I Have Always Wanted To Be Everything
The trouble is, I have always wanted to be everything. My dream career choices in childhood ranged wildly from farmer to teacher to fashion designer to Prime Minister. I would be so sure, as I traced figures from the Next catalogue to colour my own designs onto, that this was it, only to jump aboard a totally different ship when new inspiration took me.
This persisted into early adulthood, where career choices went from journalist to museum curator to marketer. Becoming self-employed was a balm for this for a short while, because I really did have to be a bit of everything. And then that amount of everything slowly became not enough, and I began to long for a bit more of everything.
The trouble with everything is that it’s too big for our little brains to hold. It’s like looking at the night sky, when more and more stars pinprick into view and there is just so much of it, and then you remember the universe is always expanding and then you start to shudder inside because it is simply too much size for you to comprehend. It’s too big, too scary, too beautiful to look at.
And so it is with the desire for all the things you hope to be. They are too big and important to look at directly, so you side eye them and you hope for them, and you go about your business of not actually doing any of them because you can’t begin to pick where to start.
The trouble is, when you are waiting to be everything, you are being nothing.
I was an earnest child and felt that what I was doing with myself should somehow impact the adult me, the way I would hear writers interviewed on Radio 4 as I had my after school crumpets saying “oh I was always writing as a child, I was always making little books”. So serious was I about making sure I had that perfect red thread from then to now that I didn’t ever unspool it. Common advice around passions is to interrogate what you loved doing as a child, but all I can remember is that I loved thinking about what I was going to be when I grew up.
Which is not to say that I didn’t love to run through the fields and listen to story tapes and do colouring in. Just as it’s not like now I don’t love to walk up hills and read in bed and share dinner with friends. More that there is a sense that this is not everything, and therefore it’s not really your life. Except, it is. And it’s passing by.
Over the last weeks something has shifted and I find myself back at the point where I’d usually change my mind and jump ship and go do something completely different. I stand looking at the different types of life I could have, branching out ahead of me like strands of a spider’s web.
There is the life where I set down roots in a white cottage with blue windows, the life where I am the mysterious wine aunt who is seemingly never in the country, the life where I have a cute flat in a small city and get a fresh cinnamon bun every morning, the life where I double down on writing, the life where I double down on being a business owner, the life where someone loves me.
The trouble is, I want all of these lives. I want to be everything. And I want to be everything so much that I can’t see what I want more.
It is unsettling to not know. One of the great perks of being both single and self-employed is the freedom; but with that freedom comes the downside of having no constancies. There are no non-negotiables, not a job or a place or another person you have to factor in, nothing to ground you. There are no certainties, only variables. That means you can do anything, but how do you choose when everything is an option?
On a walk the other week I found myself thinking “maybe I won’t mind feeling so unsettled if I accept unsettled as my state of being”. If I make peace with having an unsettled life, if I lean into it, maybe I won’t feel so bad about it. But my long history of “let me just accept and make the best of this bad and abusive situation” reminds me that that isn’t always the best way of dealing with things.
Something must be done, but not urgently. I think we forget that there are no urgent decisions, not really. We get so panicked about our “one wild and precious life” that we think we need to deciderightnow and then we careen from decision to decision, ending up spending that life constantly figuring out how we want to spend it. Exploring what we want is a project, not a decision.
So yes, I feel the door of one phase of my life closing behind me, but that doesn’t mean I have to pick a new one to open right away. I can stand here on the porch, and I can look up at the stars, and while it’s enormous and hurtling it is also beautiful and maybe, for a few minutes, I can stand in the quiet. Maybe, for a few minutes, I can remember who I am before I decide who I’m going to be.
