An Existential Guide to: Standing at the Edge of Your Own Life
A very happy New Year to all of you dear Folks!
Fear doesn’t arrive like an alarm. It seeps. It shifts. It fogs the edges of things. It convinces you that what you’re standing inside of is provisional, a draft version of reality, not yet the real thing . As if life will begin later, once the conditions are right. Once the lighting improves. Fear doesn’t want to stop you; it wants to hire you as its full-time archivist.
You wake up inside a day that does not announce itself. No title card. No swelling music. Just the weight of your own name settling back onto you, the quiet obligation to be whoever you were yesterday. Fear loves this part. Fear thrives on continuity. It wants yesterday to keep renewing itself indefnitely. The mind is a time traveler that only visits catastrophes.
The strange thing is that nothing you imagine later has any texture. Futures are always smooth and ghostly. You can’t grip them. They don’t resist. By contrast, the present is abrasive. It catches - scrapes your knees - smells like damp concrete and overheated wires. That’s how you know it’s real. Your future is a ghost, whispering promises and threats with the same cold breath.
Most lives are built not out of desire but out of avoidance. Not because people are cowards, but because avoidance is efficient. It looks like intelligence. It keeps the system running. You don’t choose what you want; you choose what won’t immediately punish you. You learn to call this maturity. Anxiety is the interest you pay on a disaster you’ve borrowed.
There is a particular sadness reserved for paths chosen because they made sense. Sensible paths age badly. Ten years in, they start asking for more of you than you agreed to give. They want your mornings. Then your voice. Then the part of you that used to interrupt yourself mid-thought because something felt funny or off or promising. Then your life itself. You spend your whole life building a monument to a self you haven’t met in years.
What you want often feels embarrassing because it is not optimized. It doesn’t come with spreadsheets or solutions. It doesn’t scale nor doesn’t explain itself well. You hesitate to say it out loud because it sounds like something a younger version of you would have wanted: and you have been trying very hard to bury that person politely.
Go to where the daffodils glow-
And find the bones that would not grow-
Your heart’s desire often speaks in a whisper, while your fear broadcasts in headlines.
