Coming of Age

All my friends are becoming responsible adults. They’re doing all the things I always assumed I’d also be doing by now… progressing in respectable careers… Getting engaged and married to wonderful people whom I adore… Getting mortgages, buying houses… Having babies… More and more often, I feel like I’m getting left behind. They’re not leaving me behind, but I don’t know how much longer I’m going to be able to gracefully keep up (or at least fit in). I’m scared I won’t reach the milestones in time. I feel like I only just got the memo and am still figuring it all out.

At times I feel like a joke… like a fool. I have been foolish after all. That’s how one finds oneself here. It’s like somewhere along the way I started to get things just a little bit wrong and those little bits gradually accumulated, but I took far too long to notice and now here I am.

I used to think that my relationship with T was the one thing I’d gotten right, but the last year or two has shaken me up… I discovered that he had a gambling problem in mid-2022 and, although he hasn’t gambled compulsively since March (7 months ago and counting!), I still find it hard to trust him. I always considered trust to be the thing that made a relationship special, above all anything else. We still have it in some ways, but we’ve still got a way to go and I resent him for breaking my trust in the first place. He didn’t just break it, he totally crushed it.

I just feel like everything is a little up in the air right now and I just hope my character and values hold up to whatever the future holds. Honestly I’m scared.

I feel like hiding away for a year or so and coming back as a new and improved version of myself.

At the same time, I know these negative thoughts of mine are all rooted in perspective. I wonder how they came to be. Although they sneak up on me and make me sad for a while, I’ll ever let them stay lest I become bitter (nothing would be more tragic than allowing envy to fester into vague bitterness).

At the moment I feel like a loser, and that it’s only a matter of time before all my loved ones start to realise.

Here are a few good things about myself to counteract those sad feels:

• I have great abstract thinking skills and am very open-minded. These qualities make me an excellent perspective-taker and are very useful for reframing seemingly difficult situations.
• When I step out into the world, I find it easy to make brief but meaningful connections with many different people, perhaps due to my friendly, inquisitive nature and reasonably high social intelligence.
• I love myself deeply and endlessly, and wholeheartedly extend that love to all living things.

P.S. It does feel a little wrong to post this in the Goals circle, but (a) this entry is all about what happens when you don’t reach your goals, (b) it serves as a great precursor to future goal-setting and achieving, and (b) I want to get better at achieving my goals, and this seems like the best place to start.

Thanks for reading.