Trapped

When I started going to school last Fall, I embarked upon a new Path of Dreams.  I had been avoiding this Path for a very long time because I always felt that dreaming and setting goals for myself was futile.  The way my life was arranged meant that we moved (usually to a new country) every 3 years, which almost necessarily meant that there was no point in my investing any sort of energy in a job/career or any kind of long-term project as I would have to give it up as soon as it all started coming together.  So I never allowed myself to invest in Me.  What happened was that, over the years, I lost myself -- almost completely.  I forgot about all the things that mattered to me most and all the little parts that made me the Person I used to be and, more importantly, the Person I used to like being.

About 5 years ago, during a trip to Japan (without husband or children), I started to remember some of those ingredients that had previously gone into the concoction of Me.  I returned home and determined to add those things back into my life.  Over the course of the following years, I did just that and started to regain some of my former self. 

When my husband and I began couples counselling two years ago, I went into it fairly blindly, having no idea how much individual therapy I needed. The issues I've encountered have been profound and I've done a lot of work on myself over the past couple of years, which is, I believe, a large part of what led me to the brave step of investing in my future, going back to school and happily rediscovering many long-lost parts of myself along the way.

The problem is that in doing so, I gave myself over - completely - to a false sense of security and to a false reality.  Recently, I have had very many reminders of the real reality that I live: that despite my thinking that I have some control over the direction in which my life is headed, I really don't.  At all.  My future hangs in the balance of people who, for the most part, don't know me and don't care about me in the slightest.  I am aware that in my reality, I don't get to make any decisions -- at least not any that really matter.  Decisions will be made and I will follow along because I have no other choice.  In a way, I am completely trapped -- in an admittedly, beautiful and ornate cage of my own making, but it is a cage nonetheless.  In the end, it doesn't really matter what I want.  I may be allowed to take little detours every now and then - like going to school - but the path I follow is not mine to choose.

My therapist says that unless I am truly free to choose my own path -- be it career, relationship or otherwise -- I will never truly be happy.  I guess there won't be much true happiness in my future...