Maybe In Another Life

“I am just going to do my best and live under the assumption that if there are things in this life that we are supposed to do, if there are people in this world that we are supposed to love, we will find them. In time.”

As I lay in my bed and think about my plans for the summer, or my plans for the fall, I wake up to a new day and realize it is only January. To worry about the future and to plan for what's to come is to study for an exam I am taking in May when there are exams to take next week. Getting so caught up in the future that you forget you are living in the present is one of my biggest fears in life. Watching life consistently pass me by without noticing it.

I'm sure others feel this way, so I'm not going to pretend like I am alone in this, because the people I talk to sometimes don’t have any more answers than I do. How do you live at the moment? How do you truly be where your feet are? Is there a secret code that I don’t know about? Maybe I should be on antidepressants and stop myself from thinking at all. I think too much.

I'm not writing this to provide people with any answers, because I don’t really have anything about anything. But there is no better feeling than reading something somewhere on the internet that is the exact same thing that you feel, so maybe this can be that “thing on the internet” that someone finds <3

With everything in our lives, there are a series of doors that stand in front of us. We choose one, we open it, and with that opening we are simultaneously closing every other door that we could have chosen. Fuck. What if we didn't choose the right one? What if I chose to go to Umass and pursue a psychology degree when another door led me down the path of a professional photographer living on the west coast and everything I ever wanted in this room was in the room I didn't choose to open the door to.

I have to hold on to the hope that everything happens for a reason or else my life will completely crumble beneath my feet. I do truly believe in that. I genuinely believe that every single thing in my life happens for a reason, that I am exactly where I am meant to be at this very moment. But sometimes when i'm under the covers in my bed that I haven't left for days, in the dark, deep in a depressive state, I think to myself “what if nothing happens for a reason” and for a split second I feel existential dread, and then it passes, because it has to or I feel like I will die.

The small choices that we make are never as small as you really think they are. You know what I'm talking about. The choice to go home or stay out. The choice to go to class or not go to class. With every single decision we make in our lives, the outcome of the two are never going to be the same. This can be scary or it can be comforting. On one end of the spectrum, you chose to go home from the bar at midnight. You ride in the uber to your house with your friends but realize you don't want to go to sleep yet, so you end up at a house party or post game with a group of people. You meet someone there and you fall in love. Kids, this is how I met your father! On the contrary, you decide to stay out late at the bar, go home at 3 am, and go to bed. On campus the next day, you just so happen to be in class with the man who would have been the love of your life in another universe. You never talk in class, and you just live your own lives. In this universe, you never even know his name.

Life's funny like that. I believe in God and I believe in heaven. And at the same time I believe that there are different versions of ourselves out there in different universes living the life that we didn't choose to live. Choosing and picking the door that we didn't pick, and like I said, there are many of them. Do you ever feel connected to someone as soon as you meet them? Do you ever feel super comfortable with a stranger you've met only once or twice? Sometimes I think that it's because you are friends in a different life.

And there are different ways to think about the people that are currently in your life. It's interesting to think about how many of the people in your life would fill different roles if you picked another path. Take my roomates for example, in another life, one where I chose to room with someone else freshman year, maybe my roommates are just people that I consider acquaintances, or maybe they are just someone my friend dated, or maybe they aren't in my life at all, and i never met them. With that thought, I am thankful that my door led to them.

Sophomore year me and my two roommates decided that we should split up the following year. Which sucked. It was a sad feeling that we clashed so much living together that we had to split up. However, with that choice that was made, both parties met new people that became close friends, both of us lived with new people, and both of us made new lifelong friends. The beauty in something that once seemed so horrible. If you sit around and dwell on the unfairness of life and what is unfair and what is awful and be upset over everything that happens, you take yourself down a rabbit hole that is very hard to get out of. Most of the bad things that happen to us result in something good, and if we are closed off to the idea of that, then life just becomes a series of hard things that make it very easy to never be aware of the light at the end of the tunnel. You either choose to have hope or to not have hope everyday that you live, and the decision you make will change the way that you live your life. You have to believe that there is a method to all of this madness that life hits us with.

At the end of the day this shit can be really overwhelming. It is easy to freak yourself out and be torn between hundreds of choices. Being paralyzed with fear that you aren't making the right decision is going to close and lock every single door. One day you're worried about picking the right one, and then slowly all of the choices go away, and you are left with nothing, doing nothing with your life, and wondering where you went wrong. You must not stand still, you have to take a leap of faith every now and then and trust that the path you went down is the one that you were supposed to follow.

The best thing that we can do for ourselves is to recognize that no matter what way we end up living our lives, happiness is always going to be within us. Is it easy to think “what if in another universe I meant this person, or chose this career path, or lived in this state, or fell in love with someone else”. It's easy to trick yourself into thinking that something out there is better than what we have now. But we fail to realize that happiness can exist in many different forms. Yes, in another universe maybe you will find happiness in a different way, but this way that I am living right now is also perfectly fine, because I am also happy, and I am also alive. So maybe in another life the person you have a crush on is your significant other, and maybe in another life the band you love is actually just your best friends, and maybe in another life you could have been a cook or a scientist.

But you are not in another life. You are in this one. And this one is just as good.