I Just Want to Live
On the loop that keeps returning, and the moment boredom finally ran out of energy
A pattern she’d been working with for years. Periods of independence, then the money runs out, and it’s back to the family home for a while. Then out again. Loop and loop and loop, with debt and old stories layered on top of it.
On the call, she wasn’t angry about it anymore. She was bored.
“Come on,” she said. “Can’t we come up with something else by now?”
I asked if she was getting bored with her problems. Time to get more creative? Maybe these are getting pedestrian.
She laughed, but something real was underneath it. If the loop actually ended, what then? She named the fear herself: what if she created something worse. What if she couldn’t handle being independent.
Is it, though, I asked. Here’s what you just said: the problems are the comfort zone.
Stay in the loop, and there’s no responsibility, no blame, nothing required of you. Step out, and there’s an adult life waiting, with everything that comes with it.
So I asked the question I ask everyone, eventually: right here, right now, is there a problem?
“No.”
Start again, I said. I’m sure you can do better. Try harder, and you can punish yourself afterward for not finding a problem.
“I’m very good at punishing myself,” she said. “That’s part of it: what can I create so I can punish myself?”
And there it was. Not the original problem at all, but the next one, already lined up. The list. The scroll that never ends. More courses, more books, more training. Never going to be good enough. Never going to be healed. Never going to be fixed.
She felt it land, and underneath the joking, something else came through.
“I just want to live. I just want to live.”
“Not finish the list. Not be fixed. Just be, right here, right now.”
Could you allow yourself that, I asked.
“A yes and a no, both at once,” she said.
Of course.