This life has been a test.

"This life has been a test. If this had been an actual life, you would have received instructions on where to go and what to do."
-My So-Called Life

Ever feel like you could use a cheat sheet for your life?  Or better yet, a fire drill to put off figuring it out at all?  Today, I feel like I need a fire drill.

It's almost becoming comical, the complete lack of comprehension and insight I have into my own life.  I wax poetic in here acting like I know something, pretending to understand what the hell I'm doing, but it's all a fake out.  If I've learned anything at all lately, it's this:  I don't know anything.

Anytime I think I've figured something out, life takes my test paper, glances at it, laughs raucously and throws something at me that totally disproves or distorts what I thought I knew.  It's kind of exhausting.  Nothing is ever simple.  Everything is in flux, changing as I change.  Just when I think I'm catching up, I fall behind again.  WTF, mate?

Let's tear down the curtain between real and imagined and lay it out as it really stands.

I don't know what I want.
Even if I did, everything I based that knowledge on would shift and reshape itself as the realization were crossing my mind. 
As soon as I'm sure about something, it's not sure about me.

Ambiguity is a bitch, folks.  I don't like it.  It drives me a little crazy.  I want definitive knowledge.  I want to know where I stand.  I don't want to put myself out there for a lost cause, or to get embarrassed or hurt or walked over.  I don't want to overextend myself, or become an easy target.  Like me or don't.  Decide to spend time with me or not.  Don't jerk me around, and don't stick around if I put myself on the idiot pedestal and behave in a way that shows I've lost sight of how to have some self-respect.  Do me a favor and don't indulge me.

I've toiled about something for the last couple of weeks.  I thought I finally came to a decision about where I stood, and it was not easy for me.  A lot of things in my head shifted, I was working so hard to re-train my brain to think in healthier ways.  And then as soon as I started settling into the idea of it, things got pulled up into a vortex of messiness again.

It would be really nice to have an open book life test.  I want the answers in front of me.  A predictable path.  Just once.  For a little bit.  The comfort and familiarity of knowing I'm going the right way. I am growing so weary and exhausted of wandering blindly through things, making choices alternately based on logic and randomness, just to see what happens. 

If this life is a test, someone please pull the fire alarm.  I think about it sometimes when I pass one, but I just don't have the nerve.