I don’t have a lot to say. I mean, what can I say that is in any way different from everything that has come before? I’m still here.

I’ve been asking a lot of questions of myself. Sometimes I think I’ve been asking too many questions. I keep a paper journal at home, and page after page is filled with why? how? what? why? why? I’m mad at myself for not having answers. When I was a kid, my mom would refer to me in holiday update letters distributed to family as the “happy go lucky” kid. Year after year, that’s what I remember being described as. Just floating around like a leaf in the breeze, letting external forces dictate my course, barely influencing my own fate with small variances in my surface. And I feel that’s been pretty accurate. Another, more grown-up way of calling it is blind optimism and too-easy acceptance. I’ve lived my life up to now just going along with the course of events, figuring out my place but never seeking to change what was happening. And now I am fighting this tendency, and I’m losing something.

I chose change. I chose to drastically alter the course of my life. I took two steps forward instead of standing still. But what I left behind is still clinging to me, hanging on to my ankles, weighing me down and making it hard to continue to progress. My life has largely been dictated by what came before – if I could make what comes after look like what came before, that’s the path I’d choose. I don’t actually know how to do what I’m doing. Where’s my guidebook? Please tell me there is a map somewhere I can purchase. I ask questions of myself and have no answers, because I’ve never done this before.

I’m writing this with one thing in particular in mind, yet I re-read it and see it as it applies to so much of my life nowadays. How did I end up being an agent of change in my own life? This never used to happen. Needless to say I’m having a little trouble coping.