lost

Posted on March 11, 2016 Updated on March 11, 2016

I’m walking along the streets of Melbourne, Australia trying to work up the courage to walk into restaurants and give them my CV. I’m wondering how I even got here. Traveling to Australia was never really on my radar, but here I am. I’m feeling lost, but that’s nothing new. 
It’s this reverse culture shock, you see. I’m back in the western world, and I feel like that automatically means I’m going to sink back into this western mentality- everything I was trying to escape when I initially left to travel. I’m having flashbacks to when I first graduated college and moved to Seattle. Stumbling around blindly and just trying to find something-anything to give me a source of income and keep me busy. It didn’t matter what. 

But suddenly I wasn’t living up to my potential. So much pressure to be successful. Be prestigious. Make my alma mater proud. You could be doing so much more with your life, people would tell me. Why are you settling for this hospitality job? You’re smarter than this. When are you going to get a real job? I started to believe them. And I was miserable. The pressure was too much for me. What was wrong with me? What did I even want? I was lost.  

But something else in me made me think maybe I didn’t want a “real” job. Maybe there was more out there than corporate America led me to believe. Maybe I didn’t have to live this life everyone else so vehemently wanted me to live. So I ran away. At least that’s what people told me I was doing. And maybe to a degree they were right. I quit my jobs. Got rid of a lot of my shit. And went all hippy dippy and flew off to India to “find myself.” Okay, so I never phrased it like that, but for a lack of better words, sure, we’ll say that’s what I did. And did I find myself? No. Did I leave with a little more sense of direction? Maybe…no. Not really. But I did know that I wasn’t done exploring the world. There was too much to see. Too many people to meet. Too many people to love. Hippy. Dippy. 

I didn’t want to stop. 

So I was told to come to Australia to make some money, so I could keep traveling around the world. And suddenly I find myself back in the western world after traveling Asia for over half a year, and it’s been the hardest adjustment of them all. Fear that I’m heading back to the daily grind. Confused about what I’m even doing here. Unsure what the point of it all is. I am back in the vicious cycle of “am I doing anything of purpose at all?” 

More lost than ever. 

But then I think of all the people I’ve met. The lives I’ve encountered. So many stressing about not having their lives figured out. Unsure if their life is amounting to anything worthwhile at all. And then I think about how much these lives impacted me. How they gave me their time. Made me laugh. Listened to me. Made me feel a little less alone. All these beautiful souls just as confused as I am and how they changed my life. Doesn’t that count as something? Because if they changed my life, they have to be changing other lives as well. And maybe that means I have impacted others’ lives too. Is that the interconnectedness of us all? That we’re all searching for God knows what, but at the end of it all, we are all just searching for each other? Is that life? I hope so. Because maybe just maybe I’ve been doing it right. Maybe we’re all a little less lost than we think we are.