Incomplete

I have been ruminating on the idea of being ‘complete’ and being ‘done’ and what I mean by ‘done’ is that space where you feel ok in your own skin, feel solid, and know all the things. Because here I am at the age of 38 and I feel far from that… I still feel in many ways as I did when I was a teenager. I have been waiting for that moment when I would feel like an adult and know what to do and have the wisdom to do almost everything and not be held back by my anxiety of not knowing how to do things.

I was prompted to write this by the randomness of a Spotify Daily Mix, and the song Incomplete by Alanis Morissette came on. This song speaks to this very subject of running toward this imaginary finish line where we will all be good and know all, and the song comes to the conclusion that we are never done, so we need to just embrace this incompleteness.

And to that idea of ever incompleteness, I am spending a lot of time with people in there 60s and 70s and in their wisened years I have seen that they are still plagued with incompleteness, and that’s ok. I can see that these people are still battling their daemons, just as us on the younger side are doing. The idea of that continual battle could lead us to a sense of despair, but I don’t necessarily think that is the case. Yah, I would love to finally beat my depression and anxiety, but the likeliness of that, is not going to happen. Yes, I have gotten to a point that I can notice when my nasties are rearing their collective heads, Facebook usually helps to bring them out on parade, and through that noticing them I can start to calm them and ask them what’s going on, and mitigate their attack.

What we can learn from our older counterparts is that we can learn to manage and deal with our daemons and maybe start to make the daemons work for us. I can see these sages around me being tripped up by their pasts in the same we all are, but they have had the time to develop strategies to manage the incompleteness, sometimes those strategies are not the most healthy in my eyes, but they are a way of managing none the less. So let this song and the lessons from our elders be a reminder that where you are is just fine as long as you just keep moving forward in some way.