Stepping off the standard life path
And when you want to live
How do you start?
Where do you go?
Who do you need to know?
-- The Smiths
Friends, Morrisey gets it.
There is no roadmap for a life with big feelings. And often, few visible role models.
Over time, you learn that the typical advice about how to live doesn’t always apply to you.
This is something I’ve heard a few times from Big Feels Clubbers over the years: ‘My life looks good on paper. I have the job, the partner, good friends, but I still feel like a complete fucking failure, and I have no idea why.’
Finding your recipe - the exact mix of ingredients that adds up to a good life - is no small thing at the best of times.
When you’re cooking with big feelings, it can feel like trying to prepare a five star meal when the stove’s on fire and someone keeps moving the fridge.
The standard recipes just don’t quite cut it.
You’re going to have to go off book.
An unexpected shift
I am thinking of making a pretty big shift in my own life, purely in the service of my mental health.
It’s the kind of life shift that some would hear about and say ‘wait you’re doing what??’
And yet, I’ve talked it through with my closest confidantes (including my therapist). From where I sit it seems like the best way forward in my ongoing quest to not feel so completely awful all the time.
I don’t especially want to share the details of this life shift yet. It feels too live, too current. And that’s strange, because sharing the most alive, current thing has for some time been the best way I know how to write. Yet I have lately felt torn about doing this.
Something wants to share the journey, and something wants to hold back.
So I think for now that dynamic itself is useful to explore in its own right.
What if I didn’t have to fit?
The bit that wants to hold back - I suspect part of it may well be that what I’m thinking of doing next doesn’t fit the cultural narrative about what a person should be doing with his life at my age.
And that’s the thing. When you don’t fit the standard mould, you have to make your own. But this is a vulnerable thing. You never know if you’re being stupendously naive, or just doing your best to look after yourself in a world that doesn’t really understand your needs.
The story of my whole life has been ‘you don’t fit’. To think this might also be part of the solution, that the answer is to stop trying so hard to fit… well, it’s confusing. And scary.
And yet it’s also full of possibility.
What if I didn’t have to fit?
What if my answer for how to live well didn’t have to look like anyone else’s?
Dangers on the path
There are good reasons not to tread your own path in life. A new, never-before-trod path could be full of unseen dangers.
(And probably is.)
But here’s the thing. For me, the clear and well trodden paths are full of unseen dangers too. Which is to say, they’re full of dangers that many of my peers just don’t seem to notice or be all that bothered by.
The emptiness of achieving life goals and realising they do nothing to silence the big questions lurking underneath.
The terrors of vulnerable, intimate connections with other humans.
Comedian Daniel Kitson sums it up well when he explains why he never wanted kids. When he’s alone and staring into space, wondering what it all means, at least now he can take comfort in the idea that he’s just made all the wrong life decisions. If instead he did have a family, and still felt lost and empty… oh the horror!
There's a tender truth in this joke. It's not that we're doomed no matter what path we choose (although it can feel that way sometimes can't it?). It's closer to something like: for some of us, the known horrors of the standard path are worse than the unknown horrors of a new path. And so we go exploring, not through foolhardiness, but through necessity. And who knows what we might find.
Mapping the terrain as we go
Because here’s the big question: If I’m going to feel this haunted and harried on the standard life path, and if most everyone else on that path can’t seem to help me with that, then why not face the unknown and carve a path of my own? What have I got to lose?
None of which leaves me with an answer about what to do next. But that’s kind of the point isn’t it?
The best we can do is map the terrain as we go. Step by unknown step.
This life decision of mine, I’ve mapped it as best I can without actually doing it.
All that remains is to try it and see if it’s a good path for me. And keep on mapping as I go.
— Graham x
How have you stepped off the standard life path?
I'd love to know. What are some ways you feel you've stepped off the standard life path? Or new paths you're considering but haven't taken yet? Either by choice or through necessity.
Share your thoughts with me here if you're keen.
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