Am I Fucking All of This Up?

This being my life.

Lately, I’ve been asking myself a very unoriginal question—just with increasing regularity. Am I fucking all of this up?

I’m not talking about any one particular thing. Not my career (though that’s always tangled in the mix), not my relationships (though those, too, can leave their bruises), and not even the petty things I spiral over—my bank account balance, the number of unread texts, the dirty dish that’s been in the sink for three days. It’s bigger than that. It’s more existential. What I mean is: am I fucking up this—this being my one wild and precious life, as Mary Oliver would put it, if she were around to witness what a mess we’ve all made of the world?

And while we all have existential crises at various points in life, are you like me and experience them multiple times a day, every day?

The Sheaf - Henri Matisse

There’s this concept I’ve been circling around lately, like a drain I’m both drawn to and afraid of: future thinking. The ability—or maybe the inability—to picture oneself in the future. When I close my eyes and try to conjure an image of myself even a year from now, I draw a blank. Not because I don’t have desires or goals or the Pinterest board to prove it. I do. But lately, it feels like I’m trying to picture a future in a house I’ve never seen, on land I no longer trust exists.

It’s a familiar feeling. I remember it well from the early months of the pandemic, when time flattened and everything—every plan, every vision—evaporated overnight. Life as we knew it was wiped clean from the horizon, and we were left in that eerie pause, suspended between what was and what might never be again.

Still life with Geraniums - Henri Matisse

I’m feeling that suspension again now. My dad is sick. Trump is president—again—and it’s a sentence that makes me feel like I’m living in a simulation run by someone with a sick sense of humor. The climate is unraveling, the news is unbearable, and I think a lot of us—especially those of us who feel things a little too much—are walking around with a quiet, persistent ache. An ambient grief for what we thought life would be, for the world we hoped to grow old in.

And still, somehow, life continues.

I bake. I knit. I go on long, wandering walks with nowhere to be. I cuddle the hell out of my cats. I send voice memos to my best friend that are essentially novellas. I pour so much love into people I sometimes wonder if I’m bleeding myself dry. I go to barre class. I light candles and let them burn for hours. I buy fruit at the market I have no intention of eating, just because it’s pretty. I believe in pleasure like it’s a religion.

And yet, the apathy comes. It always does.

I don’t know if it’s apathy or burnout or just a gentle shedding of hope, but lately I feel like I’m living entirely in the present because I simply cannot conceptualize a future. Not in a suicidal way—more like, I genuinely don’t know what happens next. I used to have the kind of mind that cast stories ahead of me like ropes: future selves, imagined cities, the way my handwriting might look in ten years. And now? Blankness. Fog. A closed door I’m too tired to open.

Nu Bleu IV - Henri Matisse

Sometimes I think maybe this is actually a form of healing. Maybe the way forward is to stop projecting so far ahead, to stop trying to outpace uncertainty with plans. Maybe this is what presence really looks like—not the kind that’s polished for Instagram, but the kind that quietly insists on being here, now, because “here, now” is all we’re being offered.

There is something beautiful in that. Something spiritual. I don’t want to romanticize suffering, but I do want to believe that this feeling—this uncertain, cracked-open tenderness—is worth something. That living without a roadmap doesn’t mean we’re lost. It means we’re paying attention. It means we’re willing to let life show us where it wants to go, instead of forcing it to follow our scripts.

Is that fucking up? Or is it being alive?

The Red Studio - Henri Matisse

This week, I made a cake with too much almond extract and ate slice after slice for breakfast. I watched a woman on the train apply lipstick with perfect precision and nearly cried from the sheer beauty of it. I told my dad I loved him. I listened to a stranger’s laugh and felt something sharp and warm and unnameable move through me. I looked at the moon and didn’t wish for anything.

And maybe that’s what I’m trying to say. That the moments are still here. The small, glowing pearls of a life. And if I keep stringing them together—walks, conversations, coffee cups, poems, the rhythm of my movement, the heat of the oven, the purring of my cats—I might not end up with a perfectly plotted future. But I might just end up with a life that feels real. That feels like mine.

So, am I fucking all of this up?

Probably. But maybe that’s the point. Maybe it’s not about doing it perfectly. Maybe it’s just about staying awake.