Angustia

As salaam alaikum,

I was thinking about what word would characterize my mood right now, and for some reason, this is the first word that came to my mind: angustia.

Angustia is Spanish for anguish. I've probably used angustia more in compositions and in discussions than I've used anguish by virtue of majoring in Spanish in college. It's also because angustia is one of those emotions that I'm not comfortable expressing in English...like longing. I end up writing entries in Spanish just to express myself, because it's in that language and that version of myself that those feelings are appropriate, make the most sense, are permissible, whatever.

So why the angustia? Oh, so many things. I've been trying to talk to my mother about this thing for days, but she's...well, she's kind of going through her own thing right now.

I've kind of...lost some direction in the last few years. I've lost some of my impetus, my motivation to move forward. I mean, I'm more excited about family medicine than I have been about any other specialty, but at the same time...something's not quite right.

I'm 25, and I'm supposed to have to grown out of this stage of life so long ago, but I really don't feel like I have any place in this world. I feel like I don't make sense, and that my parents raised me for a world that doesn't exist anymore, that maybe existed back when they were my age, but now.

I live between two different worlds. In one world, I am aberrant. I'm a 25 year old female and I've never been in any sort of relationship, not a serious one, not a not serious one. By society's standards, I am defective. There is something wrong with me. I am abnormal. I'm nobody's nun, but somehow I can't pull it together to be in a relationship. Pitiful.

In the other world, the Muslim world...I'm also aberrant. I have no culture to help me navigate the marriage process, no one older to help me, and if I were to find someone to marry, my Christian father would probably reject them. Simply put, I am a mess.

This causes me a lot of angustia...I am angustiada. Why? Because while I continue to dysfunction in a major way, I see friends, their younger siblings, my younger cousins, people younger and older than me being functional, finding life partners and getting married, people wishing them a lifetime of happiness, and to hell if I can even meet someone that I actually like enough to want to be around.

Angustia...tell me, how does this life work again? What am I doing wrong? Something? Everything? I'd give up but I don't even know how...

Angústia...ao saber que não faço o menor sentido nessa vida.

I don't make sense.

It's like the continuation of that poem I wrote all of six years ago, that ended, "Never would you tell me that we don't make sense." We didn't make sense, that was for sure...but the reason was that I didn't make sense.

So how could a we make sense if the I doesn't make sense.

I'll let this stand as it is for now. The most likely explanation for all of this right now is a little bit of PMS, but I've also been feeling undertones of this for a while now, so I might as well say it, get it off my chest, let it be.