wrong. Apparently, I could make it, in some ways.
Still, I remained oddly ashamed of that thought, and at the same time I believed strongly that everybody else would find it insignificant - so I never told anyone until a couple years ago (I’m 30).
Surely, I started hitting larger milestones - graduated college, got a job, held a job, I got into a relationship, I stayed then ended it in due time… but somehow none of it was enough to convince me that one day (soon enough!) I would reach my final obstacle, and it would be game over. I would get stuck there, forever.
So I started living my life on fast forward - mentally, not literally of course - rushing to the next milestone to see if I can “survive” it. Always with my hand glued to the fast forward button.
But something happened this year. I started it just like all the ones before, chasing new highs and scared that I would fall short of them. Yet somewhere in the space of the last few months, I stopped running.
Don’t get me wrong - that fear-driven curiosity to reach a new milestone is still there - but I like the present more. Here I feel like I’m finally “making it” in new, unexpected, almost undetectable ways.
I still have a long way to go, quite a few laps around the sun, and a bunch of milestones to hit. But I’m taking my hand off the fast forward button for now.
Ironically, slowing down has not made me write more, quite the opposite. But today I felt strangely inspired. Maybe there’s more to come.