Live Metanoia

I don’t fear a lot of things in general in this life, but one of the circulating fears I do have and think about often is that I will be 60 years old and look back on my life and be filled with a deep regret.

I believe a lot of people have this fear as well so it’s not necessarily a rare feeling. 

It’s the regret that I didn’t get to do all the things that I dreamed of doing. That I sat on my goals and wants and put my aspirations on a shelf and settled for other people. That I calmed myself down and shut parts of myself away for other people. The biggest regret, and my biggest fear, is being disappointed in myself.  

Now I am not delusional in any sense on this topic. I understand how some goals and some dreams may change as we get older and we mature in life, but there’s always those one or two root dreams and goals that you have had since you were little that you’ve always wanted to accomplish. For example, I have always wanted to travel. I thought I could be a travel photographer and work for national geographic. Even crazier then that, when I was really young, I wanted to act and travel to different parts of the world to film movies. I thought about being a travel blogger, a travel agent, or something- anything. Anything where I could stand in the ancient buildings in Petra, Jordan and catch my breath in wonder or sing along with rowdy Irish people in an actual pub in Ireland. My biggest fear is I will look back at the 12-year-old me who wanted to travel the world and do so much and LIVE and realize I never got to do any of it, and the 12-year-old me will be so sad and disappointed because I ‘tamed’ the wild, fun parts of me to be something I am not for others who told me my dreams were out of reach.

Because I feel like that’s what we do as we get older, as we become adults. We stop dreaming. We stop wishing. We stop creating and we let this world with its heavy, heavy burdens pull us down and we let others tell us who to be.

I have always been a dreamer. I have always been a creator.

I have always been considered ‘too much’ in some ways. 

I have been called intimidating. I have been called charismatic.

I feel deeply. I rage often.

I can be intuitive and empathic.

My sense of justice and holding people accountable can be overwhelming.

I can care to much or not care at all.

It’s one side of the spectrum or the other for me most of the time. And I don’t mean feeling things in the far extremes that it is considered dangerous. I just never enjoy being or feeling in the middle of any situation or emotion. It’s that I don’t dawdle. I don’t like complacency. I don’t like indecisiveness. It’s one way or the other for me. Make. A. Choice.

I’m a ‘what you see is what you get’ type of person. I try to be authentic as possible. Sometimes that scares people.

People who live for small talk and niceties. People who don’t know how to have deep conversations. People who live in anxiety and fear. I freak those people out sometimes. And it is what it is I guess.

I don’t know if this makes me hard to love. If this makes me high maintenance. That having a ravaging thirst for life and not wanting to settle down or have some picket fence pipe dream makes me a broken person or ‘difficult’. That I have wants and dreams that other people my age in this part of the country have placed in a closet marked ‘for another life’. I just want to live to the fullest I can. To experience everything. To see all the things and meet all the people. To climb mountains and find waterfalls and marvel at the beauty of God’s creations.

How can these things be wrong? I don’t think they are. But sometimes it feels that others try to press their wants and dreams on me and I can’t help but say No.

My life is MINE. Not yours. I am not someone for you to live through. Until you are put in the ground, you have the ability to chase your dreams. You have the ability to create new goals and race toward them. There is no ‘I’m too old’ or ‘Time has passed’. There are no excuses. There area people in the world who are doing amazing, crazy, beautiful things. They are not super human. So if they can, you can as well.

There is only this life. One life. You get to choose how you live it.

And I want to go out of this world with nothing but memories. 

My journey continues-

Kaycee