Today, I am 18 years old. Life is opening up to me to be a beautiful cacophony of miracles and discoveries defined by the self.
For years, I was guided by a chorus of “I have much to do and say and prove …” and this feeds into itself until I realize that I’m just making it all up to keep myself afloat.
Does anyone truly know?
I believe there is a God, but their name is not Shahana or John or Jamal.
God, or all-truth- all-answering comfort- is inherently inhuman. Therefore no one, no one alive is above me or you.
No one can tell you with certainty what you are here to do. You don’t even have to know. The unsolvable paradox is in needing an answer to begin with. In needing to provide and prove an ultimate answer to yourself, over and over again. The thing is, the question of this life is not about the answer at all.
Today, I am 18 years old. Every passing year proves that I, in my youth, am disproportionately concerned with troubles that were never mine to bear.
And moreso, can our anxieties ever be guided down the correct path when their master is young and brutalized?
How can scorned naiveté expect to have the answers to questions she cannot yet fully conceptualize?
In my youth, I’ve carried what I could not control, buried what I was not yet ready to feel, and melted under the heat of perceptual distortion, amplified by a sort of stunted egocentrism.
(I now know what I can only ever admit to myself, and can only hope others will realize for themselves; it is a truth so brutal that it must never be preached, never be forced through the walls of your home by the unfeeling intruder: To feel as deeply as we do in our youth is as valid as it is egocentric, when the ultimate price you might have to pay is your own life.)
To feel as deeply as we do in our youth is as valid as it is egocentric, when the ultimate price you might have to pay is your own life
Yet, it is … so painful.
To feel yourself being melted into the waxy crevices that have been carved for you by those who aren’t friends. All the while, you are shouting to be heard, sobbing to be pitied, reaching out to be held. Somehow people will see your cries as condemnable rather than human.
That is the first heartbreak I faced.
What the world forgets is that the ground beneath you is endlessly precarious when you are in your youth. The pressure to perform to perfection all the while may have been self-inflicted, but please understand: this was not a self I chose. At around 12, maybe 13, I started melting.
Over the years I tore through skin and ripped through clothing to try and claw out answers, but that did not make them come any faster. Now I look back and see how okay it was to feel unsure. I could have chalked it up to knowing that your place in the world is unknowable.
Today, I am 18 years old. I’ve learned that your place in the world is not quantifiable, nor definable by any human. Most are hardly able to decipher theirs for themselves.
The answer may just be to stop seeking answers. Whether sought internally or externally, that kind of misinformed hunger will always be deprived. No nobility or self-martyred woe will self-actualize you out of your mistake. No pretty box and bow can hide the fact that there is something colossal, perhaps unattainable, to this living thing.
You can be angry at the world, you can curse its cold carvers. But you can only sit with yourself in the end. At this, your joy deserves to be explosive. Hold your unanswered questions close to your chest to remind yourself of how far you’ve come.
If you are alive, be what you already are and you are already answered.
Deya Nurani is a student based in the US.
