Silently Screaming

Have you ever had those dreams where you are being chased by something terrifying, but the harder you run the heavier your legs feel, and when you open your mouth to scream nothing comes out?  I feel like I've been having that waking nightmare all week long.  There are so many decisions to be made about life, none of which I feel equipped to make.

At times I want to be like a stone and just lay down and let myself go where gravity takes me, fall where fate leads.  Sometimes I wish I was still a child and I could say, "Tell me what to do," and some wise person would say to me exactly what I need to do to make things right.  The harder I run around in my mind, the quicker I get no where.  For the last four and a half years, my goal has been to get a degree and become a sonographer.  For the last nine months it seemed like that was exactly how my life was going to play out.

Of all the things going on in my life right now, the cancer scares me the least.  I know what it is, where it comes from, what it looks like, and how to make it go away.  I'm not worried about complications from the surgery or what it will feel like to have radiation coursing through my veins.  What scares me is what having cancer has done to the rest of my life.

It's like someone threw a boulder in the middle of the stream of my existence and now I'm forced to find a new path.  Water gets to follow immutable laws of physics; it always gets to take the path of least resistance.  I wish that were true for me as well.  I suppose it could be, I could just let life happen to me but I need enough of that when I was sick from endometriosis.

The problem is that you cannot start your journey without first picking a path, and right now I no longer know what I want from life, other than to be happy and to feel safe.  I feel like I'm standing at the crossroads of the universe with a thousand different street signs pointing in every direction but no idea where those streets go.  I am lost.

Dan Gilbert, Harvard psychologist and author of "Stumbling on Happiness", says that studies show we are remarkably bad at predicting what will make us happy.  We imagine the unknown to be scarier or less likely to be positive.  For a goal-oriented person such as myself this is especially true.  I've joked that I have a contingency plan for the contingency plan's contingency plan.  When I read the Deathly Hallows, though I really got it when Harry Potter said, "When have any of our plans ever actually worked? We plan, we get there, all hell breaks loose!"

A couple of days ago I recieved this fortune in my fortune cookie, "Keep your eyes open for opportunities."  I don't normally make life decisions based off slips of paper stuffed in dessert, but right now it's the best I've got to go on.  Every time in life when I have gone against my instinct out of fear of the unpredictable, unknowable future I have set myself up for misery.  It's time to trust my heart and stop listening to the fearful, silent screaming in my head.