Tick tock, tick tock

[beandelphiki]

The second-last day of school, I was finishing up developing some photographs for Comm Tech. Two girls in my class, Ruth and Shanty, were having this conversation in the darkroom about how we all should approach the future, now that we're finished high school.

They seemed to agree that we shouldn't rush to anything. They agreed it was a good idea to take a year off; see the world, go places, do things. We shouldn't feel that we have to know what we're going to be doing with our lives yet; we have time to relax and explore our options.

And yada, yada, yada.

I told Shanty a little later that I DO feel rushed, more and more as the years go by. Laugh if you want, and tell me I'm still so young - tell me I'm crazy for pretending to be older than I am. But I honestly feel that time is of the essence, and I'm running out of it.

I've felt like this every since I was very little - that I'm somehow doomed to die young. The number 30 is a gong in my head, as is the word cancer - with the history of cancer in my family, I will be not the slightest bit surprised to get it. So I have a little more than a decade in which to make something of my life, at least by my estimate.

Now maybe it's possible I feel I will die by age thirty because I have internalized society's conceit that life ends at that point. And maybe I felt that way when I was young because I could not imagine a future where I had to be a woman, so I did not imagine one at all. Maybe there is NOTHING to what I feel.

But it stills makes me sick to my stomach with panic when I consider that I really don't have any idea what I want to do with my life. Well, okay, I have ideas...but nothing I feel confident about.

And that panics me because I feel this overwhelming compulsion to DO something with my life, to make some kind of mark, to change something. And I don't have TIME.

I don't have time.