Nico Addai

I’m trying to make up my mind and speak out what I understand about it now. And that is an impossible task.

I recently turned 20, and I think I am having a quarter-life crisis. What am I? Am I what I wanted to be when I grew up? Is there more that I could be doing? Do have any regrets? What do I do with that information?

So instead of trying to write a letter to my younger self, I will write a letter to my older self, when things will be more complicated and nuanced than now or before.

As of 2018, I am a Christian. I am a sister and a friend. I am no one’s girl, but my own woman. I am not a confident person. I am a writer. There are the few things I am sure of. There is one of these things that I want to change. It’s not just about being confident in myself, but being comfortable with myself and also my decisions. Up until this point in my life, most of the major decisions that had any impact on my future were made by my parents, and although they are reluctant to give up that baton, the holder of my future now is me.

What do I want to be? What am I? And what will I have been?

If I reach 60, the fruit of those decisions will be handed to the younger generation, hopefully to people whom I care about. But before then, I need to make it through the minefield that is the 20s ripe for distraction, catastrophic sin, and labor for a better future. It’s the time to make mistakes that matter.

There are times when I consciously say yes to sin, not because I don’t know are do not know the repercussions, but because I am angry at the state of things in my life. I am angry at God for letting a friendship fall by the wayside, or a disappointment out of my control to affect me in ways I don’t want to feel.

Instead of confronting suffering, or in this case, disappointment, I take that anger out on myself, and then sin against myself, whether by not eating right purposefully, seeking out hurtful things to my psyche, such hateful rhetoric and taking myself as their victim, and then mull over my inadequacies instead of battling it out with the spiritual and physical realm.

Of all the things I worry about as I get older, my aging body, my appearance, how I will deal with my greatest regrets and successes behind me, the eventual deaths of everyone I love and care about and the futility of life, I, at a ripe 20 years old, fear one thing above all.

Leaving the warmth of my God, the God of the Bible, the Abrahamic God’s arms, of not hearing his voice as I walk and think. If I keep nothing from my youth, I wish only to keep that. My relationship with God, and the beautiful transitions it will make as I age and regress with mental decline.

And It gives me this incomprehensible sense of peace that I can’t quite describe, and have no need to.

Thank God