this might not be one of those essays with great “moral of the story” you get to put in your pocket and take with you back home. this writing might just be more of a 20 year olds musings and what he has currently ascertained to be meaningful to his life. this may or may not resonate with you, but i personally believe there is something to be learned in every person’s experiences, so ill share mine, in the hopes that they can leave some positive impact on whoever may be reading.
its easy to be concerned with the notion of meaning when your early childhood is composed of a mother with anger issues and major suicidal tendencies and a special needs brother that inherited the same anger issues from the mother.
these two created a nasty synergy enabling the average decibels of the house to exceed any sane degree at least thrice a week. growing up like that i viscerally remember the image of my childhood self huddled in blankets staring out of the window wishing i could be anywhere but here. knowing that wasn’t possible, at the very least wishing my future self was anywhere but here.
it was also super important to my childhood self that i would live a future worth something. in order to offset the poor childhood I perceived I had, I had better live the “best, most worthwhile” life that was possible in the future. what that meant i had not yet known.
for a while after that i searched for a way to define what a “worthwhile” life lived meant. i reasoned doing good is likely pretty worthwhile. still uncertain, i think i ended up settling on equating doing good with helping people. i think generally this is a pretty safe bet - nobody is gonna tell you that helping being is not good (i hope). but it does become increasingly difficult to define how people can be “helped”
this uncertainty continues but at some point i ended up settling on helping special needs kids bridge the communication gap between neurodivergent and neurotypical populations. I think i become pretty convinced on this idea, working on it for a while with only a vague goal in mind.
In the past semester I put more thought, elbow grease, and effort into realizing this overarching goal. the same overarching goal that i thought i needed to go on with life. it was also in the last semester that i realized how tricky, unquantifiable, and unknowledgeable i was in this topic. more than anything i realized it was simply not fun research. i wasn’t enjoying my time working on this problem.
and that left me really lost. i had dedicated my life ever since i was 6-7 years old towards helping people. towards helping those who are special needs. and now i find that i don’t actually enjoy doing that? I don’t find enjoyment in my self proclaimed life mission of 10+ years? am i failure?
yeah that lead to many negative feelings of self doubt, feeling like i failed myself and others, and ultimately an overwhelming feeling of being lost. I’ve found that my life’s mission is not my life’s mission. my entire identity of someone who wants to help people - to help special needs people is suddenly gone. i dont even know who i am. just some mediocre kid with no vision, no skills, no nothing.
a shell. a husk. empty.
i think these feelings never hit me directly. though, i feel they were always present in the back. they led met to constantly worry about if what i was doing was right. they likely also left me paralyzed to pursue anything else seriously.
how could i even try if the possibility exists where I find i don’t like this new found interest of mine. then I’m back to being a husk.
its been rough to get out of that. i don’t even know if i can truly say i am out of that. its been a really long road. had to do hella reading and a lot of introspection. i also met a lot of cool people with a lot of agency that inspired me a lot. it was meeting friends like those and reading a lot of good works that got me out of my own slump.
was tough though.
that was all context though. to show that for so long i haven’t been sure of what I wanted for myself. placed maybe far too many responsibilities on myself when I was not even emotionally stable enough to responsibly carry such grandiose tasks.
i think through breaking myself down and rebuilding myself up ive come to a more clear image of what it is i want for myself. what i would like the meaning of my life to be.
I guess i will always be a people person. i think my goals are still pretty similar to what i realized as a kid. instead of “helping” people, i think it would be cool to create “things” with meaning for others. create things to help and enable others to find their meaning. pretty broad, but i feel like its probably a safer bet than investing too deep into any one thing.
but what does “enable others to find their meaning” actually mean? it could be creating an app that time tracking app, enabling others to spend their moments more meaningfully. it could be writing essays so beautiful it causes people to stop and reflect for a moment. films with scenes so magically it makes you inspired by the ingenuity of human thought and the beauty of the natural world.
it could be as simple as packing dirt on a trail, enabling a random trail hiker to be so at awe with the waterfall he’s passing by that he decides to become an trail maker himself. or an environmentalist. or a painter doing landscapes. or a ceo. whatever.
simply put i think it would be really cool if people were to be able to find meaning from my actions and the things i create.
afterword:
it felt truly very good to write this out. without direction ive felt super lost in the past 2 years i would say. i would never say my goals are absolute, defined in concrete - but i would say i feel much better about where im headed. what paths im allowed to take, which one to take. to that end if you gained nothing else from this, i encourage all to write feelings down if you ever do feel lost. its truly good introspection.