What You Don’t Vocalize, Will Grow To Consume You.

I don’t think about how much I miss Jamaica until I’m back, as if there is something in the air that traps your thoughts of island nostalgia for when you return. Well, my thoughts were released, and as my hair soaked up the Jamaican sea, I could feel life coming back into my body.

I had been drained from moving, job searching, paying bills I had never had before, and trying to navigate conversations around going down a creative path. It’s funny, I feel as though when you tell people you’re interested in a more creative field, they want you to back up your artistic endeavors with more than just a feeling of passion. Questions such as, “How will you make money?”, “What happened to law school?”, and “Where did this creative side come from?” swarm in. And if you are not confident enough in your responses, they might just think you have no idea what you’re doing.

And even though I am confident in whatever I say back, whether I believe it or not, I damn sure have no idea what I am doing.

During the months of April and May, I spent more time mourning the loss of my financially driven career path than actually putting thought into what path I wanted to go down. I spent extensive brain power scrolling on TikTok, watching videos of 24-year-old girls living the life I thought I “should” have been living.

This idea of “should” is so complicated and can drag you into a deep hole of depression if you let it, and trust me, at one point, I let it.

In 2024, I was 22 and had just graduated from undergrad. Soon after my anticlimactic graduation, I started seeing a therapist online in Boston. I was working a job I hated and living a life I never saw for myself. But isn’t this what you wanted? I thought to myself. Isn’t this the life you dreamed of having post-grad? This is how it should be, I contemplated week after week.

There it was again, that “should.”

And it happened to be the first topic Bianca and I discussed in our very first session. She asked me where I got this way of thinking. I told her I had experienced some challenging events in my early adulthood, and I had this idea that those very small events plagued my current state. So when things occasionally worked out for me, like landing this job in the middle of my senior year, I thought, “You should be happy. This is how it’s supposed to be. This is what being happy looks like.”

I don’t even know whose standards I was living up to or whose passions I was following, but looking back, it wasn’t what I wanted anymore. I was traveling down someone else’s path, in shoes that didn’t fit, like a body snatcher. And honestly, I felt like one each day I slipped on tight slacks when I really wanted to throw on loose, ripped, thrifted Levi’s and a small cropped top. But that wasn’t corporate attire, and that wasn’t the path I “should” be going down.

Bianca helped me to stop living in the “should” and to just live in a place where my mind could roam freely. A place where I could learn to let go of what was making me feel so trapped. I was able to quit my job, move back home, and get my mind right. I’ll always be grateful to Bianca for that. We spent such a short period of time talking, although she helped me through such a hard time. A transitional period that I was working so hard not to accept.

While home, my dad offered to fly me to Jamaica to get my head right, although I was still living in such an avoidant state. I didn’t want to admit to him that I needed the trip and the space that it would entail, even though I had come clean to Bianca, who up until a few weeks prior had been a complete stranger.

It’s strange how therapy works. You start sessions with someone you barely know. They learn so much about your life, and by the end of each session, you know absolutely nothing about them.

I wasn’t used to that sort of interaction. I was used to meeting people and gearing the conversation entirely in a way where they could talk about themselves. Especially in the past two years, I had developed the ability to make any topic about someone else.

I didn’t want to talk about myself, or my relationship at the time, or my family, or how my brain was chaotic and I felt detached from it more than I felt grounded. I wanted to talk about them. I wanted to hear about their life, their problems, their family.

I didn’t want to answer questions about myself. I didn’t want to remind myself that I was living in a mental prison, that I was unable to express myself truthfully, and that I was settling for a life I didn’t want to live because, as I thought over and over and over again, this is how life “should” be.

Be happy. Be happy. Be happy.

Why do I have to “be”? Why can’t I just feel?

You have to feel happy. It shouldn’t be something you have to remind yourself to do, like a chore being checked off a tattered piece of notebook paper hanging on the fridge by a $10 Gen Z magnet.

Although now, as I lather myself in the ocean water, I am just feeling instead of trying.

If Bianca could see me now, I’m sure she would be proud. The woman she met two years ago was a shell of herself. This woman is filled with the Caribbean sea and plump with creative ideas.

I am not fully comfortable with my brain, or my body, or my life, but I’m fully comfortable with talking about it, and that’s the most important aspect.

What you don’t vocalize, you are scared of. I learned that during those hard years alone in my dorm room. I trapped every idea in my head. I was scared of my thoughts, my emotions, and the walls I had built up.

What you don’t vocalize will become all-consuming.

And maybe I’m not entirely comfortable with the current labels I’m attaching to myself: “artist,” “writer,” “curator,” “MFA,” “PhD.”

Maybe I’m more comfortable living life on a whim, leaving the future up to God. Or maybe I’m not.

But I’d rather vocalize it than let it consume me, eat me from the inside out. My brain is the only thing I’m fully in control of, so for now, I decide to just do and feel.

To do what makes me feel happy.

That’s the simple equation. Or maybe that’s just the equation I’m choosing to live by while I soak up this Caribbean Sea.

Jennifer Packer, Blessed Are Those Who Mourn (Breonna Breonna!)