Dear Lana,

Do I trust myself?

With what?

I’m not sure. I’m currently studying for my certification examinations again. Spinning my pen around my three-subject notebook I also used to take notes during my senior spring, I was thinking about how uncertain the future is, how it splits the world into two types of people. You have people who take away their own freedom because they do not trust themselves to lead a life they want in the future. Then you have people who take on as much freedom as possible because they have faith that they will act in their own interests in the future.

So I ask myself again: Do I trust myself?

When do you think life starts, Lana? Is it at the moment when you are born?

I’ve been thinking lately of how little I lived when I was younger, especially when I was going through elementary, middle, and high school. There was so much to do, yet so little will to follow through. I remember I had interests, yet I wonder why I didn’t pursue any of them. There weren’t any questions that guided life, just action and reaction. Either I did not have freedom or did not want it. Simpler times. Would I consider that living? More importantly, is it something I would include in a memoir, if I ever wrote one?

I’m leaning towards no. If I wrote an essay on my life, I think I would start when I got into college. Everything that happened before seems quite irrelevant, and I choose not to remember it, negating its power to define my life. If freedom is the power to define life, isn’t writing the ultimate freedom? After all, you are creating your own universe, where everything exists as how you present it to be. It gives you the ability to suffer beautifully, if you choose to define yourself that way.