My dear existential crisis

I feel everybody generally outgrows their phase of intense angst, fear, insecurity, and uncertainty on who they want to be and what the Hell their place on earth is to be by the time they start university. I haven’t. Having one failed attempt behind me, and a whole year of waiting for a purpose to present itself, I feel barely any wiser than before. I reject the harsh truth that we never get to be everything we want even more than I did at sixteen, because I feel it in a much more tangible way. The day only has so many hours. Do I spend them studying? Or chasing a new emotional high? Texting my ex, making the music louder and louder, colouring in more details of a life I know I’ll likely never lead? Am I studying the right thing? Do I have the right friends? How the hell is it already 2025, I cannot wrap my mind around that, it does not feel real, I don’t think anything past the 2000s is actually real. I have no way to contextualise this time period. I don’t have the slightest idea what it means. Walking back to the trails of my original train of thouhgt though… We are born into a cruelly imperfect world, into one body, one specific set of circumstances. They make us believe that everyone could be a movie star. (Spoiler Alert, we cannot.) Some of us can. Doesn’t that mean we’d have to try and find out? My parents wouldn’t have wanted me to pursue that. And I might have had daydreams, as any one does, but never the drive or confidence to go after it myself. These are not even the factors that might first come to mind. Like beauty. Acting talent. A certain serendipity, an alignment of the stars – what you might call luck. You could attribute anything to luck in life. How much control do we really have? And then how on earth do we decide?? Do we even have free will??? All my life I’ve desperately wanted to be genuine, yet I can’t. I’ve never been one with myself, the self I present, the one I feel I should be, the one that sabotages me in being that for fear of losing sight of who I really am. It is a battle that gained traction when I hit puberty, and the war is only ever put to a ceasefire, never won by any one. Is this normal, I wonder? Does everybody struggle so much? I don’t meet people so clearly in a state of continual storm as I am. But then, I do my very best not to appear so around everyone else. So perhaps I do meet them, and behind the face of the seemingly put together girls studying psychology with me