Adventure is not a singular experience nor a particular destination.

Adventure is a state of mind, a means of approaching all things with wonderment, curiosity, occasional panic, but an eventual return to joy. It’s embracing the unexpected that life presents you as if you’d chosen it yourself. It’s choosing to launch yourself into the joy of living with a heart that is open and free from the immovable weight of fear.

For a time, my career, my love, my home—none of it fit.

I didn’t know what I needed, but I knew it wasn’t this. I felt as if my life were akin to spending every day in the tugging awkwardness of wet jeans, forced in all ways to contort myself to avoid the undeniable and uncomfortable rub.

When we hit these points of misalignment, our bodies reverberate with unsettling. We know in our bones that we are at a precipice, but this ground-destabilizing chaos and indecision always comes prior to needed change.

We feel like we are burning from a fire whose origin we can’t quite pinpoint, and we’re left to deal with the encroaching wildfire using little but additional tinder.

The truth I refused to face was that none of it—not the job I’d dedicated years of education and financing to land, not the relationship I’d buoyed and sacrificed to keep alive, not my home in a town where I didn’t belong—could remain unchanged if I valued my happiness. That there was within me a need for wildness, a need for exploration, a need to live a life not comfortably defined nor accepted by a world seeking order and simplicity.

It wasn’t a pull to meander aimlessly—I simply needed an adventurous life.

After I finally found the courage to let go of the world I understood to venture onward into paths unknown, I came to realize that maybe it’s not supposed to go according to plan. Maybe the very idea of a plan is a put-on, as if anything is strictly prescribed or controllable.

We are meant to aim and miss, to continually reorient ourselves toward all that sets ourselves and our purpose on fire.

So go ahead—live. It’s okay to get it wrong, to f*ck it up, to lose yourself, to fumble expressions of truth, to trip over your past, to lose perspective, to lose your way, to choose, to get it right and then f*ck it up all the same.

Life is messy—we are messy—but the more authentically we are living, the blurrier the edges become between success and failure. This is worth the mess.

I have long since refused to live in the false warmth of another sunset alight with someone else’s intention. To live any life other than mine.

Grab ahold of a path made of actions of your own choosing. It’s your life—go live it. You are deserving of love, of everything, exactly as you are. Walk away from anyone or anything that tells you differently.

It wasn’t easy, and the transition to authenticity is rarely smooth.

But within you is an inexhaustible strength—breathe, seize it, and set your life free.

~

~

Author: Lisa Marie White
Image: averie woodard/Unsplash
Editor: Callie Rushton
Copy Editor: Travis May
Social Editor: Sara Kärpänen