a complex thought about traveling, anxiety, & millennials
“Can you understand? Someone, somewhere, can you understand me a little, love me a little? For all my despair, for all my ideals, for all that - I love life. But it is hard, and I have so much - so very much to learn.” - Sylvia Plath
Sylvia Plath would understand.
does anyone else feel the urge to change something in their life every now & then? there’s this dark chasm that lives inside of me that reaches my brain every now and again. the chasm makes me want to do something, like chop my hair off, or get a tattoo, or uproot my whole life and movie to New York City and be poor. maybe it just arises this time of year, when everyone seems to reflect on the past. but when i reflect on the past, it makes me want to change my future drastically. i never want to stay stagnant in life. i am a person who constantly inhales change, and loves it; i thrive off change. if i go too long when things are the same, the cogs in my brain start to malfunction. maybe that’s my anxiety getting in the way, things can’t stay the way they are for too long, do something. anything. isn’t that such a millennial thing to say? i hate it, but it’s who i am.
the simplest answer to this query is to travel, and have a change of scenery for a brief moment. but unfortunately, this year has not granted me that as much as i want. people often ask me (and by people, i mean boomers) why this generation loves to travel so much? why aren’t we getting married and settling down? why aren’t we having children at 22 years old? and the simplest answer i can come up with is that things change. the world is not what it once was. people are different. travel is cheaper than it used to be when our parents grew up. houses are more expensive, so we’re not getting those easily, and we often live with roommates well into our 30’s. and as for children, who wants to bring a child into this world right now that is so chaotic? out of all my close high school friends, really only one person has had a child in the past 10 years. that’s it. the question then arises, are we (millennials) selfish? and the answer is, possibly. i tend to be a little selfish sometimes, wanting to do things my way, cut my hair, eat carbs, etc… but the true explanation is deeper than that. did you know that 46.6 million U.S. adults struggle with mental illnesses, such as anxiety disorder, according to the National Institute of Mental Health?
this world (like myself) is not stagnant; it is ever-changing. there’s poverty, political angst, war, discrimination everywhere we go, all over the news. there’s literally no getting away from it if you have a smartphone. that’s why i think this generation feels things on a deeper level than previous generations. is social media bad for our psyche? probably so. but we’re beyond fixing that now. we must deal with the cards we’ve been dealt - i have been doing that my whole life. maybe that’s why my generation is addicted to things like alcohol and caffeine and traveling… just a brief solace to forget the world around us, and forget the cards we’ve been dealt.
and is that so bad? wanting to live in a dream-like utopia? i think dreaming is nice. people often forget how. the weight of the world is too much to carry. no one can do it. i certainly can’t, i’d be sent to the asylum. and i think others would agree with me, especially this year, that this world is too much to bear. i don’t want “normal” things, but what is normal anyways? we make our own normal, and older generations are having a hard time understanding us for that reason. i would say as far as 2020 goes, we’ve stopped caring about money, and politics, and tangible items. the things we want are things we can’t have right now, like movies, and traveling, and going out to dinner every night because we hate cooking! and no discrimination for the color of our skin or who we choose to be!
i’m not on here to be a therapist, a mother, a judge, or a scholar, and i certainly don’t speak for everyone. i’m just here to bring light to what i see and feel on a daily basis as a millennial who understands Sylvia Plath. i love movies and traveling, and bursts of serotonin, and coffee and poetry, and Instagram, and writing on my blog. if that’s not the truest essence of a millennial, then i don’t know what is. i do love life, unlike Sylvia Plath who later took her own, but as she says, i have so, so much to learn.
-memento mori
