Stuck in the middle zone

I’m a month away from my twenty-second birthday. And that doesn’t only mean Taylor Swift is probably getting a new Ferrari, it also means I might have recently gone through one of my last major crisis events, according to Lev Vygodsky’s theory of cognitive development.

Spending a fair amount of time on social media, and especially up until recently on Twitter, I saw many peers sharing that they’re going through a period of time, where they feel they’ve made the wrong choice; that their lives are coming to a dead-end. Being the ambitious, self-centered and clear about my wishes and needs myself, I couldn’t relate less to this wave of uncertainty that was plaguing people in my generation. But lately I’m starting to feel this exact way more and more to the point I question my goals and dreams.

In my experience, life always finds a way and no matter what I do to derail myself from what’s meant for me, I always end up on the same track. This leaves me in a semi-state of knowing the future and not knowing what’s coming at all. While it may seem exciting, it answers way more questions than I have to ask, so it does make me fearful, since I’m not entirely sure this path of mine won’t throw me into a ditch.

I’ve always romanticized ordinary life, where I’m unnoticeable and blend with the picture, visually and cognitively, but that has never, for the twenty-two years of me, ever, not even once, happened. I’m starting to think this is a plot.

The way I deal with this form of a mild existential crisis however is that I adapt my knowledge to what in my experience I’ve learned the future may be. After trying to run away from film-making, as it is indeed stressful, I always get dragged back to it, even to the point of covering the bare minimum to be admitted to study in the National Film Academy here, which is notorious for being ‘hard to enter – hard to graduate.’ On a different note, I still chose to study Sound Design and Engineering, since to me that’s the field most open for learning.

Instead of asking myself more and more questions, I tried to figure out and recognized the issue and decided to work with the resources I’m provided, which I do acknowledge are a fair amount. But it does raise the question: where does this pre-planned trajectory come from? And who am I? Again, as much as I’m in the know about at least the sketch of what my future looks like, I really can’t make out what the colors could be, so I guess I’ll have to stick around to find out.