Thoughts on the Future

I've been thinking a lot lately - about life, about where I want to go and who I want to be, about what my life is gonna be like a couple years from now, 10 years from now, just the future in general. It's kind of hard not to when Pinterest makes it so easy to plan your wedding and future home and neat ideas to run a household!

But that's besides the point :)

The point is, it's driving me crazy because, frankly, I don't know anything. And I hate it. I hate not knowing where I'm going to end up, who is still going to be around, what I'm going to be doing. When I was still living at home, it was easier. I knew that every three or four years, whether I liked it or not, I was going to move and start over and have a whole new set of people around me. But now... now it's up to me to decide. There is no checkpoint coming up, no three or four year mark where I know I'll be uprooted. No one is going to make my decisions for me.. Now it's up to me to decide whether to be uprooted or planted, whether to stay where I am or to go somewhere new, whether the people around me are those I want to stay with or if I need to move on.

It's hard. Decisions are hard.

And quite frankly, I'm scared. What if I choose wrong? Everything in front of me is completely unfamiliar territory. The things I have planned are completely out of my control and the things that I can control I have no plans for!

I honestly love my life just the way it is - with the exception of my family being so far away... You'd think that someone so used to change wouldn't be afraid of it. But I am... Every decision I make now seems like a huge one! And every decision comes along with a new "what if?" game. Just when I think I've exhausted all the possibilities, the game starts over. I can't handle the thought that I might screw myself up, because there will be no one to blame but me. But what if I do choose the best thing for me, but then it is no longer an option. What if who I want around doesn't want to be around? What if this fairytale life and ending that I've been planning just doesn't.. happen. What then?

Situations change, people change, hearts change. Yes, I am a person, and it may be me changing or it may be my heart changing, but what if it's not? What if people in my life change and want something different... How do I deal with that? How do I let them go? How do I move on and patch up the holes in my plans?

I guess the answer is to not get my heart set on my own plans. I just have to trust that Heavenly Father has a plan for me and that it will all work out in the end. Whatever happens, happens - I just have to go with it. Heaven knows his plans are probably not the same as mine.

But I still can't stop thinking about it.

I'm haunted by what-if's.