the life i don’t want to lead.

I have read a lot of self-help content. For my certain variety of brain silliness, the depression, the anxiety, the ADHD, I just end up needing a reset fairly frequently. So today, a video popped up in my YouTube feed from a creator I have never heard of before. She said that you need to confront the life you don’t want to lead. So this is my attempt.

What is the life I am scared to live? A boring one. Not that I want to take up adventure travel or get famous or anything quite like that. I want to lead a life with meaning, a life of consequence, even if it is minor.

I have always felt like this, and it is a bit hard for me to understand that this is not the drive that every person has. I really can’t imagine just doing one little job, living a life of routine, and doing it all over and over again. I want to have impact, I want to help improve people’s lives.

I am aware that few of us will be remembered by future generations, that isn’t my goal. I just want to contribute a tiny bit to the efforts of the forces of goodness. I want to know I tried to do something about all the pain and injustice I grew up experiencing.

Now that I have a kid I am helping raise, this has all shifted a bit because a thing I fear is also her living an ordinary life. I don’t want her to experience pain and hardship that I associate with being ordinary. I am realizing now that that doesn’t go along with being ordinary, but with being poor. I think I connect being poor and being ordinary in a way because I believe my own specialness is what saved me from the fate of being poor. I have an immediate urge to say that I am not special, but I also know there are things that are different about me, and things that I have done differently that have given me a lot of opportunities in life that others haven’t had.

So maybe my fear of an ordinary life is actually connected to my need for stability, both financial and personal. Following that line of thinking, maybe my worst nightmare is being in the same kinds of financial position, of social position, that I started life in. A much harder life than the one I have lived for the last 15 years, one with evictions and check cashing places and going to the electrical company because your power has been shut off. The social position thing is a bit harder to explain, but there is a certain stability that comes with connections to power. You feel like you have a bit more agency when you are closer to power. Even if you don’t. There’s a confidence that comes with it to, because there are less spaces where you feel like you don’t belong.

Back to this assignment. What is the life I fear most? Ending up more disabled than I am now, being alone, being poor, and being disconnected from the rooms where things are happening or the movements where people are trying to change things. I fear not having a voice or a platform, and returning to the disempowered feeling I knew well as a child. Where bad things were happening and nothing could be done about them.

It is hard to put the genie back in the bottle. I can’t imagine being powerless in situations like when my dad got cancer, knowing that it was only my Twitter followers that allowed me to save his life. I don’t want to know what it is like to feel so small again.

My anxieties about things like AI and climate change make me feel like if I am not constantly working to be extraordinary, my fate will be sealed as just one of the masses struggling to survive. Right now, I feel like I have a shabby raft made of palettes, at least. A door keeping me out of the water. But my constant push on myself to be better actually causes me to shut down, because I am never meeting my own expectations. Doing so much used to come naturally to me, but now it is a struggle.

Ending this now to deal with the news.