Half way there - July 14, ten years ago, I started a career. And ten years down the line I still don't have one.
Like I've mentioned before, i started the twenties by accepting a job offer which was totally unrelated to what I did in college. If you had asked me what I wanted to do after Class X - which is when students in India need to decide what subjects they would like to start specialising in for the last two years of school - Class XI and XII, i had a very clear idea of what I did not want - anything to do with Physics, Chemistry or Biology. Actually i did not mind Biology all that much, but physics and chemistry, especially the latter would just suck the happiness out of me. The reason for that, was partially the truth that I have always had pathetic science teachers, while I have had great History teachers and lovely English teachers growing up - which is why even today I'm drawn to those subjects. I've also always disliked Maths, also because I had really bad teachers. In class X I almost failed the subject. Thankfully my immense fear of failure made sure I put in many many hours to make sure I didn't fail the finals. But a gorgeous teacher made me love the subject in the last two years of school and i am so grateful to her. In India for Class XI and XII, you get to choose between three streams - Science (the most prestigious of them all, supposedly), Commerce (teaches you accounts & economics ~ the middle ground, saving face as they call it), and Art/ Humanities (History, Geography, Social sciences basically - which was looked down upon immensely back then). I think I might have wanted to do the last of those options, but the social stigma of being an "Arts" student made be choose Commerce when I applied.
When we went to a school for admissions, after a couple of interviews and tests, the Principal sat down with me and my parents and offered me a seat for the Commerce section and welcomed me into the school. And then as an after thought, she said to me - are you sure you don't want to do Humanities, you seem to have the aptitude for it and a natural inclination for those subjects. It was almost as though the Sorting Hat from Harry Potter was telling me, i know you want to go to Gryffindor but you have a natural aptitude for Slytherin. She asked me what I wanted to do in college, after Class XII. It is amazing that I knew what I wanted to do a 100% - i don't think I've had that kind of clarity of what I wanted in life in my twenties. I told her I wanted to do Economics Honours. All colleges need you to have Maths and Economics as a subject in XI and XII to qualify for an honours degree in Economics. And the humanities stream didn't have Maths as a subject, it had economics though. So Mrs Ishwaran, the principal, said to me - how about we let you do Math as a subject in Humanities and ask you to drop the one subject from the usual course, would you then be interested in that stream. I stared at her and asked if that was possible. She said "yes we can make it happen" and so I looked at my parents and I think my extreme enthusiasm for that plan was so infectious, my parents said to me "it's your decision, you choose" - they've been amazing that way. Not many Indian parents give their children the choice to do what they want - especially when it comes to education. I chose Arts. I could study History and still get to do Economics in college. I dropped Geography. And I will never regret that decision.
Now, I have narrated this entire story because never again did I have that kind of clarity. Yes, I have still taken many important decisions in life post that, but it was always on an impulse, as a "why don't I try to do this" or "let's go ahead and do it and deal with what happens later" or a "let's see where this takes me". It has never been a "I want to do this". I haven't, throughout my twenties, known what I wanted. In relationships, in my job, in my career, with regards to money, with my parents, with my friends. Never a this is what I want and this is what I need to do to get it. (step # 1 , Step # 2 etc.) Some might argue that's a good thing, I am flexible about anything my life has to offer. Some might also argue that that means I have no direction in life and would always "settle" for whatever life offers me. And I understand both of those viewpoints, because internally I have assumed both those viewpoints and debated against the other. At most times, I am ok with not having a plan, but there are definitely times when I stand still and think about what I am doing, what I want to do, and about how eventually i want to get to someplace and how all the steps I'm taking should lead to that someplace - and i realise I am, at any point in time, at a complete loss with these questions. I do not know what I want - this the one of the most brutal truths of my twenties.
Although when I speak to people, they marvel at how I seem to know what i want and that I live my life the way I want to, doing the things I want and how they wish they had the same clarity. I smile when that is said to me and i also secretly have a "oh, I'm pretty cool" moment. Until the next time someone asks me "so what do you want from life" and I find my insides churning and my head thinking one thing and my lips moving to say something totally unrelated. Another truth of my twenties, when I am crumbling inside, I am my most calm self on the outside. I only show the raw me to a few close people or a bunch of complete strangers who I wouldn't meet ever again in life (my crying bouts at airports are proof of that). Anyway, coming back to the point, I wonder how the girl who knew what she wanted to do in Delhi University doesn't know where she will be living next month. I genuinely believe being flexible is a good thing, because that prepares you for whatever will come your way, not having a fixed goal means that you use unusual paths to travel and traverse and the treasure you reach might be the treasure you weren't even searching for.
But here's my problem with that - it opens you to be influenced by everyone. While inviting ideas is a good thing, it is also a bad thing if you don't know the core of what you want. And it is also very bad for your bank account. There is only so much dreaming money can buy. Because I don't know what I want, I allow myself to be influenced by everyone. One day I am opening a restaurant in Bali, the next minute I am exploring start-ups funds the government in Amsterdam is offering to startups, the next week I am looking up culinary school and the fees. In between I am also starting a yoga retreat in India or setting up a food review blog or applying to apprenticeships to restaurants in Europe. A couple days back I woke up wanting to move to Nepal, so i sat on my bed at 3 am in the morning looking at whether Indians could live and work in Nepal without a visa. It's bizarre. Not knowing what you want is akin to trying to build something without a foundation. And chances that it will crumble are high, very very high.
I have spoken before about decisions in life and one poem that keeps coming back into my mind is by Robert Frost, The Road Not Taken :
Two roads diverged in the woods and I,
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference.
I often used to think this is a poem that encourages the reader to taken the less traveled path and be ore courages or to take risks and live the not-ordinary life. But it actually ended up not being that at all. At a discussion with a friend, he told me about how he read a review where Frost is only telling us that you are often presented with choices in life and you have to choose one, which means you have to let go of the other. Now wondering what that other choice would have resulted in is a completely normal matter for the curious mind. But the truth is, you have chosen a path and followed it through and where you end up is a result of your decision, for good or bad. And while you may think that one day you might return to take the other choice offered to you, chances are you may not, since life goes on and you are rarely given a chance to pass through the same choices again. Very unrelated divergence from our topic of knowing what you want in life. But maybe it popped into my head about not trying to read too much into stuff and also make a choice and move on with life and stop acting as though this is the absolute last decision I will make.
In my twenties, I used to look at all the 30 under 30 list and shudder, because I saw all these people who knew what they wanted and went on to achieve exactly that and most of them knew how to get to their goals and what steps to execute in order to reach those. How? What I'm discussing here might be in direct contrast to the otherwise very dreamy posts about my life where I speak about following the signs and trusting that the universe is taking you exactly where you need to go. And I still believe that, you always end up where you were meant to be in the first place. But even for that to be kind of successful, I think you need to have a fair idea of things. When I am working through some of life's problems I often look to my mom for guidance and maybe even for solutions, and some times all she has to say is "don't worry it'll all work out, what is mean to happen will happen". And I believe that truly, but when you are navigating through life and need to make decisions and have to take financials calls - you do not want to listen to such dreamy stuff, you need to make purely rational decisions. I often sigh when my mom says that and regret having asked her in the first place. Being rational was never my strength. When I was in the US recently, my uncle made my write down the things I am looking for in a man. My entire family at this point in time is super worried that i do not have a "man" or I am not married or that i am not even in a relationship. So, he made me write this list. And i listed out a bunch of things, and then he also made me list out the very obvious stuff like "he should be hygienic", and I rolled my eyes and said "but Uncle isn't that obvious", and then he rolled his eyes saying "you'll be shocked, there are all kinds of people in the world". After that he said something very nice, that I'll remember for a long time. He said "unless you know what you are looking for you'll never find it". And he said it in a very matter-of-factly way when he got up to go to the kitchen to make us some coffee and I just sat there being like "oh shit". I never know what I'm looking for. I have a vague idea about what I like and how i want my life to be, but I don't have a picture in my mind. My friend and i once did this "what do you want your obituary to read". We went to a cafe in Singapore, ordered brunch and coffee and wrote and then read it out to each other. And then we did a "with the way you're currently leading your life, what will your obituary read". We saw the huge difference in the way we wanted to live and the way we were living.
It was a little upsetting, I remember walking back hone that day and not taking the public transport because I wanted to clear my head. But it was also such a nice wake up call. What did I do with that exercise? To be frank, nothing. I put that diary away and went on to live life the exact same way. Until life became so unbearable that i had to change things to maintain my sanity. I wonder how people don't go insane you know? Eventually many years after that writing exercise, we both left the city and left our jobs to go pursue a path that will maybe take us some place we want to be. In spite of that when people ask me what I want from life, I don't know. When people ask me who do I want to be, i don't know. When people ask me, where do i want to live, I don't know. When people ask me what do I want to do, I don't know. And the list of i don't knows are increasing. Navigating uncertainty was never a strong point of mine and that is because I do not know where I want to go. If I knew, all these tiny decisions that seem so big to be wouldn't seem like a burden, because with a little bit of elimination, while keeping my "goal" in mind, would have me end up with a solution or a decision. I have not been able to sit down with a piece of paper and say this is what I want and this is what I am going to do to get it. And then stick to that no matter what hardships I face or the experiences i have or the people I meet. A little bit of a setback and a person who opens up a new perspective and a new option and I am confused all over again. That is what not knowing what i want does to me. I don't have a mind of my own and all minds and words everyone else has said influence my own thoughts. In that noise, it becomes even tougher to hear what I want.
And unless you know what you want, you are not going to make an effort to achieve it. I go into this phase on and off, this "what do I want from life" phase. During one such phase and maybe the reason that inspired the obituary writing workshop was this article by Mark Manson on Life's Purpose. The dude is pretty cool and i love the stuff he writes. Most of his writing are a fun read, it makes you laugh, but it also gets you into action. You stop whining and you start doing. And when you start doing - slowly but surely you learn more about what makes you happy. Another article I had read years ago was titled "how to figure out what exactly you want" by Martha Beck speaks about 4 Ps : Pushbacks, Possibilities, Preferences and Pinpoints. And in that article she says people who get what they want are the same people who know what they want. All of these are similar to what my Uncle said. I should have done this a long time ago, maybe when I was 25. But it's never too late to know what I want and while I may not have the steps to achieve those goals, knowing what I vaguely want will at least set me out in the right direction while I wait and work patiently towards the day when the way I am living now is exactly in sync with the way i want to be living. Because the truth is, if i do not know what i want, I could be in a corporate job or working in a Michelin star restaurant, I would still be unhappy. Because in either of those situations I wouldn't know what my end goal is and how I am working towards it.
So I am ending my twenties with a question I should have asked myself much earlier - what do I want from life or as Mark Manson says, finding a way to spend my limited time on this planet well. I am ending with a poem by TS Eliot (mentioned in Martha Beck's article):
Wait Without Hope
I said to my soul, be still, and wait without hope,
For hope would be hope for the wrong thing; wait without love
For love would be love of the wrong thing; there is yet faith
But the faith and the love and the hope are all in the waiting.
Wait without thoughts, for you are not ready for thought;
So the darkness shall be the light, and the stillness the dancing
~ T.S Eliot
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