what am i doing here?

It always begins the same way; with an ending. Finals week, the long-dreaded culmination of months of sleepless nights and meticulously highlighted notes, had finally come to a close. This semester felt heavier than most; we hadn’t juggled this many subjects since my first year, and something about it felt hauntingly familiar, almost PTSD-esque in the way it pulled me back into an older version of myself. When the last paper was done, I expected relief, a rush of freedom after weeks of being bound to deadlines and revision schedules. Instead, what I felt was something far more unsettling.

Untethered.

It was as though the weight that had been pressing down on me was also the very thing keeping me grounded. Without it, I wasn’t lighter — I was lost. For a week, finals had consumed every waking moment. And now that they were over, I was left staring into an unfamiliar quiet, unsure of what to do with the space that remained.

What am I doing here?
In this degree, in this city, with these people?
What exactly am I chasing?
What do I want from all of this, and perhaps more importantly — how do I get there?

I’ve always prided myself on being someone who likes choices. The ability to weigh different options, to plan for contingencies, has always given me a strange sense of control. If Plan A fails, Plan B is waiting in the wings; a comforting illusion that I am steering my own life rather than simply drifting through it. And yet, despite my love for having options, I am realizing just how paralyzing decision-making can be. Not because I am careless or indecisive, but because I cannot seem to choose without first carrying the weight of every possible outcome.

The “what ifs” linger long after the decisions have been made.
What if I had chosen differently?
What would my life look like then?

It’s a futile exercise imagining the parallel lives I might have lived had I zigged instead of zagged, and yet it offers a strange kind of solace. A reprieve from the chaos of my current life, which, ironically enough, is nothing more than the sum of my own choices. And even the life I idealize, the one that exists in the hazy realm of all the choices I didn’t make, is a sum of my choices; only of the choices I didn’t make.

We are living, at most, half a life, she thought. There was the life that you lived, which consisted of the choices you made. And then, there was the other life, the one that was the things you hadn’t chosen. And sometimes, this other life felt as palpable as the one you were living. Sometimes, it felt as if you might be walking down Brattle Street, and without warning, you could slip into this other life, like Alice falling down the rabbit hole that lead to Wonderland. You would end a different version of yourself, in some other town. But it wouldn’t be strange like Wonderland, not at all. Because you would have expected all along that it could have turned out that way. You would feel relief, because you had always wondered what the other life would have looked like, and there you were.

~an excerpt from Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, by Gabrielle Zevin

So where does this feeling of inadequacy come from?

I made these decisions with the best of intentions and abilities I had at the time. I was sure I wouldn’t regret them, and, truthfully, I don’t. What I feel instead is something harder to name: a sense of unfamiliarity with the life I’ve built for myself.

It’s like waking up in a room you recognize but don’t entirely feel at home in. The furniture is yours, the walls painted in colors you chose, but something still feels slightly out of place. I’ve started to realise that even our most careful choices come with unforeseen costs, that every path we take inevitably leaves behind a trail of versions of ourselves we will never meet.

Maybe we are meant to feel a little lost, because certainty has a way of keeping us stagnant while uncertainty keeps us searching, reaching, becoming.

On days like today, when the noise has quieted and all that remains is the echo of my own thoughts, the urge to find answers is overwhelming.

I am not behind.
I am not wrong for feeling this way.
I am not less because I don’t have all the answers yet.