You go through your day-to-day life thinking you have a good idea of who you are: what you do, what you like, what your goals and priorities are. But then something happens—maybe you have a breakup, or unexpectedly have to move, or lose your job. And all of a sudden, bam! Your legs are wobbly and the world is a scary place.

All your little routines—your meaningless, arbitrary routines like grabbing coffee every morning at a certain place or a certain time, or talking to your girlfriend or boyfriend before you go to bed, or going running along a certain street while listening to a certain album—are disrupted. Now you have to make your own coffee, or call an old friend, or run through a new neighborhood. It’s weird and unsettling, and you wonder if things will ever get back to normal.

Well, they won’t. Not normal like they used to be. That stuff you had is gone, and maybe now you need to have different stuff for a while. Maybe it’s stuff that’s not so nice, like ramen instead of a spaghetti dinner, or a novel instead of a canoodle, or Folgers instead of Intelligentsia. Maybe some of it’s stuff that’s nicer, like reading and sleeping instead of crying and yelling.

But if you know what direction you’re pointing, at least you have that. You don’t know where you’re going to land, but you know you’re going away from something that didn’t work towards something that will—or, at least, that might. It will be something you need, or at least something you want. In the end, you’ll be more you…and that’s a good thing, right? If you’re not sure what that is, or who that is, now you get to figure that out. The timing of these things always seems to suck, but there’s a certain freedom that comes with being shat upon by life. That just happened, and you’re still here, and if the world wants to dump on you some more? Bring it! You had to shower anyway.

Walk down the street and think about all the people who are behind all those doors. Even in a single neighborhood, there are more people than you’ll ever be able to know, even be able to meet. What’s going on with them? Well, a lot of them are probably boring. Some others are nasty. But a lot of them—a lot lot of them—are nice, interesting people who you’ve never met. They probably have some cool albums you’ve never heard, or crazy stories about candlepin bowling in Canada, or really funny observations about this one time they were shat on like you just got shat on.

Right now you’re feeling alone and scared out there on the street, but some of those doors are about to open. Get ready.

– Jay Gabler

Photo by Claire Schmitt (Creative Commons)