The Road Ahead

I felt really depressed yesterday thinking about my future. Not that my future is really bleak or anything, it's just that I feel like I'm in a never-ending phase of my life in which I'm trying to figure out what I'm doing and where I'm going. For some reason, I just felt a wave of depression and hopelessness wash over me. I wondered if I would always feel this way: lost.

I always tell myself that this is part of being in your twenties. Whenever I talk to people my same age, they tell me they are struggling with the same things. I think the most frustrating part of all is that I know what I want to do, I just don't know exactly how to get to a place where I can do it. And when I say that to people, they usually rush to ask me all these questions and give all these suggestions about how I can get there and what I should do to get there. I understand they are trying to be helpful, but I want to say to them: "Don't you think I've already thought of all those things?"

I think the real issue is the fact that, sometimes in life, you have to take a leap of faith and do something crazy. It's hard. It's hard because "leap of faith" indicates you don't exactly know what is going to happen when you leap. You have to have faith that, if you leap, you'll land on the other side, and if you fall off a cliff, God will be there to either catch you, or meet you at the bottom to sweep of the pieces and superglue them back together. It's the leaping that has me stuck right now.

I want to leap so badly. I see others leap, and I'm so jealous of their faith. I see people post pictures on Facebook of themselves standing in front of the pyramids in Egypt, hiking the highlands of Scotland, making lewd gestures at the guards outside of Buckingham palace, and I want so desperately for that to be me. So why isn't it? Why can't that be me?

For the moment, I feel like I might be inside a cocoon, waiting to come out and fly away to wherever I wish. I read somewhere that if you were to cut open a cocoon before whatever inside emerges on it's own, you will kill whatever is inside. I'm trusting right now that God has me still wrapped up in my cocoon because there are things that must be completed in me before I emerge. I just hope I emerge sooner rather than later.