Types of Lost

Haunted House or Malaga Market

I was a scientist having a breakthrough, a eureka! moment. I’ve recently discovered there are two kinds of lost. There may be more but those others haven’t revealed themselves to me. The two kinds are ScaredLost and HappyLost. Though similar in practicalities and appearance, they differ in texture and flavor and mouthfeel.

ScaredLost is the one I think most people are familiar with. It’s the moment when it becomes clear that nothing is clear. Our lizard-brains, those silly contraptions that desperately seek clarity, can flip into panic mode at this realization. We don’t know where we are or where we’re going. That makes us feel unsafe. During ScaredLost, the outside world is full of hungry piranhas, treacherous cretins, invisible boobytraps, and falling anvils. Something bad might get us. It probably will. Something will probably definitely most likely for sure get us and then we’ll be dead and it’ll be horrible.

That is ScaredLost.

Or, at least, that’s my experience of it.

I have been ScaredLost many times in my 36 years. Sometimes it hits me like a train but passes through just as quick. Other times ScaredLost will settle over me like terrifying fog and linger. It sets up shop and envelops me with stunning nonchalance and no plan to leave any time soon. I’ve lived through whole chapters in ScaredLost.

A few weeks ago I wrote the following -

I am lost.

Let’s start there. Let’s start with the truth.

I am wildly lost.

Writing those words feels like heavy work. My fingers move through molasses to type. My mind trudges uphill against the fog to get to the next sentence. What is this? I wonder. How did I get here? How do I get found? My fingers continue to move across the keys.

The diagnosis is easy. Tracing this bewilderment to its root is fairly straightforward. It was a break-up I didn’t see coming and that, 8 months later, my heart is still attempting to untangle and make sense of. It was staying in a job about 2 years too long and watching all meaning from the work dissipate, resentment and hardness filling the void. It was seeing the entertainment industry move out of Georgia, out of the country. It was going on dozens (a hundred?) auditions and not booking a single job in over 2.5 years. It was the realization that, at 36, I am broke and just one lone person of the 57% of Americans living paycheck to paycheck. It was “the state of the world.”

All of this, the tumult of things beyond my control coupled with 3 decades-worth of personal choices, have landed me here.

Lost.

The abandoned projects. The half-read books. The constant moving. The flurry of thoughts. The frozen feet. The dried-up dreams.

And the world spins madly on.

Damn.

Macabre much?

Poor Patrick of several weeks ago. He was in a state of ScaredLost with all the classic symptoms. He was distracted and unmotivated and really fucking afraid. One bad thing was tied to another bad thing was tied to another bad thing. The world felt like a washing machine of chaos and all he could do was lay down and succumb to its cacophony. He didn’t know which way was up. Not that it would have helped because he was too laden to even swim in that direction.

That’s the thing about ScaredLost. It tricks the brain into thinking the world is divided into two groups - those who know what’s going on (everyone) and those who don’t (me). It neglects the fact that being a human on planet Earth has always meant being in the washing machine of chaos. From cavemen to aristocrats to farmers to billionaires to Patricks. And that is not a bug in the system, that is the system. It is operating as designed.

Of that litany that Patrick-of-Several-Weeks-Ago wrote out, one was the bedrock of his ScaredLostness. The linchpin that everything else hung itself on.

I stayed in a job too long.

When I look back, with the eye of a forensic investigator, I should have left the party about 2 years ago. I overstayed my welcome and it was nobody’s fault but my own. Comfort is a seductive poison, the sweetest of toxins. Why rock the boat? I would ask myself, failing to remember that life itself is a boat ride on unpredictable waters. And so I stayed, and stayed, and stayed, and stayed, until I found myself untethered, unmoored, and unhappy. ScaredLost had been steadily rolling in while career necrosis spread unchecked.

Months ago in a lightning bolt moment of undeniable clarity, the kind my lizard brain laps up with delight, I knew it was time to leave. The truth rang out like a gong. A flame was ignited. I talked to my closest people. I wrote up the letters. I sent out the texts. I said my good-byes.

When people ask what I’m doing next, I respond with a nakedly honest, “I don’t know.” There’s no sugar to coat that. However I follow up with, “but I’m clearing the field to figure that out.”

Having been out of that job for only a week, I can say that is precisely how it feels. The field has been cleared and I can see a wider scope of possibilities. My own life feels a little less claustrophobic around me. The apathy and distraction are also loosening their grip. My feet feel less frozen to the ground below. I’m a little bit lighter, a little bit freer.

Thusly I find myself in a state of HappyLost.

At least right now. At least at this moment.

I don’t know what’s next but I know it’s not piranhas and anvils. HappyLost isn’t a haunted house. It’s light-filled. It’s open. It’s free. HappyLost is wandering a crowded Malaga market to discover foods you’ve never seen. It’s an entire day with nothing on the calendar. It’s roaming through aisle after aisle of books at The Strand. It’s stumbling upon a cute, previously unknown neighborhood in your own city. It’s booking an international trip with no plan. It’s a washing machine of possibility, never knowing who or what you might bump into sparking the next adventure.

So onward I go, into the land of who-knows. And with any luck I’ll stay HappyLost until I hit the shores of whatever place has been beckoning for me.