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The meaning of it all - by Anita Ilango - letters to Nobody

anilango.substack.com · 951 words · saved by 1 readers

I spent most of my early twenties trying to figure out what it all meant. What drives me? Why? Who did I want to be? Why? Did I want this job? Why? Life felt like a rinse and repeat cycle of pursuing difficult experiences, dissecting said experiences with my friends, then coming home to stare at my bedroom ceiling and decide what I thought about all of it. This routine was so persistent that I started ascribing it to my personality — I was an existential person with existential thoughts and I needed to start a Substack to talk about it. As it turns out, I was just 22. That phase would pass. Eventually I’d be a few years older, feeling like a completely different person and writing about the things I care about instead of the things that confuse me. In transitory phases of life, I think it’s necessary to live messily and go through the motions and pretend you’re the only person in the world concerned with the ‘why’ behind everything. Then one day the mess becomes a story, you start to w

Photo taken on the day I wrote my first Substack essay, of a beautiful apartment I have since moved out of :’) I spent most of my early twenties trying to figure out what it all meant. What drives me? Why? Who did I want to be? Why? Did I want this job? Why? Life felt like a rinse and repeat cycle of pursuing difficult experiences, dissecting said experiences with my friends, then coming home to stare at my bedroom ceiling and decide what I thought about all of it. This routine was so persistent that I started ascribing it to my personality — I was an existential person with existential…

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