Take Me To Whatever The Opposite Of Contentment Is

I never want to be where I actually am. Sometimes I think it’s just me trying to find the greenest of all the grasses. Other times I think I’m built this way, like contentment isn’t a comfortable state for me. I’m always wanting more, more, more, and contentment is a standstill. If I’m satisfied, what else is there to work towards? If I have everything that I need, what else is there to do? I think I always leave a little room for dissatisfaction, so I have more to get excited about, otherwise I’d just get bored. I’m competitive. I don’t do shit just to do it. I want to gain something if I complete something and I don’t know if I’m prepared to let that part of me go. Maybe I don’t need to self-help everything out of my system. I like my hunger. It keeps me going, keeps me excited, keeps me wanting more out of my life.

For me, the grass is greener on the side of the person who is just content and comfortable with their life. I always look at people who have their routines and their mundanity and their daily lives which look the same day in and day out. I watch these people, who live by their schedules, who routinize themselves almost perfectly. They do things. They exercise and they cook and they probably get their taxes turned in on time. They’re going to bed at respectable hours and waking up before their alarms. They’re never self-loathing or sick of hearing their indecisiveness ringing in their ears. Content. Happy, maybe.

They are the antithesis of me.

And I sort of loathe them. Because I am not them. I will likely never be the person who just does things over and over and over. I can’t just wake up and do the same exact thing I did the day before in the same exact order with the same exact outcomes. I can’t just know how life is going to shake out for me. I need that rush.

I can make myself crazy and I get mad at myself for not doing all the things I say I’m going to do, but a lot of times I’m just piling shit into my life in an effort to make my life look like the shiny people I have in my mind, the people who Do Things and Have Content Lives.

I don’t want that. I don’t want to know how my day is going to shake out. What if I’ve got a schedule keeping me busy every moment and I miss something big? I’m always afraid I’m going to miss the magic, the surprise. Because, life can be so many things and some of them aren’t that great, but life can also be magic. You can find yourself sitting at home at 9am and feel this incredible pull to go to the coffee shop and, while at the coffee shop, meet your next best friend or your newest lover or find $10 under the chair. You just never fucking know. But if you claim to know and you routinize every moment and you predict every move and outcome, then you do know. You know it will be what it is and it will be what you expect.

But where the hell is the magic?

I WANT THE FUCKING MAGIC.

I met my husband on a random Monday afternoon at Notre Dame Cathedral in Paris all because I woke up that morning and was like, I gotta go to this cathedral and I don’t know why. I got a job as a writer at Thought Catalog because I sent an email to the founder and was like, will you publish my work and I had no idea why I sent that email, except that I felt compelled to do so. I came home to California from Rome and met with a friend in San Francisco who turned into my roommate, my best friend, and my eventual business partner… all because I said YES to a champagne happy hour.

Life can be magic. Things can happen on a whim. Life can change in a day, not a preplanned day, but a day in which you have at least some space in your life to listen in on that little stirring inside, that little voice that says, go there or there or maybe there or say this or this or maybe this. Plans and goals and routines have nothing on magic.

And, I guess, that’s what I want. That’s what I’m afraid of missing. I’m afraid of missing that call, that little stirring, that little voice. I’m afraid that if I set my life up in a way in which every moment is accounted for, I have no room for surprise moments. I have no room for the unexpected, the magic. And, that’s what I want. That’s all I really want. To open my life up enough to experience that everyday kind of surprise. Because life can be a lot of dark things, but it can also be so, so, so many good things, that’s the thing to remember. Life is as good as it is not. And there’s as much magic as there is not. There really is. I’ve seen it. And I’ll see it again.

For more from Jamie, follow her on Facebook: