the world is your playground! have fun!

Somewhere, someone decided life needed borders: timelines, five-year plans, appropriate age to begin, appropriate dreams to outgrow. Entire systems built by people no less frightened and confused than you are now; anxious people who needed their worlds to feel more legible and tangible, a way of coping with the fact that reality is neither. This isn't pessimistic criticism, if you assumed it is. Consider it a reframing: If the rules are made up, you can simply construct different ones. Why do you need permission to become a changed version of yourself? To pursue something new, to leave, to begin again, to build a definition of success that nobody claps for, but you're finally breathing inside of? You get to decide what counts as a good day, good life, good enough reason to do something. The rules you're living by right now — did you willingly choose them, or did you inherit them and forgot to ever question them? Are you running on someone else's operating system? The whole world is…