On Guilt-Free Wishing
I have been having an amazing time on my trip through Italy so far. We’re about to enter the last leg, making our way to France tomorrow before ending it and parting ways in Paris. There are only a few days left, but I still find myself looking forward to the independence that lies after that. This has been the first time doing anything like this with friends, and it’s been a mixed bag, though mostly skewed towards good, thankfully. I have been trying, though, to reconcile some negative feelings that come as a result of this passive act of looking forward to something. Despite all the fun I’ve had on this trip, I feel a familiar sense of guilt every time I even internally begin to bemoan it.
The logic I imagine my subconscious is following is that, after a long period in which I was generally alone and desperate to spend time with my friends, I should have no right to complain about getting the chance to do just that. It feels almost like a betrayal of a past version of me, who fondly sat spinning expectations and coming up with fantastically simplistic adventures, in that they mainly revolved around my spending time with my friends. Or just making new ones. But there are a few things I’ve realised in the time since those wishes were formed and actually began to take form in some shape or another.
This trip has been undeniably fun and a great experience for me, and I feel the need to reiterate that fact as often as possible to prove that I am expressing at least some amount of gratitude. One of the things I’ve learned, though, is that things are far from being cut and dry. Surprise, surprise. I’ve here written about my social battery, which I only realised existed recently, but what that means for me is that I now have a new factor to think about when thinking about my future. I have to keep reminding myself that with these new ‘revelations’, I should no longer be bound by the same lofty expectations I previously held, and that I am well within my rights to adjust and grow, and to plainly be a different person.
The other strange part of this whole realisation, I’ve found, is that I’m now constantly on the search for the next thing that will change in my life or that I’ll learn about myself. I’ve drawn a lot of conclusions about myself through undeniably flawed hypotheticals that have unfortunately been substantiated in my mind as fact. This process of growth, though, if it can be called that, is an almost entirely accidental one that happens the more I push myself or simply enter new environments and situations. As a result, I don’t have to worry about looking out at all, I can be comfortable with the knowledge that I will change, whether I want to or not. Having just written that sentence, it is occurring to me how truly simple the conclusions of these entries end up being. At least I’m reaching them, though.