lost

I'm lost.

So lost I don't even know where I am anymore

And I didn't even realize I was lost until I looked up and realized I couldn't remember how I got here.

A friend told me to try writing about it. Maybe that would help. Maybe that would ignite something in my brain and I would remember who I was again.

As a kid I always felt so sure about everything. I was going to move to New York and go to Columbia and be on Broadway. And then I got scared of moving so far away from home.

And then I was sure I was going to move to California and work for Disney and one day I would work myself up to be an Imagineer. And then I moved to California, and I worked at Disney, and I realized how horrid it was. And it drained everything about me.

And I was sure I was going to marry that boy and we would have a family and I would be a stay at home mom who was an author of YA novels. And I did not marry him and I fell out of love with him and that was ok. But in the darkness that came with that, I also lost all of my creative spark that made me believe I would be a great author.

Writing for kids seemed so easy when I was a kid. I wrote my first manuscript at 15. A Cinderella type story. Wrote it all in a month after being inspired from a book about writing.

My second book came at 16, a story about having a sibling with Autism that I wrote for my best friend.

And another book at 18, a behemoth of 300+ pages about Wendy being torn away from Neverland and struggling to find her way back after it was lost to her. I loved that book, still consider it one of my greatest works. It was the last piece of my writing that my dad read before he died. I wouldn't let him read it until it was finished. It came together when he was in the hospital and he took it with him to his chemo treatments. He was the one who urged me to go to school for writing. He was the one who said my true gift was writing.

And yet I'm the one that's lost now.

I'm 26 and I don't know where the last 8 years went. I graduated college 5 years ago, and it seems like I've been treading water ever since, getting farther and farther away from shore.

And I just don't know where to go.

I look towards the future in my mind and it's empty. Like there's nothing there. I mean, the important things are there, like my boyfriend and my best friends.

But people keep asking me what it is I want to do...and I really don't have an answer for them. Because I feel like nothing.

And even that is not necessarily true.

What I want to do is go back to that childhood version of myself that was so sure she was going to move to New York and be on Broadway. I want to move to New York. I want to audition for shows and try to make something of myself. I don't feel like I was ever happier than I was on stage. I want to try and find that happy again.

But I say nothing because it seems impossible to me. I am too old. I have nothing on my resume since 2010. I am not coordinated enough to dance anymore. The only singing I do is to soundtracks alone in my car.

And I look around and I just feel so lost.