I always admired people who would set a goal for themselves and then stick to it. For me, there were never any goals in life. There was merely an order of sequence that was expected to follow in life and I just went with it. How did it work out for me? Not that well. You could say I was damaged by the social expectations and tried to live up to them. As much as I was free-spirited, I was also very much down to earth which was not an advantage. Rational and irrational were always waging wars within me. I needed them both equally, or I needed irrational more because it was an escape from the world that did nothing for me at the time.

Lately, I often find myself thinking about myself in my twenties. I was expected to get a job and build from there. When I told my parents I was getting married my father didn’t seem happy. I thought he thought I was too young, but much later I learned he didn’t like my ex-husband. He was right, I was wrong, my ex was everything but good for me, not that I would admit that then. When young we are mostly stupid living in some kind of a made-up fantasy of the world where bad things happen to others and we are safe from every harm. We are right about everything and don’t take much time to really feel things. We live too fast, leaving things for later to deal with.

Now I see things much differently, and I wonder would any kind of education have any effect on my decisions. When one falls in love very young his/her judgment is so clouded that rarely any other image, other than the one made up by the person in love, gets through.

Looking back I see how foolish I was, but I know it was the experience I had to have to gain what I have now. It sounds so wise when I say it like that leaving all the pain, sorrow, and depression that followed behind. I don’t believe we can get wise, or better yet confirm the wisdom we have encountered, without living through the things the wisdom speaks of, touching the bottom and rising once again to write our destiny, or in my case to bleed in ink on the pages that only few will read. No matter what anyone says writing is much cheaper than paying a therapist.

As far as setting goals go I still don’t aspire to anything that would be viewed as an ambition worth calling an ambition in the eyes of most people. I just want to be left alone to enjoy time with my family, spend time in my garden working and growing things, do photography and writing, and spend time with the people I call my friends. But I can’t I have to go to work which I love but find difficult as the years pass, mostly because now I have to drive to work, and it takes a lot out of me. I can’t be home and enjoy daydreaming while cooking or gardening.
The frustration I experienced because I couldn’t be where I wanted to be was that of a small child when left in the daycare for the first time. The only difference is that I knew right away I had to be where I didn’t want to be and that I didn’t have any choice in that matter.
It took me three weeks to get the frustration out of my system and see things differently. There was no use in reasoning with myself because my emotions were too strong.

Goals for the future? Don’t have any, and to be honest, I don’t want to make any goals because that would mean I have to bond myself to them and do some work in that direction. I’m married and have children; I feel and think that is enough commitment to last me a lifetime.