Today I snapped up from my computer, my breath short with realization, and had an epiphany: I’m boring.
While this seems alarming, pessimistic, or downright depressing, it’s not. You see, in today’s world of hyperactive Instagram adventurers, we refuse to acknowledge the monotonous aspects of our lives. What you’re doing on a Monday simply is not sexy enough to be given a second thought. But what if it is?
It’s easy to gloss over a weekday to get to a weekend, but in the process, we lose something. We seemingly live more adventurous lives than ever yet melancholy is at record highs, nearly everyone is medicated, and we’re all still…lost. Here’s my inkling as to why: we’re bored. We focus so much on the peaks of escapism—how far can I go, how unique can I make this trip—that we begin to glaze over how we live our everyday lives. It’s in these neglectful moments that your freak flag begins to fade and a girl’s trip to Thailand in June won’t be enough to brighten it up again.
You get comfortable, you feel satiated from one-off experiences, and boom—you wake up one day and you’re boring. You were too focused on the peaks to realize you’re living in a goddamn smog-choked valley.
So yes, today I ‘woke up’, if you will, in the literal smog-choked valley of Salt Lake City and realized that life was feeling excessively cyclical. I’ve checked the boxes of a good boyfriend, a steady job, a nice apartment, some trips to look forward to, but still feel…meh. It’s a sensation that I’ve toiled with nearly every day for the past 2 years. As more boxes get checked, the void expands. The question reverberates louder in my mind, “Why am I so empty?”
I recognize the extreme privilege embedded in this question, but nonetheless, it is a pervasive feeling that remains leached in society. The more “successful” we become, the less we have to fight for what we want, the more complacent we get in developing the intangible—our soul purposes, our primal desire to be free.
While it now seems obvious as I write this, I have been mistaking emptiness for boredom. And it’s not my boyfriend’s fault or my boss’s fault that I got here—it’s mine. It was the choice to sleep in my bed instead of on the ground under the stars, it was the decision to go to the climbing gym instead of ramblin’ the Cam down to Joe’s Valley, and it was the fear of stepping out on my own after getting so used to the comfort of another human being. These revelations don’t upset me, they’re like fire in the pistons. They’re like a dye job for my freak flag.
Now that I’ve finally cleared my head, I can revel in the fun part—enabling myself on a daily basis to let my freak flag fly. The key here is a focus on presence, an appreciation of each day and how I can use that day to 1. have a great time and 2. get closer to being truly free. As a creative, this means putting time into creating for myself and flexing boundaries, into thinking about how I can fulfill myself and not getting sucked into the endless vortex of fulfilling others’ visions. I’ve set some long term goals that have instantaneously imbued each day with purpose and I’m feeling curious about life again; about stepping into the unknown and trading comfort for the raw feeling of being alive.