The Five-Year Forecast

Waiting is something I never realized would be so uncomfortable.

Well. Honestly, adulting isn't exactly easy, especially when you thought you already had your whole life planned out.

There should be a handbook for this part.

Maybe there is. I wouldn't know. I haven't read it.

I just know that somewhere along the way, I started believing life would move in a fairly predictable order. You grow up. You figure yourself out. You meet someone. You fall in love. You make plans. You get engaged. You buy the appropriately sized furniture. You become the kind of person who knows what they're doing.

And then, apparently, life looks at your plans and says, That's cute.

I guess you really never know what's going to happen. We're always told to expect the unexpected, which feels like an especially irritating thing to say to someone who would prefer to have a detailed itinerary.

When I was younger, putting myself out there felt easy. I'd talk to people. I'd make friends. I'd try things. I'd walk into a room without first conducting a twelve-part analysis of how I was being perceived.

I don't know if it's because I wasn't comparing myself to everyone yet, or because I hadn't developed the ability to overthink absolutely everything, but life seemed to glide.

Now, sometimes I'll be sitting at home alone, working or writing, something I've unexpectedly come to really enjoy, and I'll end up on the floor in the dark, staring at a wall.

Not in a concerning way.

At least, I don't think so.

There's just something about being still that makes all the noise in my head a little louder.

Sometimes I don't even know what I'm thinking about. There's so much running through my brain that it becomes one giant pile of mental laundry. But every once in a while, one thought rises above the rest. Something I can't shake.

And lately, it's been this:

Why is it so hard to be alone?

I know how that sounds.

A 27-year-old man sitting alone on the floor in the dark, staring at a wall and wondering why he's alone sounds like the beginning of either a profound personal revelation or a documentary about a lonely goober.

Maybe it's a little of both.

Because the truth is, I don't think I'm actually afraid of being alone.

I'm afraid of what being alone asks me to do.

It asks me to sit with myself without the distraction of another person. Without someone else's plans, opinions, affection, or expectations. It asks me to figure out what I actually want when nobody is standing there to help me decide.

And that's harder than I thought it would be.

It's easy to show people the version of yourself you want them to see. What's harder is sitting quietly enough to notice the parts of yourself you haven't quite figured out yet.

And, more than anything, I think I want connection.

Which sounds sad when you say it out loud.

But maybe it isn't.

I grew up moving around a lot. We weren't the kind of family that lived in the same house for years and years. Things changed. Places changed. Friends changed. I learned how to adjust. I learned how to walk into a new room and figure out where I belonged.

I don't know that I've ever really thought of a house as home.

My family was home.

Maybe that's why change has always felt strangely familiar to me.

Except now, at 27, it feels like everything is changing faster than ever.

And I'm tired.

Like, really tired.

I'm tired of starting over. I'm tired of making new friends. I'm tired of figuring things out. And, simultaneously, I desperately want to make new friends and figure things out.

Which is a particularly annoying contradiction to carry around.

So, anyway, back to why I started writing this.

Or, more accurately, back to whatever has been occupying my mind lately.

I'm trying to get back into what the spiritual gurus would call my energy.

My dad would probably have a different approach.

He'd tell me to get my shit together, rub a little dirt on it, and I'd be fine.

Yeah.

Whatever that means.

But I've been thinking a lot about what it means to stop trying so hard to control what happens next.

Michael A. Singer, one of my favorite authors and spiritual teachers, writes extensively about the suffering that comes from trying to make the outside world conform to the way we think it should be. His philosophy, in its simplest form, is something like this: relax, stop resisting, and participate in what is actually unfolding.

Beautiful.

Very profound.

Also, what the fuck does that actually mean?

Because I'm pretty sure "stop controlling everything" is significantly easier to say when you're not the person currently trying to control everything.

I've spent a lot of my life thinking that if I could just understand what was going to happen, I could prepare myself for it. If I could make the right decision, say the right thing, plan far enough ahead, maybe I could avoid the parts that hurt.

But life doesn't really work that way.

And maybe that's what this strange period of my life is asking me to learn.

How to wait.

How to be alone.

How to stop treating uncertainty like an emergency.

How to let something unfold without immediately reaching for it, naming it, analyzing it, or trying to decide where it will end.

Which sounds peaceful.

I'm sure I'll be terrible at it.

But I'm trying.

Or at least I keep telling myself I'm trying.

But what does trying actually look like when you're trying to figure out who you are? Or what comes next? Is trying supposed to look like making plans? Making peace? Dating? Going out? Staying home? Reading books by people who seem to have figured out something you haven't?

At some point, I suppose I'm supposed to let go and let life happen.

Right?

That sounds nice.

It also sounds a little insane.

And maybe that's because letting life happen is not something I'm particularly good at. I like to know where things are going. I like to understand why something happened. I like to find the lesson, identify the pattern, connect the dots and, preferably, have a five-year forecast by the end of the afternoon.

Which brings me to TikTok.

I love TikTok.

Probably too much.

And every time something in my life goes slightly out of whack, suddenly my entire For You page becomes tarot card readings.

Someone from your past is thinking about you.

You're entering a new chapter.

The universe is asking you to release control.

This message found you for a reason.

Do I stop and watch them?

Maybe.

Do I then watch another?

Obviously.

Do I then spend the next twenty minutes wondering whether the universe is actually speaking to me through a woman named Jessica holding three cards in front of a ring light?

Potentially.

But here's the funny part: I know I'm creating the algorithm.

I stop on the tarot videos. I watch them. I interact with them. I tell TikTok, in the most literal way possible, Yes, please. More of whatever this is.

So when my entire feed starts telling me to release control, maybe the universe isn't even involved.

Maybe it's just the algorithm.

And then I had an epiphany.

If I'm creating the algorithm by repeatedly giving my attention to certain things, then maybe there's a similar principle at work in my actual life.

The things I repeatedly think about.

The things I give my attention to.

The stories I tell myself.

The emotions I keep returning to.

Maybe they begin to shape the reality I experience.

Yup.

I already knew that.

This is the part of my brain that gets very excited about discovering something I have technically known for years.

And there is research that points in this direction, too. Dr. Joe Dispenza, a chiropractor, author, and researcher whose work focuses heavily on neuroscience and behavior, talks about how habitual thoughts, emotions, and behaviors reinforce particular patterns, and how changing those patterns can change our experience of life.

Interesting.

Very interesting.

Also completely useless if I don't know what the hell to actually do with it.

And welcome to my brain.

This is what I do.

I find something I want to understand, and then I consume information about it until I am absolutely convinced that if I just read one more book, listen to one more podcast, watch one more interview, or find one more person explaining the concept in a slightly different way, I will finally understand the thing I'm going through.

Except I usually don't.

Instead, I end up exactly where I started.

Sitting on the floor of my apartment.

In the dark.

Staring at the wall.

Except now I'm holding my phone, have twelve tabs open, have saved three TikToks about surrendering to the universe, and have somehow developed a working theory about my childhood, attachment style, nervous system, and the algorithm.

It's kind of funny.

Because maybe this is the very thing I'm trying to stop doing.

I keep trying to think my way into an answer that might only come from living.

Maybe I don't need more information.

Maybe I need less.

And maybe there is something else I need to say here.

Something I don't think I've ever actually said to myself.

I'm not writing to become some influencer. I'm not writing to make a lot of money. I'm not writing because I need to be seen in some grand way.

I don't need that.

I genuinely just enjoy writing about my crazy, beautiful, sometimes completely fucked up, but mostly beautifully crazy life.

I like taking the things that happen to me, the things I think about, the things I feel, and putting them into words.

And whether this reaches two people or two thousand, well, great.

As long as one person wants to tag along.

As long as something I've written makes you smile, or laugh, or cry, or scream, or get angry, or sit quietly for a minute and think, Holy shit. I get that.

Then I think my writing has done what it was always supposed to do.

Make you feel something.

Feelings are crazy. They're scary. They're inconvenient. Sometimes they completely fuck us up.

But mostly, I think they're beautiful.

Because what would life be without them?

So I'm going to let myself feel mine.

And you should enjoy feeling yours.

And, if you want to, enjoy mine, too.

And if this story is all over the place, or doesn't make sense, or doesn't flow the way it "should," or isn't grammatically correct to someone's standards, well...

Go write your own damn story.

I graduated college.

I don't need another English teacher.

This is mine.

It's messy because I'm messy. It's funny because sometimes life is funny. It's sad because sometimes life fucking hurts. And it's probably going to change the more I live, because, thankfully, I'm not finished becoming whoever the hell I'm going to become.

So I'm going to keep writing it anyway.

Because maybe the point isn't to tell a perfect story.

Maybe it's just to tell a real one.