Itchy

Sometimes I get tired of living with "it-could-be-worse" approach. I am dying to scream that it could be better. We must be grateful for what we have and I am so SO grateful. But I’ve started on the road that was too wide for me, now I am walking on this narrow path that keeps getting smaller. It’s suffocating to know that there are bigger roads out there I don’t dare to take. It’s like finally getting to your dream world of exquisite color and shape just to see all the beauty moving away from you, folding down like cardboard, leaving plainness and emptiness.

I’ve seen my mom withdrawing from the outer world for years, the tiny apartment being the sufficient fraction of the world, giving her enough refuge from disappointment. She likes reading history books because there she finds something she failed to discover in our present time. She embraced religion, which does nothing but prepares her to leave this world, redeem all the sins and leave. I’m sure there is a place for her in this world that she could love, where she could be different, it’s just that she gave up too soon.

I don’t want to go like this with submission and humility inflated enough to cover disappointment. I want to put up a fight, to show my teeth, to turn myself inside out, to see what’s hiding under the sea of layers.

You can’t suppress your wants, ignore that constant itching that’s meant to keep you moving forward because the world is so much bigger than playing it safe. If true happiness is strictly internal, why bother with the world then, why leave the house day after day in this self-proclaimed quest for adventure to bring your life to the desired fullness? Should we seek to take a bigger space in the vast world of possibilities or surrender to the safe smallness allocated to us by the restraint of our choices? Where can I find courage and inspiration to live bigger? Maybe it’s time to whisper to the universe the words I’ve been denying myself the right to even think of, “I am grateful, but give me more”.