‘No offense to me but wtf am I doing?’

A while ago I saw a meme which read ‘No offense to me but wtf am I doing?’. I remember thinking I had yet to see a more accurate or appropriate quote for my life. I also recall thinking, as I age, things will just naturally become clearer. I’ll make choices and know that they’re the right ones. I’ll also feel 100% secure in the life and the job that I have and I won’t wonder what if. I won’t question if I’m in the right career, or if I should be looking to play to my strengths more and pursue my creative pursuits. I won’t question if I’ve just sold out and become an adult that does the right thing. Well, I hate to say it to myself (and everyone reading along!) but these questions don’t become any clearer with age. To be honest, they just become more nuanced and therefore heightened.

I’ve often written about the questions we ask ourselves in our lives. The truth is we don’t ever get a definitive answer. Our questions become rhetorical and for those of us with a predisposition to overthink or over analyse, this means that all that happens is that we fixate on that question and it bounces around our head for days, if not weeks. The only thing that comes out of this is a deep seated self doubt that sets us back even more so than before the thought first appeared. It makes us look at life, at our decisions with a skewed perspective which focuses on an unhelpful negative questioning of who we are entirely. 

As much as I know this about myself, and as much as I have worked on these aspects of myself; I still can’t help but fall into that inevitable trap. I know what tools I need to draw on mentally, I know I need to slow my mind down, to focus on what I’m grateful for and shift my thinking. But at times it is impossible to not fall down that rabbit hole and fixate. The questions of why can’t I be less sensitive, why can’t I take things less personally, why can everyone else move on from something that affected them so easily, continue to play on mind.

I suppose I’m never going to find the answers to these questions. Or perhaps the answer is, because I’m just different from everyone else. My mind ticks in a different way and comparing myself to others is going to do nothing but make me feel terrible about myself. I’ve tried to not think about my quirks as deficiencies but inevitably that’s where my mind goes when I’m struggling with something. It then means that everything that I believed in, that I was working towards at a certain point in my life, suddenly has a black cloud over it. Which then has me questioning every decision that brought me to that point.

Is it possible to have an existential crisis at every intersection point in my life? Or is Mercury just constantly in retrograde in my astrological chart? Honestly, I don’t know what the answer is. I said to my husband last night that the only steady and consistent thing in my life seems to be that I’m always upset about something. Or something has affected me so deeply that it’s moved me to question everything. But upon reflection, maybe that just means that I’ll never sleepwalk through life. That I won’t wake up one day and wonder why I didn’t ask those questions or feel those emotions in the moment. Perhaps the questions are a part of building a life worth living. 

Either way I know that the neurosis that creeps into my psyche when I overthink is not useful to anyone, let alone my own personal growth. I have to continue to stop, take a few deep breaths and keep things in perspective. I have to continue to practise gratitude and take one step at a time. There will always doubts; but I can’t let these debilitate me to the point where I stop putting one foot in front of the other. A part of living is simply believing, having hope and trusting ourselves. For now, that’s what I will draw on in times of uncertainty.