Today a dear friend of mine told me they had recently read a post I made back in April of 2021 titled One Out of 326 Million. I have a terrible memory and can’t recall the content of most of my writing by title alone, so I went back and re-read it.

I told my friend later essentially that I stand behind what I wrote, that I mostly still feel the way I did then. I’ve been thinking about it all afternoon though, and I think now that maybe I have a differing opinion than April 2021 me. (I will always stand by my old writing, embarrassing as it may be, because even though I’m not standing in the same place today, where I was standing, and what I was feeling, and how I was seeing the world is completely valid and should not be forgotten or dismissed.)

This particular realization makes me think of those stories you hear about travelers finally making it to an amazing vantage point of Mount Fuji, only to find the entire mountain obscured by clouds. I feel like I look at my life like that much of the time, the reality obscured. Today though, I think the mountain appeared briefly from behind the clouds. And it was lovely.

When I look around at my life, and I think back to how I got here, the constant theme is that I did what I wanted. I am very fortunate to have parents that enabled me to be able to live this way. They didn’t give me a hard time about not going to college, even though convention would tell me that’s what I should have done. Why would I spend the time and money when I didn’t know why I should be there? They may have rolled their eyes or been baffled by my choices sometimes, but they always let me make those choices. I never had to endure questions about why I wasn’t married or why I didn’t have children, or why I wanted to pick my life up and move to a guest ranch in Colorado, or again later to Michigan. I’ve made some questionable choices, but I am happy to say that my parents allowed me to make them, and even helped me out when I got in a jam or two. Also most fortunately, no doubt thanks to their life-long guidance, I’ve made many good decisions, and I have a good life. (With humility I must also say that I think that most of us are only one unforeseen disastrous event away from a life we would not even recognize as our own. I’ve been very fortunate so far, and I know it.)

This leads me to my realization, the spoiler alert to my future down-on-me self: My life is exactly as I want it to be.

Yes, I have truly had a broken heart more times than I can count. I’ve loved people who didn’t love me back, given to people who don’t give in return, and miss very much people who don’t miss me. Even when I think of the one person that I let myself believe that I would drop everything to be with, another voice whispers, “Would you, really?” When I’ve looked wistfully down those other, very different and well-worn roads, would I really have wanted to walk any of them?

I’ve played the victim for myself many times in my saddest, loneliest, bitterest hours. If feels good sometimes to feel hard done by. I think though that I’ve made tiny scratches out to be gory, gaping wounds, seeing the clouds and not looking for the reality of the mountain behind them. Oh, woe is me!

In the past couple of years, being well into my forties, I’ve done a great deal of “inside work” and spent a lot of time in self-reflection. I’ve got hundreds of pages of handwritten journal entries ranging through rational, delusional, angry, and tear-blotched that I keep but will never re-read. I’ve spent hours talking to my therapist, sometimes going through the same grief over and over and over again. I’ve wondered how many times I was the villain in someone else’s story when I thought it was surely them in mine, and I’ve realized how many times I’ve been complicit in my own tragedies. I’ll admit that more than once I’ve descended willingly into a snake pit having convinced myself that my slithery friends wouldn’t bite me, or if they did, that I wouldn’t mind. They always bit, and I always minded.

So I’m here today, having skimmed over both glassy, placid waters and through storms of my own creation into a friendly sea under a mostly sunny sky, my little boat somewhat weathered but completely intact.

The reality is, for most of my time here, I’ve been doing exactly as I wish, living my life only for me.

I’m not single because there’s something wrong with me. I’m single because I want to be, whether I’ve realized or admitted it or not. I do crave intimacy, and the electric feeling of connection to another person. I desire to be desired and to feel desire. The things that come with intimacy and trust and desire are too confining, though. The natural fall into routine and promises of security and comfort and that future-perfect forever are confining to me, as good as cold metal shackles. Forever? Seriously?

The snake pit is full of desire and excitement and false intimacy. I tell myself that trust and comfort await, but I know both that I won’t find it, and that I don’t want it. When the inevitable bites come, the consolation prize is crushing emotion. Better to feel pain than nothing at all. Which is why I’ll almost certainly find myself writhing around in another snake pit again one day, feeling feelings.

But I hope that the next time I’m standing at the lookout seeing only clouds that I remember today, writing this post, and can see again the beautiful reality peeking through that is always there.

This is the life that I made, and I made it this way on purpose.