There are times when it’s just so hard to breathe. I tell myself a lot of things before I go to sleep, and most of them are assurances that things will go according to plan in the end. No matter how much I am hurting, no matter how the thought of being unable to become anything oppresses me, I just lie in bed and try hard to breathe no matter how much my breathing constricts, no matter how much the pain gnaws at my chest. I try.
In this world, you try your hardest to become useful to society. This is the stage where you build your career and then eventually settle down. But before you enter this part of your life, you embark on an academic journey of finding what profession you were made for. Some find the answer and some do not. The latter, those who never find that answer, just end up becoming someone whose life was made by someone else.
I envy those people who know what they want. I think it’s nice to have some concrete goal, some destination you want to go to. This way, you won’t have to figure out what’s out there for you. You only have to focus all your energy on how to get it.
People like me who tend to dream of being a lot of things suffer what we call an existential crisis. This is a moment in which an individual questions one’s purpose in life: whether or not one’s existence in this world is valuable, whether one’s existence can contribute to some higher end. I want to be a lot of things. Whenever I feel this way, it always brings me back to Sylvia Plath’s novel, “The Bell Jar,” in which the protagonist Esther muses: “If neurotic is wanting two mutually exclusive things at one and the same time, then I’m neurotic as hell. I’ll be flying back and forth between one mutually exclusive thing and another for the rest of my days.” Truth be told, this speaks to me on a spiritual level. That’s why it keeps haunting me.
Wanting to be a lot of things is painful to think about. The fact that you don’t know which path to take and the fact that you’ll forever be stuck in the middle, the average, never great at something, crushes you. This is the problem: when you cannot decide and you are forever in a deadlock. It is the breeding ground of negative feelings. And when you start to feel them, no matter how much you are afloat in whatever endeavor you engage in, it will still poison your whole being to the point that living feels tedious. It will feel like you’re crawling with heavy arms and legs. It will feel like you’re underwater. It will form a crack in your soul. It is inevitable that this crack will become bigger and tear your mind asunder.
In this respect, I fear that sooner or later, I would fail to save myself from the abyss of this primeval question—and ultimately drown.
Anavie R. Alegre, 21, a law student at the University of San Carlos, is “a lover of words and fleeting moments.”