Taking Risks

Life is full of uncertainty, and uncertainty can lead to fear.

I'm afraid of a lot of things, I hide it pretty well, but laying in bed at night I find certain thoughts creeping up on me, moving from the darkness of the room and into the darkness of my mind.

I've been through a very difficult year, and while I'm not in as bad a position as I could be, I'm trying to work out what the next year will be like, and the one after that, and so on. What I will be able to afford and what I won't, and whether these will be things that really matter or not.

I'm still trying to work out what I want to be when I grow up, and why I haven't become this yet.

I sort of know...

I want to be happy.

Happy? The trouble is, I need to know what happiness means to me, personally. I need to be able to afford a roof over my head, and food, while chasing after what ever these things are, these elusive things that lead to a happy life.

I feel like I'm chasing rabbits, white rabbits. Falling down rabbit holes.

I'm in a similar position to a lot of young people. I followed all the rules, went to university, and when I graduated I found the old rules I had followed didn't come with the sort of guarantees they once did. It was a lot more difficult to get a job, especially a graduate one. So I figured I'd find a job doing something like working in Bookshop for a year, as I had always wanted to do that, and save up for an MA, in something. Partly for prestige, partly to develop my skill set, and partly in the hopes the job market would be a bit better once I finished. So that was what I did.

Only, it's been three years, and I'm still there. I haven't been able to save anything up, either. I don't feel like I'm moving forward. I'm restless. This restlessness has lead to doing some fantastic things, being involved in a lot of great projects, particularly as far as dyslexia goes, but also a lot of soul searching. I've spent a lot of time just...trying to figure out who I am, how I really work. I've sort of spent my whole life doing that, but working part time there are less distractions.

I didn't find out who I really was until something awful happened, and I was tested in ways I never had been before. I lost my father. He's not dead, which makes it harder. If he were dead at least I'd still have my memories, untainted, I'd still believe he loved me, or my brother, or anyone other than himself. I'm no longer talking to any one on his side of the family, I can't see my young cousins, or god daughter. I lost my home, and all the stability I had ever known. I felt like I was losing my mother, too. I found myself being strong for the adults in my life, for people I had always seen as in control, as more capable, and realizing how fragile people truly are, how lost everyone really is. That I was actually an adult, and it was never going to get any easier. This was adulthood, feeling lost, and stumbling threw, doing your best to follow your heart and not to sell out on your dreams, at least when you knew what they were. So often people seemed to have given up on theirs, lost them completely, given the chance at something better away so they could be certain, so they felt safe, and it hadn't worked, anyway.

Pretty much every adult in my family had messed up their lives, through unhappy marriages, mostly. By doing what was expected in their personal lives and career instead of taking risks, or saying 'actually, I deserve better than this, I owe it to myself to try.' One of my friends died recently, she was just 22, my 14 year old cousin, dear to me as a little sister, nearly followed her. They hadn't taken any risks, done anything that might increase their chances of passing away, they just got sick.

Life can be short, and brutal, and unfair.

Dusting myself off, looking at the world afresh, really feeling this, instead of knowing it in an intellectual sort of way...I don't care anymore, not about anyone's expectations of me. Life is too short to live it in a way designed to get applause from people who don't really care who you are, don't like you.

So...I've decided to go to drama school, where I hope I'll get applauded for doing something I love. For taking the big risk I've always wanted to take, and believed a couldn't. The thing my parents warned me against when they were told how talented I was, at one point acting seemed the only thing I seemed good at, due in part to my dyslexia. One of the only things I've always been good at, never had to fight for.

I'm scared I'm not good enough. That I wan't get in, and people will know I have failed, I'm scared I'll get in, and won't be able to afford it.

But I am going to try anyway. I owe it to myself to try, and if I fail, I can try again, or I can try something new, and at least I will know I did my best for myself.

Life is too inherently unpredictable and capricious to follow the rules and to play it safe all the time, to follow rules and guidelines in the hope of a certain outcome, because everything is always changing. Things outside your control will throw you off course, and if that's gonna happen, you might as well be going after something that makes you feel lighter inside, and freer, so when you have to fight, the fight feels worth it...

Dyslexia does come into this. Because of it, I think I'm less scared of failing, I'm used to failure. I know it's not the end of everything. It's something you can learn from, grow from. I'm used to people looking down on me for all the things I'm not, instead of seeing me for all the things I am. But it's also made me wary. I don't like failing, I don't like to be bottom of the class. There are some things I don't want to feel ever again, like standing up and trying to recite my times tables, when I couldn't, and all the other children watched and judged, until I started to cry.

There is failure, and then there is humiliation.

It's more about attitude, than anything else. Attitude, and the forces outside your control, and trusting in yourself to be able to handle them, whatever they might throw your way. And if you can't? accepting that is ok, too, that whatever you do, you're enough. It's the people who can't see that who have the real problem, who will never be happy because they've never asked themselves 'what is happiness to me?' they think they already know, think that the same things make everyone happy, and so happiness will always be just out of reach...they will never be enough in their own hearts, no matter how perfect they try to seem on the outside.

It think it's alright to be scared. It means that I'm alive.