A Feeling of Listlessness

Photo by Mishal Ibrahim on Unsplash

Do you ever feel like you have no idea what you’re doing?
— like life is one big game that you can’t really figure out how to get a hold of no matter how hard you try? You go to school for years and wonder afterward if it was the wrong decision. You have a relationship with your family that is just unsustainably rocky. No matter what you do or how hard you try there is nothing you feel good enough for.

I have been in this rut for years.

At 32 you’re supposed to have it all figured out.

When you get less than 100 years to live and both of your parents died at fairly early ages you, in many ways, see 32 as it being half over. What do you have to show for that when you have literally nothing?

Most 32-year-olds have houses and kids.

I have a room that doesn’t belong to me, dreams that I don’t know will ever come true, and a knack for creativity that I can’t seem to actually figure out how to organize and harness.
— I have no idea what I'm doing.

I want to figure out how to make myself happy and find a life that’s going to be sustainable for the next 20/30 years. I don’t even know how to set goals for myself anymore. What direction to even put myself in to pull myself out of this funk.

I had so many goals when I was younger. I wanted to be the one to travel. The one to live in New York City with a job that I loved. I wanted to be everything that this small state couldn’t provide me with. Somewhere along the way, I lost that and I don’t know how to get it back or fix it.

Everything feels heavy and unattainable.

I’m really good at building other people up, but I feel like my head keeps getting held underwater. Try as I may, I can’t find a soft spot to rest my own bewildered thoughts and it’s manifesting in ways that are just keeping me in this rut.

I don’t know where to begin to find my way out of this darkness.

This isn’t depression, not a chemical imbalanced depression anyway. It’s a lack of direction or support that is more so holding me, hostage, to feeling like I don’t have any place to go to get myself out of it and I don’t know where to begin.

Have you ever felt like this? What did you do to build yourself out of this bad rut? Can you suggest to me any way to better harness my creativity and narrow down an outlet to not feel like I'm failing at every corner?

I need a little bit of direction, my lovely writing friends.