It’s 3:33 and I awaken. I am aware another year is passing and I am entering my mid phase of life. I reflect upon all that has passed. The childhood. Adolescence. Early adulthood and the start of what I thought would be the rest of my life. But then I flipped the script, turned the table, and I found myself here.

I can be immensely proud for choosing the different path. We all have life stories that bring our present self into being. What I have learnt is that no matter how many times I was crushed in life…and it was so much more than I can even comprehend…I still made it. I still got to this day. Some people might know some of the dark times I faced, but probably not the extent of it. Not for how long certain events and narratives ran for. But I finally feel that some of those lifetime narratives have closed. Nothing but sheer determination, willpower, and ultimately – when put on the line – the choice to survive and to keep getting up, got me to this point.

This liminal space has been a few years long. It barely looks liminal from the outside because I packed it full of things. I did not know which way to turn. The map of life had been ripped apart. I thought I’d eventually draw a new map, find a new direction. But now I realise I don’t need a map at all. I have found the way to feel my inner compass for now. During the liminal space, I found I no longer cared about anything. Nothing seemed to matter. We are here for the briefest of times, and we all start and end in nothingness, so what really was the point to anything? I can’t say from an existential standpoint that I have an answer, but as someone who cares deeply I probably was never going to stay in that mode for so long. It is just that I had cared too much and had grown tired. And now as this liminal space closes, I find I am probably somewhere more in the middle. I give myself the care that I used to bestow upon everyone in my life except myself. And I realise that I should have backed myself all along. Because I look at all I am. I look at the richness of my life, the bold decisions I made, and how I beat so many odds in different arenas of life, no matter what age I was. At the time I felt like the consummate loser, when that could not have been further from the truth. I should never have compared myself to any rules or laws of what the ‘standard’ journey of life looked like. Because there is no standard journey. All of our journeys are different. It’s just that the public narrative can create the sense of overarching themes of how life should be. Are these narratives even the most common blueprint? In many ways public narrative is not necessarily about the majority rather than who has the means to shout the loudest. It is not you or I. And so if you ever feel lost and like you got the wrong map, remember that you author your own map and you can rewrite it however you like.

I find myself surprised to say goodbye to certain aspects of myself as I now journey into this next phase. Some of the attributes that served me well until this point can put down their tools. They may be called upon again in future should their strength be needed. But for many, they now enter a complete retirement. They were not the parts of me I thought would – or could – be retired. I often wonder if the purposeful decision of how I live my life from this point on will be a noticeable inflection point in future, or if it will just seem part of the continuum. All I know is that as I always say to myself, my yesterday’s self will look like a joke in the eye’s of my today’s self. I don’t mean that to disparage my past self, rather than to say that I am always building. I am not a static person in any sense of the word. I am always listening to life, always learning, and probably more purposeful than I had imagined.

I will allow my old self to tie up its way of being over these next four days. And then I will step over the divide and I shall not turn back. Because my journey ahead, although bumpy (because life always is), is going to be exceptional. Not in the loud way of accomplishments that anyone else can witness, but exceptional because I know where I came from and I know what it took to get here and I know that I have finally ripped up the meaningless map and stepped beyond. The map has borders. The compass does not.