Creating space
Creating space
Honestly..
For the last few months my blog has been quiet. Again. Not because I ran out of things to say, but because I ran out of space to say them. Over this time, I’ve felt overworked, overcrowded and overwhelmed by my academics, social life and personal ambitions. I’ve felt like I was being pulled in every direction yet somehow not doing enough to balance things. And I think, as teenagers so many of us silently run out of space for themselves when stretched too thin.
I think what I felt most strongly in my time away from the pages was this dread of being stuck somewhere in the middle.
In the middle of work and life,
in the middle of dreams and reality,
And in the middle of what’s happening to us versus what we are trying to make happen.
No end to the middle
It truly sucks. No fancier or better words can really embody the emotion better than; it suck’s.
And I think being a teenager comes with the permanent agony of middle ground. Not quite being who you used to be, but not yet who are youre becoming either. Your dreams feel just within reach, yet far enough to doubt and your best efforts fall just short of the outcomes you expect. You strive to become yet get stuck within the long tedious process that is ‘becoming’. One that can never be neatly finished with a full stop. One that asks for indecipherable, messy drafts, countless unfinished ideas and the hardwork of thinking and rethinking endlessly.
To be honest time off certainly came with its own revelations. Revelations about myself as an aspiring author, as a a teenager with her fair share of struggles and as a person who is in the process of becoming.
I think something I realised that scared me most though, was that there was no escaping the middle.
Being in the middle of things isn’t a temporary phase, Infact, it’s where most of life quietly unfolds. It’s where we question ourselves more than reassure ourselves, where efforts rarely feel impressive and where progress rarely looks obvious.
Somewhere.
Why is that scary? Because while trying to escape the middle ground, we could accidentally escape our lives. In our haste to reach the destination could we be letting life ‘happen’ to us rather than taking the reins? It’s a complicated place, ‘the middle’, it needs us to keep moving without knowing where we’re headed, with no full stop in sight.
I said at the beginning of this article that I ran out of space for my words. I ran out of space because I let things happen to me blindly. I let them take up space while I was busy looking the other way in search of the end of the middle.
So I tried coming back with the perfect words, at the perfect time, and then when neither were in sight I decided to make peace with the middle. With imperfect words, unfiltered confessions and inconsistent messy thoughts.
Because writing, like most of life, was never meant to look neat.
So no, this isn’t a triumphant return with my path charted and my objectives clear. With no end in sight and the long process of becoming in front of me. This is me in the middle of thinking a lot. About a lot.
But nonetheless I’ve shown up. And maybe that’s all any of us have to do to be somewhere rather than nowhere.
.