I wish someone had told me when I was like eight years old that there’s absolutely no way to plan for your life. No matter how much mental energy you put into making decisions, weighing your options, determining next steps, people are still consistently shocked by the paths their lives take, and where we all end up, and how the hell we got here. This has been consuming a lot of my thoughts lately, not for some complicated, existential reason, but mainly for the mere fact that I’m lonely, dreadfully so. One of my dear friends from undergrad is getting married this month; my sister just gave birth to her fourth child; my parents just celebrated their 37th wedding anniversary—and here I am, living in group housing in Africa’s soon-to-be newest nation, and I’m wondering if I had made different choices if I’d still be alone, or be like one of those friends that is buying their first home, or celebrating their child’s third birthday, or taking a weekend away with my partner of five or six years.
What I do know is that no matter how much I didn’t plan for love or marriage or kids, I also guess I never pictured myself still single at 32—a profound single with no potential partners in sight. I feel like I’ve been meandering down a long and winding road of false-starts, flawed expectations, failed attempts. And while the longer I’m away from the conventionality of marriage and a permanent address, I do feel the gentle tugs of wanting some sense of “normalcy”, commitment, companionship in my life. I’m dying for it honestly. I think of my friends and how some of the most successful relationships I know are nothing slightly resembling the daydreams we had as young girls of who we’d end up with or how. Friends who have fallen for partners ten years older than them, divorced, with kids, from different countries speaking different languages, partners with complex pasts and even more complicated presents. All the complexities of juggling careers and culture and step-children—it’s nothing we anticipate when we’re sixteen and imagining our lives…but it is the reality of our world and if nothing else, love seems to surface when we least expect it, and allows us to lose all ability to rationalize or think clearly, and we are utterly and hopelessly consumed by it. That’s what I want. That’s what I’m waiting for.
Yet, the longer I’m away, the more frightening those conventions become to me. I’m not sure I’m capable of settling down, not sure I have the tools in my kit to manage that existence anymore. As difficult as my lifestyle is on most days—familiar aches about disconnection from family and friends back home creeping in and craving that stability—it’s mine, and at some point I became more comfortable with living out of a backpack, hand-washing my underwear in the sink, and eating beans and rice every dog gone day of my life. Thinking about moving back to the states results in anxiety bubbling to the surface—finding an apartment, a car, a job that will pay my bills, finally having a permanent address on record that is NOT my parent’s. It’s overwhelming and scary, and then I’m back to where I started. And that’s when I wonder—do we ever find a moment where we find ourselves thinking this is exactly what we pictured, exactly what we wanted, sitting cozily next to the perfect partner that we hadn’t even known we were searching for, who turns out to be everything we ever wanted, and nothing we could have ever possibly dreamed?
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