disalarming | In 10 Years

Krissy commanded (er, I mean tagged) me to write an entry about where I’d like to be 10 years from now. This prompt was a lot harder than it sounded, and it took me a while to figure out what I wanted to write in this entry. First I came up with a list, which I rewrote into paragraph form because the list sounded awfully stilted. Then I wasn’t happy with what was in my list or paragraphs, so I scraped it all and tried to start again.

I wrote about how I wanted to travel the world. How I wanted to continue moving from country to country, just like I did in my childhood. How I wanted to learn new languages, like Italian and Russian. How I wanted to find a dream job, one that combined my loves of travel, language and communications. How I wanted to be happily together with a man, ideally the love of my life, and maybe even think about starting a family. How I wanted all of my current hard work and dedication to pay dividends in the future.

But no matter what I wrote or how I wrote it, nothing sounded quite right.

Somewhere amidst all of my brainstorming and revising and rewriting, I realized that the problem wasn’t with how I organized or wrote out where I saw myself in 10 years. The reason why I was so dissatisfied with what I came up with was because I felt like my list focused too much on the material, or on tangible evidence that would reflect the progress in my life I hope to make in 10 years. Not to mention the fact that it is impossible for me to even think that far into my future; years of moving around and being uprooted have made it incredibly difficult for me to see things in the long-term.

I ended up putting aside my attempts to answer Krissy’s prompt for a while so that I could have some space and time to think about how I wanted to tackle the question. It took a while, but I think I figured out how to answer it.

In 10 years, I just want to be happy.

I have faith that the rest will work itself out.

Cross-posted from breakthesky.net. Please leave any comments there.