What I Want at 35 and Beyond
An Honest Answer to Myself
I am 35. The main focus here is not "I am" but "35," now that my ethnocentrism years are long gone and my grown-up mentality is starting to kick in. Dang it! I just said "my" twice already even after telling the readers to ignore this "self" here who is sitting in front of the keyboards trying to actively think hard in the midst of feeling completely separate from every entity in the known universe but from "I."
Turning 35, I made a promise to myself that I want to be emotionally and mentally mature and not to be easily tempted to having nervous breakdowns and be the drama queen whenever interruptions, big or little, arise to threaten my pitiful, but meticulously laid out plans and, consequently, even attacking to bring down my entire being. No pun intended here and I am so not in the mood to exaggerate. But, yes, I do have a tendency to believe that whatever it might be is either for me or against me. Dang it, again! How childish and spoiled I sound right now!
At 35, this is the person I have become. Sometimes I am proud of achieving whatever it is that I set out to accomplish. Sometimes I am amazed that I came this far to be what I am and to have what I have. On the other hand, sometimes I wake up in the middle of the night having this horrible anxiety sitting in my chest thinking that I am doomed for having done so little and for all the wrong reasons. I get easily frustrated and saddened at the thought of how a part of me died within me and I do not even recall when that happened. And then I get bewildered and scared out of the clear blue sky and I can only explain this experience as something comparable to existential crisis.
I suddenly realize that insecurity has turned into instability; magical thinking has turned into practical and even cynical thinking; my wild and blissful dreams have turned into doable dreams, forever chastising and reminding myself that I am still not good enough. All notions of girlish, unexpected surprises have been replaced with painstaking planning and countless backup plans. From the moment I wake up until I finally fall asleep, I am completely consumed by my obsession to look for what is missing in my life and trying to find a way to either replenish or buy some time until I have means to replenish.
I want. I wish. I hope. Endlessly and intensely. At 35.
I want myself to be held accountable for my own actions and intentions, and therefore, for the consequences, whatever they might be. I do not want to look to anybody but my own self to complement and to blame. I want to be completely independent and to be able to trace down every action to my own belief system that I have been carefully preserving and editing through both painful and rewarding experience of the infamous problem solving method called, the Trial and Error.
I wish to be classy and elegant, unpretentiously and selflessly. I am tired of hurting myself and others so needlessly due to my inexperience or inability to adequately use any sort of defense or coping mechanism. I want to shave off the "rough around the edges" qualities about me and put myself and everybody around me at ease. No need for the sympathetic nervous system to arm oneself with fight-or-flight response only to release cortisol to harm our ever-aging bodies in unimaginable ways when my sole intention was to be good without any ulterior motives.
I hope for betterment of my life. The ebb and flow of fortunes is strangely and refreshingly acceptable by me as long as I can learn from it all and bring a peaceful closure to the end. I cannot accept stagnation as a rationale for being set for life. I refuse to succumb to the idea that at certain point in life one needs to retire from improving oneself, whether it be cultivating one's quality of life or accumulating material gains by most beneficial means for all.
At age 35, I embrace the vagueness, abstractness and uncertainty of life. I am speechless to describe what is still left of me. The work is in progress. Whether it be a sparkling diamond or a chunk of cold, nameless minerals, I find solace in knowing that this is how it all should be at 35. Thirty-Five. Three. Five.
About the Creator
Ji Na Khananisho
A wife, a daughter, a sister, a friend, a colleague and an aspiring author. Adore David Foster Wallace, Charlotte Bronte, Thomas Hardy and Khaled Hosseini. And lastly, I am the happiest logophile and logomaniac you will ever meet.
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