The Difference Between Wants and Needs

I am young and afraid. I worry constantly about the direction my life should go. About regrets I have not yet made and do not want to have. About a life of not growing of not learning of not changing into the person you were born to become. I worry about taking the wrong path and making the wrong choices. I worry about being stupid and unhealthy and nothing of what my parents expected me to be.

One of the biggest fears of youth is not being liked, being excluded and deluded and forgotten. I am no exception. I want to make my mark on the world; I want to write something beautiful and poignant that it will be hard for anyone to forget in years to come. I want to be remembered but shouldn’t I remember myself first? I sit down to write but find myself blocked; this writer’s block that plagues me is something I can’t push through. I find myself unaware of how to say the words that I think, that I feel, that I know will be different because I am different. I have my own voice with which to speak, I have my own hands with which to write, I have my own life with which to live. And here I am speaking, writing, living or at least trying to do all these things. But does it matter? I worry about being a conformist, an alarmist, a stagnant creature who doesn’t know where she is much less where she’s going. Where am I going?

For so long I have been unhappy. I have shuffled along in my life carrying my baggage. This is the baggage of my past, the baggage of all my transgressions and mistakes. Of the things people I barely know have said to me and of the things I have said to the people I barely know. I carry what my parents have done to me of what I have done to myself and what I haven’t done at all. And I am tired. My bags are heavy and I am so tired. I need to find a mirror I can look in without hating myself. And I must forgive, forgive myself my trespasses and forgive those that have trespassed against me. Forgive, forgive, and forgive. These words reverberate in my head like an echo I started years before. Forgive. What if I can’t? What if I don’t know how? I think of everything I have been through in this short life span and I wonder could it have been different, could I have been different? Could I have loved more? Laughed more? Will I learn from my mistakes and start to love and laugh and laugh and love more now?

I want so much for this life of mine, I know I am meant for so much more than this thoughtless, mindless work that takes away my creativity, which takes away my soul which breaks my heart slowly. My spirit lays next to me on a daily basis asleep and cold on the desk next to my multi-phone line, my desktop computer, my calendars and fax machine numbers. My pens, pencils, scissors and folders. I don’t want that spirit to die and yet I know if I spend one more minute forgetting who I am one day I will wake up and it will have happened. I find myself waking up now in a cold sweat grasping, gasping for air. I am disoriented and can’t breath or feel or love because those good things that I am I can not find. I wake up in a panic because each day a little more detail is lost. A little more of me is gone and it’s just out of my reach. I am losing the things that I want to love about me, they are leaving without notice. I want those things back because I deserve them. I need those things back because they are all I have.

And I cry. I cry in the bathroom for what I have already lost in one year. I cry in my cubical and tear at my corporate personality that has bled through who I truly am. I cry at home for the girl who needs the money to pay her bills, I cry on the phone for the girl who I was before I walked into this place. And I cry for my friends, the women who I have met along the way, who are losing a piece of themselves, the peace in themselves everyday, just as I have lost mine.

And I cry, cry and cry. And I cry for them and I cry for me. I stand right next to who I was, who I am and who I want to be and all I can do is cry.