Times Change, People Change

I woke up feeling miserable today. Honestly. Utterly and hopelessly miserable.

I kept thinking about my story and how much more work on it lay before me. In addition to taking notes in a notebook, I printed off my manuscript and have been writing on that. It’s just note after note after note.

I see where characters need to be developed, conversations expanded. The pace needs to be slowed in places. And hurried up in others.

It’s a lot.

But I also got to thinking about my life. And how, this morning anyway, I felt as though I haven’t done much with it.

From an outside perspective, it looks like I’ve done a lot. I lived in Korea and China for close to twelve years. I travelled all around South East Asia and Europe. I went to South and Central America.

I went bungee jumping in the Alps. Hiked to Machu Picchu. Rode a motorbike through Vietnam.

I self-published five books. And wrote several more.

Yes, it looks like I’ve done a lot. Maybe I even have. But when I woke up, I felt as though I had missed out on so much.

The thing is that I didn’t follow the path that most of my friends have. I didn’t get married and have children. I didn’t buy a house and a car. I haven’t held a job for much longer than a year or two. And, because of that, I haven’t worked my way up any type of corporate ladder or planned for much of a retirement. Honestly, having $10,000 at any given time is a blessing. (Though I’ll add that I haven’t had any debt for 20 years, so that’s a blessing too.)

And, now that I’m back in Canada, those different choices I had made are making themselves more and more apparent.

They don’t feel nice.

This isn’t to say that my friends who have chosen the “normal” way of life are any happier. I know that a lot aren’t. They go to jobs they don’t like to make money for things they think they need. They wish they had travelled more. They dream about sitting down to write a book they don’t have any time for.

But still. I wish I had done some of the things that my friends have.

That’s a strange realization for me. It was something I never would have imagined as little as a year ago.

But times change. People change. And I guess that’s what happened to me. To an extent, at least.

I want to keep writing (which isn’t the most lucrative endeavour at the moment and may end up never being one). I want to focus on my health and fitness. I want to get out and take a bunch of photos of interesting places.

It’s the family that I’m looking at having now. Getting a bit more of a secure job. Maybe even buying a place (eventually).

It’s hard to make sense of it all. Not so much the why it happened, but the what I’m going to do about it.

Actually, no, the why is pretty important too.

But I don’t plan on figuring out those answers anytime soon. And maybe I don’t need to. The whole point might be to simply accept what I have and move forward with it. Or to figure out if any of this is even really what I want.

Much harder said than done, I’ll say. But that doesn’t mean it isn’t the thing I’m supposed to do.

Hmm…who knew that all of these things would come up while spending some time on my own up North working on my book?

I guess I did.

Even more than that, I think that’s why I came.