Limbo

After a four-year hiatus, I have decided to revamp the blog. It’s a decision born from creative impulse, yes, but it is also a response to the sense of destabilization that’s permeated life lately. 

When I wrote my first post, I was a nineteen-year-old college freshman with bottle-blonde hair and a bad tan. I was taking advantage of the new liberties of college life, and I had no sense of identity or self-assurance. I was in a constant limbo of trying to define myself through externalities – my boyfriend, the clothes that I wore, the words I said to strangers… I was seeking to build a self-construct from these things so I wouldn’t have to face the fact that I had no idea who I was or what I wanted. 

Four years later, I am floating in the unknown again. College was a period of personal growth and evolution in countless ways, and it’s true I am considerably more settled into myself now. However, life is nonlinear. College may have been a net positive, but it was punctuated with so many dark spaces along the way. I suppose this is the theme of the forthcoming entries: navigating a non-linear life after graduation. Navigating a world that tells you anything is possible, and the insecurity that results from this maxim. Navigating the changing relationships, both with others and self, alongside the buoyant, terrifying feeling of pitching headfirst into the future. 

A line from my old journals keeps bolting through my head. It reads: Where to go from here? It’s not a particularly poetic or individual line, but the words arrange themselves almost involuntarily in my mind. Recently, I didn’t realize how uncalibrated I’ve been feeling until this question arose. Where do I go from here? 

Half of my friends graduated college and landed in the seat of corporate U.S.A. while the other half are anxiously living on their parent’s couches. I am a member of the latter group of adult-child transplants– the creatives, the people continuing school, those whose aspirations are too lofty to narrow down, the list goes on. I’m sure it’s easy to envision us playing video games, stuffing our cheeks with cheeseballs and twiddling our thumbs (on our parents’ dime of course), but I promise we don’t want to be here any more than our parents want us here. 

Three months ago, I fell victim to the beautiful delusion that if I graduated from UNC with a good GPA, etc, then the perfect job would fall into my lap. I was comfortable with this if/then situation until I actually began the job search. It wasn’t until I was handing out resumes that I was forced to face my own uncertainty. The problem was that the ‘next step’ had always been prescribed. I had always acquired it with ease. All the moving parts of major life decisions seemed in place to serve me, and I had coasted from high school to college with minimal friction. Though I have never considered myself a passive person, I realize that the trepidation after graduation was born from the realization that in order to move forward, I needed to become a much more active participant in my own life. 

It’s hard to be gifted agency after ease. 

Don’t get me wrong, though. I am not complaining; I am so grateful. It was an issue of restructuring my mental reaction, of reminding myself that this caliber of freedom comes with personal responsibility. What happens in my life is ultimately a product of my decisions. If my reality is a reflection of how I perceive and interact with the world, it is my responsibility to exist in love and positivity rather than fear. The former is far more productive, while the latter trends towards destruction. Of course, the paradox is that life smacks you with the unexpected, and this is the only true constant it gives you. I suspect there’s a balance between agency and going with the flow (another phrase that cycles through my brain: Vonnegut’s ‘so it goes’), and sometimes I wonder if they’re really so different. It’s a choice to have faith in the process, isn’t it?

So here I am. Lost, confused, feeling a bit unraveled, but also confident, excited, inspired. It is a daily choice to wake up and pursue that which nourishes my soul, and I am abundantly grateful to have the space to do so. I’ve learned that limbo isn’t the worst state of being if you meet it with presence. A moment is not defined by its position in relation to other moments, thus presence is simply the act of becoming comfortable in the ever-changing now. And once you find presence, the peace that comes with it dissolves the entire concept of limbo. 

I guess what I’m saying is that limbo isn’t such a bad thing. It’s not even a real thing. Sure, I might not be making six figures or climbing the corporate ladder, but what feels like failure right now is only creating space for better things to come. I get to wake up in the morning and write. When I go to work bartending, I get to listen to the crazy stories people carry with them. I get to spend more time with my family as I figure out next steps. Changing the narrative from ‘I have to’ to ‘I get to’ reminds me to savor the present moment rather than worry about what is to come. 

And, presently, I am remembering how much I hate conclusions. I could say I get to hate conclusions, but I haven’t reached that level of maturity yet. So, since this is my blog and all, I’m not going to leave you with some long winded synthesis of my word-regurgitation. Instead I’ll leave you with these sentences. Read them with your hands in the air!

Let’s embrace this in-between! 

Let’s meet the present moment with joyful inertia, passion, and open-mindedness! 

Let’s learn to love and have patience with ourselves in every state of being! 

I hope you get to experience so much beauty today. 

With Love,

Siena