Epiphany: “Awakening” is not some kind of down payment on a softer future, and be kinder towards yourself

I had this notion once, half consolation, half conceit, that if I suffered and “awakened” early, if I tuned myself finely to all the invisible strings of spirituality and self before anyone else, then later life would part for me like curtains. While everyone else was staggering through their quarter, mid, or late life crises, I’d be there already, a little smug perhaps, already on the other side  “cruising”.  It was comforting to think my pain had bought me something, that my long season of self-exile, my soul searching and inner work, had yanked me out of that clean, fluorescent trance of production – doctor track, scientist track, the neat, nearly robotic silent escalators of expectation.

But my little “awakening” came with transcripts and emails and numbers in red. My hiatus in high school— the slipping grades, the decision to drop my hands and tend to my own mind —first arrived dressed as failure. It felt like I had walked away from the sacred bargain: endure four short years, pay with sleep and skin and Saturdays, and then enjoy. That was the story, wasn’t it? One narrow ladder, one wrong step, one missed internship at sixteen and you tumble off into some foggy, unremarkable future. So I built myself a counter myth: you can begin at any age and any time; screw the Ivies they can dissolve like chalk in rain; I have suffered and so I am ahead in another register, invisible but real. And yet even that started to taste like a cotton candy dissolving after being awarded to a sanitary raccoon– essentially cope with a different costume. 

A friend, in the flat, stubborn way that truth sometimes arrives, said: just because you had it hard early doesn’t mean it will be easy later, and just because someone else floated for a while doesn’t mean they’re doomed. There is no secret exchange rate where anguish converts cleanly into grace. Pain is not a down payment; awakening is not a lifetime warranty. All that remains —and this settled over me slowly, like the yolky sun in switzerland fog— is that whatever route you take, whatever ladders you climb or refuse, you will look back and wish, fiercely, that you had been gentler with yourself.