anon, that sucks. it rly rly rly sucks. i think sometimes crying a bit to a stranger can help so i hope writing your feelings out cleared your chest out a bit, like a rant, if not outright made you feel better.

the first thing though...you're not a waste. i'm not just saying that to make you feel better. i mean it. i think the magic of people being people is that we have infinite possibilities at every single instance in time. you have so many choices even if they don't feel like a big deal but you can turn your head left or right you can walk to your door and walk back you can sit down you can lie down and each of these things is a choice. they might be small choices but i like to think about the fact that i can choose to tap my pinky finger up and down or keep still as a sign that i still have a little bit of control. you can think independently for yourself...your cells could have made up anything in this world but they made up YOU, a cognizant human being with the ability to shape their own future and unshape and reshape it. go ahead and take a deep breath. the air you just moved in and out of your lungs? you did that. you're powerful. and because you're a powerful human being, you're not a waste.

about the infinite possibilities... right now you might feel trapped for certain options, to keep going down the same road you're going or not, whether you can really continue and keep going or if you should change, if you even CAN change. but life isn't forks in the road...it's an empty field... there is no road... it's just that things can be harder if you don't walk a path that someone's trod down before...

you said you don't think you can take some time because it's "late" and i can understand that, the pressure to get things done and have your life together as soon as possible, but like i was saying to isabelle recently, there aren't actually any hard or fast rules about time. it can be harder if you don't follow a certain timeline, and i was just talking to someone who said it was really tough to go back to school at age 36 but it's not impossible. and i think things just tend to be more possible when you really want to do them.

here's how i see it, but you might disagree. i think i would rather fall behind a month, a semester, even a year now and take my time to figure out where i want to go and really want to get to my destination so that i can get there eventually rather than walk down a road that will take me somewhere but when i get to that place i realize it's not where i wanted to go and i hiked and hiked only to not reach any real destination.

i know it's not that easy, i know there are constraints, things like "time", money, parents, perceptions of people around you, your own abilities...but when people tell me that these are reasons they "can't" do something, i disagree...they're obstacles, yes, but they aren't the limits of your universe. you can get past obstacles for things you really want. but if you're tired it's really hard to get past obstacles. you are filled with infinite potential, but it's really hard to access it if you don't know what you love.

someone said our generation feels increasingly like this because we can find answers for anything on the internet but we can't find answers to the future nor our hearts, so you're going to have to take risks and explore to find out. i found that almost all my close friends ended up changing majors and they're tons happier even tho now they're set back and later than they "should" be on their career track, but they had to 1. step back and realize they were not going to keep going down their initial paths 2. branch out and have a hard period of time where they had no idea what they were doing or going to do to figure out the path for them. both required conscious decisions that mean you can't move forward. i don't think you ever do know for certain, actually, if a path is right for you but you start to get a better idea once you've walked around a bit and seen some trails you've never walked on before.

i think my personality is too different from most people to really give good advice on this - rather than not enjoying my path i tend to enjoy every path i ever find...but maybe you can channel a bit of nisa *sends you telepathy* there are things you can do and things you can't do. if you can't do it - if you REALLY can't do it - it's a boundary in your world of possibilities and not just a very very scary obstacle, then you have no control and you can only forget about it. there's no point dwelling. if you can do it, even if it's really really hard, you can chip away at all obstacles. even if it's small steps, things can be done, and you do it.

and importantly...even if you get to the end of a road, no matter what road you end up on, the great thing about people and the world and life is that it's non-linear. even if you're 50 years old and reached the end of the world you can turn. you can turn to the right or to the left or backward or diagonally, and the end of the world is not the same as the end of your journey.