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What I Found at the Edge of the Map
How to Keep Going When It Feels Like the End of the World
One of the biggest myths we’re sold when we’re all still young and stupid is that life is a straight-shot journey from Point A to Point B. All you have to do is follow the totally real life map we’re presented with, and everything will turn out just peachy.
Do this, then that. Be this, then become that. Follow the signs. Never stray. And if you do everything exactly right, you’ll reach your destination right on time. Oh, and there will be a trophy and a pizza party waiting for you when you arrive, of course.
But what no one tells you is this. The destination point keeps moving, which hardly matters, because no one ever clarifies where you’re supposed to be going in the first place. The map spontaneously redraws itself the moment you think you understand it.
And the edges? You eventually find out that they don’t mark the end of anything. They mark another big, fat, blank beginning you didn’t know to expect, and it’s even more ambiguous and vague than the last.
I spent an embarrassingly large chunk of my one life chasing the idea of “arriving.” At what, I don’t exactly know, although I assume it had something to do with success, love, healing, wholeness — the four horsemen of the…
