is it normal to feel lost in life?

throughout my entire life, i’ve often felt lost. while many people said that feeling lost is often experienced by young adults when they go through quarter life crisis, well i have started feeling lost early in life. not when i was in my “quarter” of life (usually mid 20 —i’m not even in there yet), but maybe starting around 15 to 16, ’til now.

what people usually think when they feel lost?

i’ve had many thoughts when i feel lost. the thoughts of escaping to somewhere far away where i could start a new life. the thoughts of how fun it must be to live a life where we are passionate about what we do —daydreaming. the thoughts of blaming myself, thinking how can i be this lazy or unmotivated when in reality i haven’t achieved or done anything. the thoughts of blaming people around me of how they treated me, how they saw me, how they judged me. the thoughts of finding ways to end my life in a least painful way. the thoughts of wondering, what is exactly i’m doing in life… my purpose in life, the meaning of my life.

have these thoughts ever crossed your mind when you were feeling lost? are these thoughts included as a part of feeling lost? are these thoughts… valid?

trust me when i say i have done and went through a lot of moments in my life where i felt lost. i don’t know what i like, i don’t know what i want to do in life, i don’t know why i do things, i don’t know why nothing excites me, i don’t know why i get bored easily with life and stuff. i don’t know a lot of things, and feelings, in myself, and which made myself alco curious… is this normal? and how do i stop these thoughts from occurring? or at least… the reason, or the answer, would be better.

apart from only thinking and feeling, i have also looked for ways on how to stop that. reading articles, watching videos on youtube, reading self-help books. all of that… are temporary. i don’t know where it goes wrong. is it in myself, or is it in those things? is it myself that always fall in the same hole, or is it those method or ways that are not the real solution?

if there is anything i could get from how often i felt lost in my entire life, then it would be on how fragile and confusing it is to be a human. i, or we, as human often desire to be free, have our own freedom, to do things, to think, to have the knowledge that we have endless choice to choose in life. but when we really have it in our hands, we often took it as feeling lost (maybe it shouldn’t be “we”, it should be “i”). very confusing, right? and also very wobbly, unsteady. so what do i actually want?

i don’t know. i never knew, and will not know as well. it is so mysterious. it is a pandora box that i never have the courage to open. no matter how lost i am, i don’t think i will want to know the final destination of this life that i have now. i don’t think i’ll be able to handle the pressure. it’s good if i could accept it no matter if it’s good or bad. but what if i couldn’t accept? what if i got swayed by the answer? if i finish this life not so long after i know the answer, maybe it won’t be too bad. but what if i still have to live long after that? will i able to handle it? after all, we all will die at one point. this life is so finite that all i could think about whenever i feel lost is that all human is actually only waiting our turn to die. we are all the same in that term. what makes us different is how we utilize the time in between, whether we only wait doing nothing, or we wait doing something.

right now, i am actually standing on those two circumstances. one is where i am so curious about my calling, my purpose, my destiny, and one is where i am afraid to know it all. so wobbly, so lost.

so, whenever these thoughts come, and the feeling of lost arises, i only will do one thing. i will do whatever i have in front of my eyes as well as i could. i could only maximize whatever i could do in the moment, while preparing myself for the best, whether it is to get swarmed by the inside of the pandora box, or to actually go away forever from this finite life.

maybe… feeling lost is not so bad anymore. maybe i already get accustomed to it.

Photo by Daniel Jensen on Unsplash