I feel like I'm missing something

Do you ever feel as though you haven’t quite achieved your full potential in life? That on paper your life is really quite impressive, and in reality you’re always so frickin busy with stuff going on, but deep down you just feel as though you have something else to give out to the world?

Fyi, I don’t know what mine is by the way. But I feel a bit panicky that I need to work out what it is soon, and then get on and do it.

Do you know who I admire these days? People who do things. Like go on Masterchef, aiming to be the very best chef there is and to make it in their world. When they’re interviewed by Moncia they say to her, “This is such a dream of mine to be here, I’m so happy. I’ve wanted to be a chef since I was two”.

Or people who write a book and are beyond delighted and tell you how hard the last seven years have been writing it and trying to get published. Or other people who run a marathon because they woke up one day and thought, this is what I want to do from now on.

I don’t know what my potential is, and I also don’t know why my inner voice is so loud on it at the moment. I did wonder if this had all come about due to having had cancer, because that does make you look really closely at your life as being very precious - and you do think, I’d better make the most of it before it’s my time to go. I’m also nearly fifty too which might be contributing to a loud clock in my head going TICK TICK TICK.

But - what if you don’t know what to pursue, like me. What if you just know that you’d like to do something, but you’re not actually quite sure what it is.

This is quite a frustrating feeling I’m having regularly at the moment.

Something I thought that I could throw myself into, to really give it my all, was fashion, seeing as I’m drawn to it a lot. But every time I post on Insta I end up feeling really weird about it all and then I’ll delete it.

And then I thought it might be writing - because that’s something I think about a lot and have done lots of since I was young. But when I sit down to type my mind ends up going totally blank. Or, if I do get something out, I read it back and think, that sounds a bit shit. I also don’t have big dreams like other people do about spending my days sitting in a room with a cat writing away or producing a piece of work that everyone loves and is really good or special.

Some people might say to me, “but Jess! Slow the f down, you’re doing fine”. But I don’t know. I just feel a bit twitchy about this.

A few friends over coffee have said try a few things out. And then they said, set the bar really low, as in, don’t think about ‘achieving your potential’ just do some things and see how you feel when you do them. This is good advice because trying to force something to come isn’t a good idea, is it. You just end up feeling even more pissed off about not having it figured out yet.

Like I say, you’d think that with a full-time job, two teens to look after, and a house, that I’d be content and fulfilled from that but for some reason something inside me is telling me there might be something more in me yet.