Emerging Adulthood

My post-college years were marked with habitual resident changes and failed romances. Since I was small I developed beliefs and values (some good and some not so good) all as a result of my environment and pressures from society/peers to conform. College hadn't prepared me for this. Hell, life hadn't prepare me for this. My eye yet to have opened enough to recognize omens and signs. I had felt lonely and confused before, but not like this. College didn't teach me about the universal laws, the power of thought, how to balance a check book, School didn't teach me how that 9 digit number they give you at birth would follow me around for my entire life hindering or helping along the way. They didn't teach me about de-citizenship. They didn't teach me about different religions, different schools of thought. I thought the fact that I didn't have it figured out by the time I left college and my friends "did"... made me "a loser". All my college friends were settling into their careers, their new adult lives. Maryam was free. Free of any constraints from a "job" or a relationship or children. I was free. Free from college, free from parental control, free from that small town I grew up in, free from that small town I went to college in. I had arrived. Atlanta, Georgia... 2010

25. Confused as to why I am, sitting alone in an apartment I can't afford, on a leaky air mattress--starving. College didn't teach me about my credit score or stocks and bonds --neither did my parents. But how could they teach me what they themselves did not know? Heterogeneity. 25... I thought I was ready for this... to go gamble on myself, my dreams. I thought I knew it all. I thought I was supposed to have it all figured out. My self-identity ... I was suppose to be comfortable in that. I was suppose to know what I wanted out of life and love. I was supposed to know what I wanted to "do for a living. Back then it was a lot about proving myself. Back then it was a lot about "making it" and proving people wrong. I wasn't doing anything for me. I wasn't doing anything for my soul. I'm not sure I even knew what a soul was. Where was it? How do you search for it?  If happiness was the difference between what you expected out of life and what you actually got, I was fucked. What was this? I thought everything was supposed to fall into place. It always had for me.

I started thinking something was wrong with me, maybe I shouldn't have moved to Atlanta. Maybe I shouldn't be chasing "dreams". Maybe I'm not talented enough to be successful in the arts. Maybe I shouldn't have quit my 9-5. Maybe I should just go get another 9-5.  Maybe I should go back to school (at least my Grandmother would support me, again). I just didn't accept myself and it seemed like no one else was accepting this facade of me either. I screamed to the world that I did accept myself--that "I knew myself", by giving myself alter-egos and fake alias names. I was a kid, posing as an adult. I had spent so much of my life working toward what/who I "thought" I should be instead of just BEING. Setting life goals that turned out to mean nothing to me. At 25, I had experienced huge bouts of self-doubt and hatred, and had suffered. This couldn't be life. Feeling like an outsider. Feeling like a fraud inside your own body. And at my worst, feeling as though I did not truly exist. Without a group to neatly " fit" into, I lost all sense of identity.

29. 6 weeks until "30". What is age, really? Nothing. Who am I? More important. For the first time in my life, I am now aware enough to take charge of my own revolution, consciously choosing to evolve to a higher state of being. I feel fearless. I feel strong. I feel vocal. I feel IN charge of my life. I feel grateful. I feel favored. I feel blessed. A spiritual being having a human experience. "Weary of the ways of unconsciousness, the personal and collective egoic insanity that's evident in humankind's myriad forms of suffering. I feel hopeful and I feel LOVE.