five year plan

I've never had one

my actual palm, circa 2016, rubbed in a cold fireplace of a 6-bedroom dilapidated mansion in NZ, painted with eyeshadow

When someone asks my five-year plan, it’s like… why don’t we get our palms read? Why don’t we shake an 8-ball? You want me to tell you the future?? You want me to lie to you and act like I know what’s going to happen??

I had no idea all the things that happened in the past five years were even possible, and you want my projection for the next five years? No.

I am dizzy from the sheer number of things I’ve had and done and want. My life is bursting at the seams and there is very little order to it all. And I want and I want and I want.

I want to fall in love again, I want to grow a garden, I want my hair to grow past the soft curve of my under breast, I want to live near the ocean (I already live near the ocean but wherever I live I want to live near the ocean), I want a collection of friends and their tiny humans (and maybe my tiny humans) swinging and out of my doors, I want to write and write and write, I want to drive acoss North America in a 4WD or a convertible from the West Coast to the East stopping in New Orleans to see some friends, I want to see Olivia Dean perform at Lollapalooza this summer, I want my home made messy from love, I want all my days filled with creative projects the make the world a more beautiful place, I want to be tired of doing load after load of laundry because it means that I am caring for others, I want to bake naughty-made-healthy things that dissappear into crumbs within minutes, I want to go to Farmers Markets every weekend even when it rains and to know the farmers by name and the produce by season, I want to go on road-trips to places without wifi and drink in the stillness and wrap my arms around my man and lay my face against his back and smile while he measures out where to set up for the night, I want to go back to New York and do it better this time.

My five year plan is for life to be an extension of me and since I am always always always growing and changing and evolving so is the plan. And the plan is less a plan and more a thread of desires and wants and needs and hopes and dreams woven together around me and my life and body of work.

I want to have finally answered the question “what do you do?” with something simple that doesn’t need explaining. I want to sing more, I want to forgive everyone who hurt me and be forgiven too, I want to know more people who are living in ways that I admire because they are so authentically themselves, I want to feel at peace in new social circumstances instead of tightly wound up (I don’t know if anyone else has figured this out, but if you have, please lmk), I want to think less about my body, I want to think less about myself, I want to go on girls trips with girlfriends I’ve had for a decade and drink wine and laugh at all the things we used to do and worry about, I want to make everyone’s birthday cakes and decorate them with flowers, I want to go through the painful learning curve of renovating my home by hand, I want to foster animals that need a home. I want to savour the slow seasons, to surrender to their stillness, to their illusiory unmooredness.

One of the things that makes any of this meaningful is to fully experience it. Every moment. To be present with life. I don’t want to miss any of it, not one second. I want to be excited about my 40s and 50s and 60s and beyond. I want to be delighted by how well not having a five-year plan works out. I want to enjoy the ride.

Wanting is the easy part. The harder part is surviving the uncomfortable, uncertain space while waiting and hoping and doubting (dear god, the doubting) whether any of it is ever actually going to come to life. The part where you look around and don’t see anything yet and you have to keep going anyway. How do you maintain that essential and nearly delusional belief and trust? Where you can't explain to anyone, least of all yourself, how this is going to work.

You just do. Even without a plan. You refuse to give up.

What nobody tells you about building something of your own is that it does not begin with a plan. It begins with a list of wants and beliefs and hopes and dreams. Somewhere inside all of that wanting is the thread. The body of work. The thing that is yours to make, that no one else will make if you don't, that grows from the same root as everything else you love. Applications have been dripping in for Practical Dreamer and are open for another 9 days. More here.

other essays on wanting and desire: