The Right Thing.

You know, I want to rant for a bit. Everyone uses Facebook to rant about random stuff once in a while, right? So, here’s my rant. I feel anxious. I feel anxious all the time. Mostly, because I don’t know if I’m doing the right thing. You know, just like everyone else, I have this wish, this urge to do the right thing in life. Believe in the right thing; pursue the right thing; be a good person; love the right person; treat others the right way. Know that my life has the right kind of point. And if there is no such thing as the right thing, and if life has no point, I want to be certain of that. I want to settle that matter once and for all in my heart and move on with my life with that in mind. I want that certainty. I want to know that I’m not wasting time. Even if I am wasting time, I want to believe, deep down, that one day I will arrive at that certainty and things will clear themselves up. Like, y’know, in the “you just have to wait and see, kid” kind of way.

I want to know I’m treating other people well. I want to know that I am not the Wicked Witch of the East, who causes people pain out of carelessness, or greed, or plain evil. I want to know that within me doesn’t lie a dormant Hitler, who is only restrained from emerging by my fear and cowardliness. I want other people to tell that I have a good heart. I want people to remember, 10 years after meeting me, that something about me made them happy. I want to know I’m not an abuser. I want to know that I haven’t accidentally become a monster.

But that certainty is nowhere to be found. From day to day, I’m rushing about between different ways to capture meaning.

I read the Bible every day, but, trying to cover all my bases, I also read nuclear physics and organic chemistry. I take drugs that calm down the hormones in my brain, but I also try to experience the most feeling that this world has to offer. I toil away at a double major in a far away foreign country, to be successful and not forget to pursue my dream, but I tell other people that their grades don’t define them. I bake people cakes out of the blue to practice selflessness, but immediately tell myself the sacrifice wasn’t worth it and you can’t buy the love of others, let alone care about it. I try to forgive those who make me hurt, but heed the women’s magazines’ call to maintain healthy boundaries. I alternate between “you are good enough” and “you should always improve as a person.” I fluctuate between “nothing really matters, since we’re all doomed” and “your deeds go on the two sides of the scale, and each and every one counts.”

I want to have faith in something. I want to have a capacity for faith. I want to have a capacity for trust. I want to believe that good outcomes exist; that people love me; that there is a person, or a place, or a thing that will stay, that will not quit on me whatever happens. I want to believe in it with all my heart the next time I wake up at night screaming, the next time I bawl my eyes out crying.

I want to know that I am not trapped inside my head, floating in a whirlwind of insanity, and that things outside have meaning, and purpose.

I want to know I’m doing the right thing. Like on the dreaded math test in middle school, with time tick-tocking on the clock, I just want to know that I am doing the right thing.