Generations of Bad Decisions are Sitting Inside Me

Each year, I dread the season of summer for it comes with a insatiable feeling of emptiness and melancholy.

I don’t feel whole. I don’t feel whole in a way that I sense that I was born with a burning hole in my being. That I am intrinsically made up of human body parts and that only one of them was sworn to not belong to me.

For as long as I can remember, my thoughts had always been accompanied by a longing, a feeling akin to a constant qualm. A part of my brain held my interest aside to benefit the interest of my peers.

I cage in my brain relics and stories of past generations. Replicas of my ancestors’ tales and antics are etched in my neuron forest in a tangled mess of nerves. I’ve held onto them as a kid holds to their heart the newest action doll they have received, the way mothers hold onto the first drawing they had drawn of them.

Every decision I make goes through the filter of these nerves. Every decision I make has to be in concordance with these tales.

I ultimately hold in my insides the weight of every right and bad decision my ancestors have ever made.

Whenever my mom would tell me about her life stories, it’d feel like she was telling me about her most precious and visceral dreams and nightmares. A regret... A secret remaining in the tensed delicateness of her voice... Beautiful.

For some intricate reason, each summer, as I’m faced with the emptiness of my schedule, the reminder of these stories would make its way back to my life. There has an abundance of intention in even the most mundane things that I do, for I can’t ‘end up’ as the people holding my last name did before me.

How do I make the best of my time? How do I go forward in my professional and personal life?

Summer makes me hyper-aware of this veiled race to success I had been unwittingly bestowed. I have all the time in the world to sit and linger with my thoughts. To sit and scroll through social media, consuming an all too stimulating flow of information.

Ultimately, I realized upon journaling on a clement summer day, that every decision made before me, and for me, will forever remain carved. I can’t go back and change my predicament, but I have to live with them for the remainder of my existence.

I can’t dwell and pity those choices but only accept them, and live with them as someone would live with a vexing sickness.