I remember walking to my high school to get my GCSE results, it was a warm day in the summer of ’98. This summer marks the tenth anniversary of my leaving school, ten years ago, a whole decade in the past. In those ten years I’ve grown up, I’ve changed, I’ve become a different person, a better person. I got hitched, got my own place, got dangerously drunk on more than one occasion, partied for seven days in the sun, danced in a cage, inhaled things I shouldn’t have, had incredible sex with men I barely knew, caught an STD, worried about the getting the result of a blood test, attended a wedding and two funerals, experienced two new children appearing in the world, and taken up snowboarding as a regular hobby. I have definitely lived... so why does my life feel empty?
I shall tell you why my life feels empty. In acquiring everything that society has expected of me I have become ordinary, mundane. I have got to a place that many people struggle their entire life to reach; attached, comfortable, relatively content, predictable and based on routine. There is no longer a spark, I am like someone who has pursued wealth throughout life and then won the lottery - the fun of the chase is over. I have so much of what I wanted that driving force of my life has gone. I have reached a point where everything will remain much the same until the day I die - different houses, different cars, different clothes... but still the same old me. I feel like I have stopped growing up.
I dare not tell people of the feelings I have. As is so often the case with such deep personal anguish I have spent months perfecting my analysis of my own thoughts. The moment I utter a sentence to anyone else I shall be contradicted by input from their perspective. From their view I would be saying “I’m bored of you all”, which couldn’t be further from the truth - they have all loved and nurtured me to become who I am today, nonetheless they would be wounded and offended, and believe they are in some way to blame. I don’t want to quit the great life I’ve got, I just want to have a proper once in a lifetime experience, something a million miles away from the average. I have a dream of taking a career break for six months and working for minimum-wage in a ski resort in Canada, make new friends, and become a more confident, more secure, more talkative me. I don’t want to leave because I don’t like my life - I am happy and very lucky - but I want to better myself, be happier in life and able to give much more to the world and the people I love than I currently do. No one around me is in my shoes though, they’ll see my wanting to leave in such a different and negative way. The past ten years seem to have slipped by almost unnoticed and the following decade will probably pass equally fast. I will find myself aged thirty-six, in the same rut in life, wondering where the hell time went with my regrets even more bitter.
How can I make everyone I love see that letting me go for a while will make me much happier, that it really isn't they who are the reason I want to go, and that they are in fact the reason I will be wanting to come back!
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