This isn’t supposed to be my life

Sometimes I think I was royalty in a past life. I’m convinced I was some beautiful, privileged, wealthy, and gifted princess. I imagine I lived in a gorgeous villa palace with gardens and lots of open space. I also believe I must have taken my life and position, and whatever power I had, for granted.

Because in this life I can’t help but feel like I’m far too pretty and intelligent to suffer the way that I do. (But let’s be honest: all I am is stubborn and easily distracted.) Still, everyday I’m confronted with the glaring truths that adulthood is tragically stressful and time-consuming. I keep feeling like it wasn’t supposed to turn out this way. I’m not supposed to be this poor, to feel this isolated. I’m not supposed to hate everything the way I do.

I keep feeling like I’m better than this… except I don’t feel better than anything.

My Youth Is Gone

At twenty-five and thirty I didn’t worry about aging the way some of my peers had. I don’t think I will ever worry about aging because the truth of mortality is we can die at any time. And I’m not overly concerned with not achieving my wildest dreams. I’m generally indifferent now to achieving anything at all. I’ve already written and published my books. I’ve already fallen in love. Neither of those things turned out the way I’d expected they might or should. But I’ve come to accept that such is the life.

And that’s what bothers me most about aging: that I’m becoming jaded. I worry about becoming bitter and hard, scared, distrustful, and reclusive. Experience has taught me not only that I can’t always get what I want, but also that I can’t trust people, and I must never be completely honest. These lessons have stripped me of my previous hopefulness and the wonder of my youth, the kind of necessary blind faith by which a daredevil must be consumed in order to jump, fly, and soar. I’m 31 and the only genuinely good thing I still find joy in is the sunrise, and the outline of clouds hours before the rain.

The World Depresses Me

Sometimes when I get deep in the edibles I believe I’m here to help people. I believe I have a calling to be a healer, a nurturer, a lover, a giver. I believe at my core this is what my spirit arrived on this planet to do. But I look around me and I have no idea where to begin. I have conversations with people around me and I feel no connection. There’s an invisible, but very real wall between us. I don’t know how to touch anyone, and I’m not entirely interested in having anyone touch me.

I saw an image on Tumblr this week of Moroccan migrants atop a fence, from a news story that’s almost a year old. And it made me feel slightly sick for all of two seconds, because despite it’s blazing contrast and highlight of our socially polarized and morally bankrupt world, I was already numb to it. We live in countries governed by the laws of injustice. Our world is not ours. People suffer for their freedom while so many of us feel astoundingly entitled to it. And why should we be free? (deeper still, are any of us really free?) Why should any of us expect to be free when we turn our eyes and backs to the struggle of others for the same right?

All of our political problems and even our personal ones seem to me to stem from a complete lack of compassion for other people. I often feel that nothing is real; everyone is selfish, no one actually cares about anyone else, and we are all chasing the illusion of material security while our collective spiritual accounts overdraw. And, you know, if reality is just our perception and whatever we think it it is, then I have to conclude that the only reason I think I see the world the way I do – devoid of compassion and humanity because – is because that lack, that black hole exists inside me. Because I have this negative bitchy princess karma and guilt.