As human beings, we need the closure of cycles. It’s a way to cope with life itself, helping us process experiences, find meaning, and move forward. The end of the year is here, and inevitably I become more reflective. I analyse the passage of time—where I'm are standing, who is by my side, and who is not. The lessons, the pains, the loves. I look back, amazed by life's constant flow through me.
Do you feel like this?
As I write and think about this, my heart pounds strongly in my chest. The weight of it hits me especially hard, as 2024 marks the end of my twenties.
Today, I am writing from a café on an island in Indonesia, alone at the end of the year. While it might seem idyllic, there's another side to this story, one I'll share another time. If you had asked me at the beginning of the year, I never would have imagined being here like this.
What? I had other plans!
Ha. It amuses me how I naively underestimate the forces of the universe—whatever you call them: energies, God—and how I seem to repeat this pattern each year. But this time feels different.
I feel like this year, I’m a different person from who I expected to be or who I was supposed to be. The realisation of this—and the subsequent distancing from those 'expectations,' which were largely external—was a significant turning point. In a moment of pure honesty and awareness with myself, that “oh, I am not who I thought I was going to be” was a powerful turning point, marking a new beginning for me. This awakening, though it sounds pleasant in words, was accompanied by pain and a sense of mourning for that idealised self, a fantasy built on adopted external expectations.
This mourning—for the loss of that imagined self—propels me toward a different way of living.
Living differently opens me up to new thoughts. I've reached a point where I no longer feel the need to know the ending of my life's story to take the next step. The 'aesthetic' narrative I'd constructed for myself—one that fit neatly into a pre-established, safe, and familiar mould—no longer resonates.
Now, I feel like I can’t tell where my life is going. It feels like a blank map.
Scary and beautiful, all at once.
Finding my own voice and crafting my own narrative means relinquishing the need to predetermine the outcome, to stop telling myself a story and instead live it fully.
As I write, emotion wells up within me and writing becomes a therapeutic journey into my inner world, seeking answers to my deepest questions and taking me to my truest self, where all that remains is to nurture my self-love, free of judgment.
I look at the beginning of this story without an end in sight. I like to think that life will take me to the best port,
where the only luggage I need is my own heart.
Ps: I invite you to listen to this song “Heavenly - Resavoir” which was playing in the background while i was writing these words.
With love,
María.