Maeby Today

It has occurred to me on many (many, many) occasions that I often wish time would pass more quickly. When at work, I always find myself impatient for the time when I can be done with work. When driving, I wish I was at my destination. When looking forward to some event, I wish full days, weeks, months out of my way. I have spent my entire life wishing for my life to pass.

If you, like me, are working a steady job that jeopardizes the majority of your time, then I am sure that you, too, have felt the crippling despair of a life unlived from time to time. There are people who live for their work. My boss, for instance, is never done working. He takes a sincere pleasure in being a business man, and having several things to handle at the same time. He thrives in situations where everything is a rush to the finish and his entire staff is acquiring anxiety disorders from the pressure. There are people who feel that their life is only fulfilled by serving, and they spend their every free moment in volunteering and mission work. There are people who have wanderlust, like myself, who find it nearly impossible to sit still for too long when the world is so vast. Every single person has a ‘purpose’, perhaps predestined but maybe just self-assigned, and when unable to pursue or exist within the environment we crave… life can seem like nothing more than a burden.

Life is short. Considering how very short life can be, it’s almost cruel how long it takes some of us to find ourselves where we wish to be. Some of us don’t even know where we wish to be until we are halfway dead. For someone like myself, who has to work in order to afford life and yet can’t seem to make enough money to ever get myself in a position to actually live, it is really difficult not to wish days away. I become so bitter about the fact that I have to waste the majority of my life doing things I don’t love to do. We are forced into this path before we are even born–to school, to college, to career–and only after twenty-five or more years are we able to finally attempt to make our own decisions. Did you go to college? No? Well, you can’t do this or this or this. Did you go to college? Great! But so did all of these people so you still can’t get your foot in the door because you aren’t related to an executive. You have a passion for singing? Then I hope you were blessed with abounding good looks and fashion prowess. Want to be a writer? Hope you are prepared to never sleep, since you have to squeeze in writing around the hours upon hours of time needed to work a job in order to feed yourself, because writing is not a lucrative career choice unless you are hella good at it. Or unless you write Twilight.

It just seems like we are beholden to too many rules and given not nearly enough time to abide by them all and still live a full life. If you were born into a family who has enough money to even live comfortably, then you will have an easier time catapulting yourself toward your fulfilled life. But if you have been born to a family who has to live paycheck to paycheck, you are almost always doomed to live paycheck to paycheck yourself. In order to get ahead, you have to start ahead. If you aren’t frustrated by this, trust me… you started ahead and don’t even realize it.

I have wished and wished and wished years of my life away, seeking a day when I could finally live in the way that would make me feel alive. Here I am, though, still feeling like a shell of a person, leading a life and yet not actually living. Until I have the courage to escape the things that make me miserable, and face the challenges of pursuing my dreams without a safety net, I will continue to live half a life.

Are you living? Or are you wishing?