Everyone at some point has been asked the question - Primary School teachers love it, Grannies too and the dreadful UCAS (sorry) ladies used it almost every month in the year running up to A-Levels - What do you want to be when you grow-up?
TO BE.
I once retorted that I already "am" a person - I just needed to figure out how to make money to live decently. That went down rather like the proverbial lead balloon. It threw me into a state of massive confusion - what to be? Nobody ever asked about the who.
The who is always there, and for me it was the "who" that mattered, not the what. Who am I now, who was I, and who am I going to be later on? And THAT, dear reader, is the crux of the whimsical joy of our time of this earth.
Looking back on cancer and the utter crap-show that it was, I remember very clearly that nobody in the hospital ever asked me what I did for a "living" - it was irrelevant - we were all trying to just live. Walking into the ward a week later to see empty beds and oppressively starched sheets that marked a permanent change of the Guards to the other side made us all cut out the mundane. We simply didn't care.
The comfortable and the uncomfortable - these are things that we can choose, most of the time - to choose the well trodden path, or to go down a road less travelled. I thought I was comfortable, but my insides were screaming for a change that I couldn't quite put my finger on, or maybe the timing was off, or was I just telling myself that so I didn't push out the corners that were framing my life? Who knows - my therapist probably does, but I'm still trying to figure it out.
What I do know is this: feeling uncomfortable, lost, out of a fluffy zone, out of my depth and looking at a massive question mark that is my future - is the most terrifying and liberating feeling I've ever experienced. It's not the same question mark that came up at my first doctor's appointment 10 years ago when I asked will I die? No, this is a different question that for once, I have some control over. And that, Dear Reader, is what I want to be - this is the place I want to be in.
The future is bright x
Take care
