As someone currently 36, with an almost 2-year-old, a job that doesn't fulfil me in any way, and in a relationship that will be legally registered towards the end of the year, I just wanted to comment and say that I feel exactly the same. I am at the point where I'm looking back at my early 20s living in a big city far away from home, the city offering itself to my potential, my imagination, the future unwritten yet, and I cannot help but feel a bit sad. I often go about my day with the daily routine, work, drop off child at nursery, log on, do work, log off, and in the middle of day I get sudden - I would call them electrical impulses in the brain but that would be factually wrong - pangs of nostalgia. Of remembering there was a time when the unknown was in front of me, and I was young, and I was carrying an insurmountable amount of self-doubt and anxiety about the future, and I wish I could for a moment return there, and feel that freedom again. But I chose this life, and I know more or less the direction it's headed in. I can't, however, help but sometimes casually fantasise about all the parallel lives that I could've lived had I made different choices. But to quote something I read (and won't ever forget) in a book Cheryl Strayed wrote, "that other life isn’t yours. I'll never know of the life I didn't choose. We'll only know that whatever that sister life was, it was important and beautiful and not ours. It was the ghost ship that didn't carry us. There's nothing to do but salute it from the shore." I don't want to say anything unhelpful about wanting to have a child, as I'm sure you're constantly being bombarded with all sorts of advice, except that it will happen. Mine came as an accident, an answer to a question I was always asking myself: do I want to be a mother? The experience made me acutely aware of my own mortality, of my body aging, of a failing placenta towards the end, and of me constantly doubting if perhaps I waited too long to get the answer. Yet somehow things settled and worked out. I wish you nothing but luck (as it's a numbers game) and patience.
Thank you for reading and thank you for your words. The electrical impulses, the ghost ship, the parallel lives — I can hear who you were in your early twenties in the way you wrote this, which might be the answer to both of our questions. That version of us leaves traces. She's in how we notice things, how we can't quite make ourselves stop caring about all of it even when the daily routine suggests we should.
As someone currently 36, with an almost 2-year-old, a job that doesn't fulfil me in any way, and in a relationship that will be legally registered towards the end of the year, I just wanted to comment and say that I feel exactly the same. I am at the point where I'm looking back at my early 20s living in a big city far away from home, the city offering itself to my potential, my imagination, the future unwritten yet, and I cannot help but feel a bit sad. I often go about my day with the daily routine, work, drop off child at nursery, log on, do work, log off, and in the middle of day I get sudden - I would call them electrical impulses in the brain but that would be factually wrong - pangs of nostalgia. Of remembering there was a time when the unknown was in front of me, and I was young, and I was carrying an insurmountable amount of self-doubt and anxiety about the future, and I wish I could for a moment return there, and feel that freedom again. But I chose this life, and I know more or less the direction it's headed in. I can't, however, help but sometimes casually fantasise about all the parallel lives that I could've lived had I made different choices. But to quote something I read (and won't ever forget) in a book Cheryl Strayed wrote, "that other life isn’t yours. I'll never know of the life I didn't choose. We'll only know that whatever that sister life was, it was important and beautiful and not ours. It was the ghost ship that didn't carry us. There's nothing to do but salute it from the shore." I don't want to say anything unhelpful about wanting to have a child, as I'm sure you're constantly being bombarded with all sorts of advice, except that it will happen. Mine came as an accident, an answer to a question I was always asking myself: do I want to be a mother? The experience made me acutely aware of my own mortality, of my body aging, of a failing placenta towards the end, and of me constantly doubting if perhaps I waited too long to get the answer. Yet somehow things settled and worked out. I wish you nothing but luck (as it's a numbers game) and patience.
Thank you for reading and thank you for your words. The electrical impulses, the ghost ship, the parallel lives — I can hear who you were in your early twenties in the way you wrote this, which might be the answer to both of our questions. That version of us leaves traces. She's in how we notice things, how we can't quite make ourselves stop caring about all of it even when the daily routine suggests we should.
I can only agree because you wrote it so well. ❤️❤️❤️
I liked this perspective on agining: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2_Y-dSearQU . :)