I Think I Know Where My Life Train Is Going

I'm writing this on the train back to uni. Out of the window I can see the sky, clear and blue save for a few dashes of pink and purple bruisey cloud, with the beginning of a yellow sunset ombre-ing itself in from the horizon. I'm listening to Gabrielle Aplin and feeling strangely elated, so thought I'd write. I have this bizarre (wonderful) sense that the world is mine now. I feel like my life is on track, I am exactly where I want to be and the world is mine. I know that I can do whatever I want and something good will come of it; and if I fail, I know that everything is small.

Everything is small in that sometimes I have bursts of seeing my life as if from afar or above, I can somehow see the whole picture. Everything, everything that I once thought was the most important thing, is just so unbelievably small. Friends making my life truly miserable for years on end in primary school; it was huge at the time and all-consuming, but now it's just so tiny. Endlessly making a massive fool of myself in front of boys I liked at school; microscopic. Even (especially?) my exams which were said by so many to be life-determining, the crux and culmination of our lives so far, are now just an extraordinarily minute spec on the canvas that is my life. The friend disaster in sixth year? At the time, I had never cried so much over anything or been so heart-wrenchingly distraught, but it means nothing now and the shackles of fakes secretly hiding things from me are well and truly broken. Mum's disability; bigger, yes, but not all negative. It brought us closer, relying on each other in a co-dependent team, taught us both patience and tolerance and that the things you took for granted can be taken from you in the blink of an eye. Yeah okay it would be fantastic if she wasn't disabled but it's also pretty great the way we are. My parents' divorce; brilliant, if you think about it properly and don't consider the consequential branches. So we don't live in our big house any more. So I ended up (sort of) an only child, not the eldest of three. So I don't see my dad as much as we'd like, it's all a billion trillion times better than it would have been. And besides, I don't know any different. How am I to 'know what I'm missing?' There's nothing for me to miss. Second families on the other hand, that's been a bigger blot on my life canvas but even now it's shrinking. After fifteen years of not feeling totally sure or settled, I'm gone and I have complete and total control over my return. Blot: small; me: stronger, wiser and braver for it.

And now the choice is mine. All the wonderful, unimagineably amazing things that have happened or are part of my life can be magnified into something huge. They have full and delighted permission to fill all the space they can on my canvas, because when I see my life from this distant point I know now for sure that I can make them matter exponentially and they are already the foundations of my happiness and the most important in my little world. My little piece of the big wide world, that is mine for the taking.

So as we draw into the station and Gabrielle motivates me still, I know that I am going to do everything I can to stay on the pinnacle of this mountain, looking out across the plains of these eighteen years so far with a breathtaking clarity and a certainty that I can keep my life as steadfast and sure as this train on its track. My life train is heading exactly where I want it, and this track will lead me there.