You Can In Fact, Make This Shit Up

Resisting the urge to begin this entry with some cliche about life, how short it is, if you blink you’ll miss it etc… but it’s true. Life is short and for most people we spend an infinite amount of time trying to find meaning in it.

When we are born we are a blank canvas. A story ready to be written. An endless amount of pages ready to be tattooed in ink documenting all of our experiences, milestones, pitfalls, emotions and everything else that comes with being human.

A lot of our story is influenced in our early years by the people and environment we are raised in. Unfortunately for some that environment is less than ideal. For others it is an immediate head start in life.

When we get to a stage where we can stand on our own two feet, make our own decisions about where to live, who to build a life with and what kind of career we want to pursue, we begin to experience life in a more relative state. We are impacted directly by the things our caregivers protected us from.

Personally I grew up in a idillic home believing that my parents had it all together.

Little did I know that back in the late 80’s and early 90’s interest rates were at 18% and after all the bills were accounted for each week they had $11 left. They chose to spend that $11 on a pizza and hiring a movie.

As I have grown into an adult and approach my 40’s in the coming years I’ve had my fair share of ups and downs. Maybe it’s recency bias but it has certainly felt like there’s been bigger downs than ups.

But something that I’ve wrestled with is the feeling like I don’t know what I’m doing.

I’ve placed this expectation on where I should be and what I should be doing by my current age of 36 years and felt like at any given moment I’ve just been making everything up as I go and believing that I was wrong or incapable of achieving certain things.

Ok, now it’s time for the cliche.

We aren’t given an instruction manual on how to live a life worth living.

None of us know what the fuck we’re doing most of the time and you can in fact, make this shit up. The more I’ve come to realise this, the happier and more at peace I’ve felt about all of my past decisions (mostly the questionable ones) because of the lessons I’ve learnt along the way.

Most of the time our decisions are fucking educated guesses. We choose a partner we believe is right for us but we never really know until we’ve lived the experience.

We choose a career we believe we are passionate about but when you’re in the trenches in the middle of the year, the middle of the day on a Wednesday and things aren’t going right, you begin to question whether the passion is still there.

One of the biggest guesses is deciding to become a parent. You can get all the advice in the world but a lot of the time, you just have to make shit up and hope it turns out alright.

No one has it figured out.

No one is living from the ‘how to live life’ playbook. It doesn’t exist.

You can in fact, make this shit up.

So fill your pages with a story worth telling.