The Hope Is in the Opus

It took me a few hours to realize I felt better.

Nothing had been resolved. The ambiguity of my life was still difficult to manage. The decisions waiting for me had not politely made themselves while I was otherwise occupied.

But I felt lighter. There was room in my head for something besides anxiety and overwhelm. I’d had a good conversation, an unguarded one. Normal, even. Which is an annoyingly simple explanation for such a substantial improvement in my outlook.

What’s funny is that I’m not a phone person. An unexpected call generally feels like an administrative failure. Surely there was a text-based solution? panics in millennial

But someone reached out, and I answered. Someone with whom conversation usually comes with constraints. This time, there was room to be open. To talk without monitoring quite so carefully what I could say.

Hours later, I realized I wasn’t negotiating with my brain for executive function. I felt present in my own life.

And I thought: This. This is what I want more of.

An AI-enabled shuffle recently threw “Hopeless Opus” by Imagine Dragons into my rotation. A little presumptuous of the algorithm to name my current life status, but here we are. There’s something in its playful self-criticism that feels familiar. I’m trying to make a life, and I have considerable editorial concerns about the work in progress.

Some days, California feels like a choice I’m still making with curiosity and intention. Other days, I wonder whether I’ve just given my uncertainty a more expensive address.

I wanted distance. I wanted room to heal, to learn how to relax, to be present. I have some of that room now, and I’m discovering how easy it is to fill it with questions about whether I’m using it correctly.

Apparently, I’m pretty damn good at turning rest into a performance review. Raise your hand if you’re surprised by this. No one? Right.

That said, I can spend a remarkable amount of time reviewing the evidence against myself.

What I should have recognized sooner. What I could have said differently. How much I might have contributed to the problems. Whether being called a failure repeatedly meant I’d been wrong about my own competence.

Once I get going, nearly anything can be entered into evidence. A difficult conversation. An unanswered question. An afternoon when I can’t seem to get much done. There are things I need to own, for peace of mind and because I value authenticity and accountability. I want to understand my part in my own life. I also want to learn how to finish that examination and go make dinner.

For a long time, I’ve lived with constant pain and kept going. I stayed on. I performed, anticipated, adjusted. When expectations changed, I tried to catch up. I became very capable of functioning that way. I took pride in being able to manage so much, even when I was struggling.

Now I’m trying to understand what it costs me to keep doing it, and which parts of that way of living I’m still carrying into a life where I hoped to feel different.

I’m in California with no debts, no dependents, and some distance from the life I knew. There’s freedom in that. I know it, and I want to enjoy it. And I swear I’m learning how to relax. It’s just that I would appreciate clearer instructions and perhaps a progress indicator.

Being present is difficult when you’re accustomed to preparing for what comes next. Even a quiet moment can become an opportunity to assess whether I’m doing enough. Am I growing? Making the right choices? Taking full advantage of my expensive geographical plot development?

I still have ambition. There are things I want to build, work I want to do, and experiences I want to have. I’m learning to let that ambition take a shape that makes sense for me.

Fulfillment looks different now, too. I’m still figuring out the language for it.

I want to enjoy an ordinary day without spending half of it bracing. I want room to speak honestly. I want to notice where I am while I’m there.

These sound like modest requests until I think about how much of my life I’ve spent struggling to feel that way. This recent conversation gave me a few hours of feeling balanced. I hadn’t realized how much I needed the feeling until I noticed it was there.

Someone had reached out. I’d been able to talk openly. For a while afterward, I could move through my life without examining every difficult part of it.

I’m still facing decisions I don’t want to make. I’m still lonely and unsure of, well, a lot of things. A good call hasn’t made those things disappear.

But as I question what I’m creating here, I want to remember that evening, too. It belongs in the account alongside the uncertainty and the difficult conversations: a few ordinary hours when I felt like myself and could breathe a little easier.

I want to take that feeling seriously.

I’ve spent years asking myself how much more I can handle. I’d like to spend some time finding out what helps me feel happy.