What Being 24 Feels Like

So now my masters degree is done and all that’s left is a little St.Andrews-sized hole in my heart and the existential question of what now?

It’s a question I find hard because I do not know what I want to be, really. And, as I’ve observed myself more and more, I find I’m not sure I have ever known what I want to be.

I have tended, instead, to say (and fully believe) I want to be whatever the person next to me is being.

Example?

Watching a girl sing, I want to be a singer (and I feel that want desparately in every piece of my being). Reading an anthropology article, I want to be an anthropologist (and when I believe that, I really really believe that). Being in 5th grade, I wanted to be a 5th grade teacher.

My body-wracking desires-of-being are suspiciously correlated to whatever is the most recent thing I consumed. Right now at this moment? I want to be a kentucky-appalachian folk singer (thank you Sierra Ferrel). And I really mean that.

So, in a world of “trust your body”, I am starting to think: okay maybe my body cannot be trusted here. At least not in a direct sort of way.

I have to read between the lines of the adrenaline rush of a new life-plan (although sometimes I do become absolutely convinced by my own adrenaline). I have to ask, “is this life plan something that is actually compatible with what I want to do/ who I am?"

Or..

Did I just happen to watch a pretty girl do something well?

These things are really confusing to me.

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Mystic Micheala — celebrity aura reader and my favorite internet guru — has confirmed me a turqouise-purple aura. And to be honest, this aura diagnosis is something I think about a lot. Turqouise aura’s are famously like water: they are the deep pool that reflects the people around them, but they often forget they are the pool, not the reflection.

I’m not saying I believe Mystic Micheala, but I am not saying I don’t either. Because recently these days, when I start feeling adrenaline kicking off and a new life plan frantically forming, I ask myself: is this life-plan coming from the reflection, or from underneath the surface of the water?

I can’t always tell. Which can be exhausting.

But this is where I wonder: maybe this is just being 24? This never-ending self-analysis?

I feel in some ways like I am just actually getting to know myself. People ask me what I want to be and I can’t even properly articulate it. I don’t myself that well. But I am confused how that can be true, because I spend every single hour with me. So, how can I still be such a complex puzzle?

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I am spending my days trying to keep my head underneath the water: in that still pool. Away from other people’s reflections, what still rings true? I am finding it helpful to look back at my younger self, and look to see what she was doing.

She was, in any order:

• in the woods

• in the water

• writing stories in the early morning

There’s a few memories in particular that stick out so strongly in my mind that I know they must be on to something: one of them is me, around 7 years old, before 8 a.m., walking out to show my parents a small little storybook I had written that morning. I remember feeling connected to my purpose then. It was an experiential storybook: I had decided to try to write it without any punctuation and fill in the punctuaction later, and I am sure it was about some girl surviving in the woods with some passed-down indigenous knowledge (it was, I will admit, probably a bit culturally insensitive). I remember showing it to my mom and she said great job! but did, “did you forget to put in periods?”

Forget was a strong word. I had chosen not to.

A creative genius move, if you ask me. I didn’t want to block my own flow.

My second memory is me around 5 years old sitting on the couch and trying to read two, maybe three, sentences of National Geographic. I can actually physically remember the way it strained my brain and I could only read a sentence or two at a time. And I never read the stories about only the natural world. There had to be a human/ cultural element to the stories. But I remember the way those stories would make my brain light up. I wanted to read those articles, even if it actually hurt my neuron pathways.

I am guessing, somewhere between those two memories, is the deeper well of Ada Shaw. I am guessing those memories stick out because I wasn’t writing, and I wasn’t reading National Geographic, because the person next to me was. I was writing and reading because I wanted to.

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So, the question lies now: how does one monetize reading and writing? Academia is one way, I am sure. But what about for those of us who want to make a bit more money, who need a bit more security than the constant push-pull of competitive academia?

That is where I am now, trying to figure it out.

I am trying to stay in the deep well. I am trying to remember that I am the pool, not the reflection. I am trying to sit still, really still, and see what happens when the woods goes quiet and I am all alone.

Turquoise aura, 24, or both.

The wind blows

what now?