The blindfold over my soul

It feels good to be back home for summer break. I decided to indulge a little, sleeping in and taking things slow. Finals month was brutal on my body. It feels good to finally get my 9 hours of sleep again.

There's a looming cloud of uncertainty as well. Even though things are going pretty well with college and my preparation for the next phase of my life, it still feels like a leap into unfamiliar territory. Sometimes, I can't help but feel that my hope that the ground would hold me up when I land is doing more work than conviction or vision.

Uncertainty. But isn't that a privilege? The dread of stepping into uncharted parts of my life, the excitement and the fear of exploring new things? Getting pricked and bleeding all over the path, the path I both chose to walk and build as I go on?

I think of her frequently, the daughter of a family friend. Married at 19, now with a baby at 20. She seems happy, at least as much as I can tell from the stories she posts on her insta. I should not judge her life, I shouldn't judge it when it has been chosen by her.

But was it really? Would she have been supported , if she had rejected it? Would her family have respected her choice to study further?I know for a fact they wouldn't have. Had she spoken against it, she would have been forced into this path anyway. But she never did.

And even though I tell myself I should not judge her "choice" to marry young, I can't help but feel she was indirectly pushed toward it, down the only path that had ever been created for her, the only path made visible to her. She was never given the tools to forge one of her own. How is it a choice when that was the only thing she had known her entire life?

The set of choices that I can make which would not knock off the sticks that keep up peace at my home is quite limited, if I have to be honest. But for better or worse, my parents made sure I don't have a blindfold tied around my soul. That I can carve my own path, even the ones they won't like and approve of. For that, I'm eternally grateful to them.

One day I'd do something that makes them wish they'd left it only a little less open. haha.

I hope she was given the resources that could've shown her the many lives she could've lived. The people she could've met. The choices she could've made, right ones, wrong, whimsical ones. I hope she chose marriage and motherhood after she considered the countless other possibilities that existed for her.

Maybe I'm too judgemental of her. Maybe I'm not. But all I hope for is that she won't reach her forties mourning the loss of her twenties, and the life she could've had.