and all that was left of my autonomy, and I barely realised.
From what I can remember, I used to be fun. I used to have ideas. I used to be the one coming up with weird adventures and drink cocoa in parks at 3 am. And eat pizzas on a weeknight in the city. Read romance books without one guilty thought of being unproductive.
Then the adulthood came, and I somehow got it all confused with endless work and goals. And a to-do list. And another one. And ten more. I became corporatised, commercialised and capitalised, and didn’t even think about it twice. Maybe it’s been underway my whole life, who knows. Slowly at first, then all of a sudden. It became mine before I ever knew the difference.
Spending all my time with a laptop in hand, I imagined that’s how all my life should look like. There was no time outside of screen. All my moments without it felt so bare and uncomfortable, I couldn’t imagine how I could go through them at all. Any idea to leave it behind, even for a few minutes, seemed ridiculous. To leave the seat for silence? For boredom? For the prison of my own thoughts?
I had so many notions of what the world should look like. Of what was fun and not, of how to connect and exist, of how I should behave and what’s accepted. And for all that I knew, one day I realised I knew nothing. Or at least such an insignificant amount of something that it didn’t matter anyway. For all that intelligence and drive, I had forgotten the most important thing there was to learn.
To live.
And so I started learning.
I learned how to linger. To make tea and wait with someone in silence before the conversation start to flow. To allow the in-between to be, no rush nor expectation.
I learned to build relationships, the unserious ones, the loose ones that feel like excitement rather than yet another form of labour. Where connection is a two-way street that doesn’t require endless reminders to keep in touch. Nor such insurmountable mountains of guilt.
I learned that I have the right to be here, inherently and unquestionably. That I don’t have to be of interest to be interesting, nor wanted to be allowed to want. That I wasn’t small, at all, and that there is space to take up that no one can deny me.
I learned that there are other ways of learning. That not everything has to be measured, that no amount of tests and numbers can tell me what I really know. That not everything has to be finished to have value. That, like so many have told me, it truly is the process that matters, not the end goal.
And conversely, painfully too, that the end goal doesn’t have to be the end at all. That no matter how much it hurts to admit it, I don’t owe to my past anything more than the past owes me. That there is more betrayal in unchanging, in clinging to what used to be.
And so I lost my personhood but I’m trying to regain it. I think there’s some honour in that. Maybe it’s more common than I allow myself to think. I experience and learn, fall, then fall again. I indulge in shameless noticing and keep realising what’s been missing this whole time. And I think maybe that’s the thing, at least for me. The answer. My personhood.