Existential Overwhelm- The Pain of Not Being Able to Live it All

An adapted Instagram diary entry from December 23rd, 2023, from my New Zealand Bike tour.

I’ve been tired and depressed these last two days of biking Across New Zealand. Traveling frequently fills me with dread, anxiety, and remorse, but I haven’t quite been able to explain why until now:

“I can never read all the books I want; I can never be all the people I want and live all the lives I want. I can never train myself in all the skills I want. And what do I want? I want to live and feel all the shades, tones and variations of mental and physical experience possible in my life. And I am horribly limited.”  

Sylvia plath

Apparently, I suffer from existential overwhelm.

When I travel, I want to be the small artist who has cultivated their skill to make beautiful necklaces and sell them at the waterfront in Queenstown. I want to be the artist skilled in glasswork, embroidery, beading and painting. I want to be the person who does a working holiday in New Zealand for 6 months on a vineyard. I want to become a skilled tattoo artist. I want to be a writer. A filmmaker. I want live each decade of my life with different tattoo styles, some entirely ornamental, some with full sleeves, some with only big pieces, and some with only small. I want to live in the mountains in Peru. I want to create a beautiful home for myself and my cat and read each morning for an hour with a coffee on the couch. I want to sell it all and live in a treehouse in Japan. I want to be a professional competitive athlete. I want to be a professional recreational athlete. I want to be a name everyone knows. I want to be a nobody and strive for no achievements other than to have fun. I want to wear hand crocheted dresses purchased at the farmers market. I want to relearn how to paint- watercolor, oil, acrylic, everything in between. I want to be a bike mechanic. I want to own a home and a garden and chickens with homemade sculptures on my front lawn. I want to live in a van and see all the wondrous sights across Europe and Australia. I want to backpack around Asia. I want to bike across Africa. I want to see an active volcano. I want to go to Antarctica. I want to be able to do a handstand. I want to meditate every day. I want to move to across the world and never look back. 

I want to know the art of Japanese bamboo weaving. I want to be an arborist, a geologist, a botanist.  I want to read every book on my Goodreads list: about indigenous Alaskans; the history of tattooing; pioneers of drag. I want to go back in time when people used to swing dance in their free time, jazz around to the rhythms of the music. I want to play the saxophone again. I want to be part of a small band that plays at the local cafe or bar. I want to spend uninterrupted weeks of fun with all of my friends who don’t live near me anymore. I want to be a muralist again. I want to be the artist who spent hundreds of hours on a singular piece of work, critiquing and perfecting each detail, pouring ever fiber of their soul into a piece with so much emotion and intimacy, proudly hoping that others see its ethereal beauty too. I want to go back to school, to art school, to try each and every single medium, then develop a career upon a couple of those mediums, and spend my thirties doing such with my life. I want to work in tourism and be paid to travel the world. I want to be a tourist and pay to go on those tours and not worry about a single thing aside from having fun. I want to take cooking classes in each country I visit. I want to speak Spanish fluently. I want to hike glaciers, fly in helicopters over the forests. I want to listen to every ground breaking album listed according to The Rolling Stones and Spotify and study the lyrics and musician’s stories to intimately comprehend what they strove to give the world. I want to start a record collection of my favorite albums- a mix of well-known pieces, and a mix of underground, unknown works, so that when a passerby asks “who is this?” I can relish in the titillation of sharing something I love that others haven’t discovered yet. I want to spend time in rural communities across each continent, immersing myself in lives completely different than my own. I want to live, touch, breath, feel, taste, love, listen, dance to it all.

I want to live a thousand lives, but I cannot. Traveling is what reminds me of all the beauty and magic that we have in this world- that we have as individuals- yet the profoundly limited time we have on this earth to experience it all. The sadness is heavy. 

Comments

One response to “Existential Overwhelm- The Pain of Not Being Able to Live it All”

  1. Mark Robinson Avatar

    Kia ora – me too !

    Just stumbled upon your journey.

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