At least I have the shoes

Do you ever pause for a moment and look at your life? Do you ever have that shocked feeling that where you are is so not where you thought you’d be? You can’t figure out how you got here, how all those plans you made got switched around.

And you’re not discontent. In fact, you’re pretty damned happy. But still, how did this happen?

I never imagined I’d end up where I am. I figured I’d lead a cosmopolitan life – that I’d see the world and then I’d change it; that I’d be a bigshot lawyer or a journalist or a novelist or a beloved professor or an influential (in the good sense) politician; that I’d have the world at my feet, and that those feet would be clad in incredible shoes.

Instead I’m remarkably average and astonishingly domestic. I’m married (at a relatively young age). My job is, at best, tolerable, and most days it’s incredibly boring. What do you do for a living? Oh, I make paperwork. I have a home with comfortably ragged and mis-matched furniture. A dog. I knit in public. I’ve developed a strange love for cooking. One of my greatest joys is opening my home to friends, enjoying their company, their laughter, the easy companionship.

My job is anything but influential and bigshot-like. I sit in a badly climate-controlled office and count hours until I can go home. My dreams of writing a novel (or anything more complicated than a blog post) are currently buried because the very idea of spending more time in front of a computer after work makes me twitch. I’m not traveling the world or changing it. The world is most certainly not at my feet. In fact, I sometimes get the feeling that I’m at the world’s feet and the world is waiting for me to stand up so it can sucker punch me.

I’m just here. Me.

But at least I have the shoes.