Anyway, what I am getting at is I feel like I might be embarking on my quarter life crisis. Which is disheartening, because I aspire to live until I am at least 200 years old, (but I am going to make 200 years look good. Seriously.) So, if I am already hitting my quarter life crisis, that means I am only going to live until the age of 88. That is not long enough.
Ahem, correction: I feel like I might be embarking on my one-eighth life crisis. (Ahh. Much better.) What I mean by this is I am starting to doubt and wonder about everything I have done thus far in life. Am I on the right track? What is the right track? I mean, we are all sort of born into a life track, and then we hit college, and then we begin doubting everything we ever were taught or brought up to believe in, everything we always thought we were so god damn sure about. Which is really just scary, because it's like, well, if I feel this different now than I did when I was 15, what is stopping me from feeling completely different when I am 27 compared to now? Can we ever really believe in what we believe in? (Note to self: strike two with the woe-is-me existentialism.)
For example, I was raised in a conservative family. My parents were always and still are Republicans. So when I went to register to vote down in Florida when I was 18, I registered as a Republican (you can’t register Independent, or else I would have done so.) It just seemed…correct? Politically correct?
Now, every day it seems my political views begin to lean more and more left. I am fiscally conservative (but not exceptionally) and socially liberal (on most issues). But really, when it comes down to it, I don’t want to be either. I think partisan politics is a bunch of bullshit and I hate that we have to put ourselves in a box that isn’t even properly made. I think (some) politicians are corrupt. I want to live on Pandora and be a Navii.
I also have begun to question my religious beliefs as of late. I was raised Catholic, but stopped attending church with my parents in high school around the time when that Catholic Church sex abuse scandal blew up in the media. Now, my parents are still both quite religious, however they still don’t attend church regularly. The last time I attended church was in Brisbane. I will say that it was an eye-opening experience at the time, perhaps even life-changing in ways I can’t really articulate currently. And yet, I still play with the idea that I might actually be an atheist. I might actually believe that when you die, you just die—the world goes on without you in it just like when you weren’t born yet.
This leads to my most salient inner debate: Why should I bother caring about the world so much? Is there a purpose behind my attempts to understand the global food crisis and how we can make our food production more sustainable? Is the world really going to come to an end in my lifetime? Wouldn’t it be more enjoyable to live in ignorance? And especially if I didn’t believe in God or an after-life, why should I care about the planet that will remain after I am gone?
Yeah, these are some real questions. They dig pretty deep or whatever. But the more I learn and the more people I talk to and the more I live, the more the answers to the questions begin not to necessarily matter.
I’m definitely “in flux,” as a friend recently told me. But maybe we’re always in flux. Maybe that’s kind of the point.
Like, OK, here is one last example. I grew up HATING cats. HATING. Once, a cat attacked me and it traumatized me for the rest of my life (so I thought), and on top of this, I'm also pretty darn allergic to them.
Then a couple months ago, my friend/apartment building-mate Charlie decided to get a cat, so I put on a sour face for a few days. Then the little guy, named Tito, started trying to be all cute and cuddly and handsome and then next thing you know he became the first cat I ever loved. Just look at that face:
Once again, this blog post has somehow turned into a non-conclusive rant that ends with a heart-warming picture (yes, I just suggested that Dunkin Donuts cups are heartwarming).
Help me out here. Is it normal to be in this state of flux when you are a 20-something-year-old, getting ready to join society IRL? Or are we supposed to feel all conflicted like this forever--and should we want to?
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