Man, sometimes you just hit a wall, right? Like you’re cruising along, thinking you got it all figured out, and then BAM. Everything just… stops making sense. You start looking for signs, for some kind of guide, like those folks checking their Virgo monthly horoscopes or getting tarot readings. You just want someone, or something, to lay it all out for you, give you that “detailed reading” of your own life, you know? Tell you what the hell to do next.
I remember this one period, not that long ago actually. I was just going through the motions. Woke up, went to work, came home, rinse and repeat. Every single day felt like a carbon copy of the last. It wasn’t bad, exactly, but it felt… empty. Like I was just floating, without any real direction. All my pals were into astrology and stuff, always talking about their rising signs and sun signs, getting readings, you name it. And I’d just nod along, scoffing a bit on the inside, but secretly, man, I wished someone could just hand me a cheat sheet for my own life. Tell me what my “cards” were saying.
But I’ve never been one for waiting around for the stars to align. If I needed a reading, I figured I’d have to damn well give it to myself. So, I started. Not with crystals or cards, but just… trying stuff. Anything. I needed to shake the tree, you know? See what fell out. I started jotting down every single thing that made me feel even a tiny flicker of interest throughout the day. Like, “Liked that weird documentary about fungi.” Or “Actually enjoyed trying to fix that leaky faucet.” Just raw, unfiltered observations.
Then I decided I needed to get my hands dirty. I signed up for a pottery class. TERRIBLE at it. My pots looked like lumpy ashtrays, even after a month. But the feeling of the clay, the focus, it was something different. Felt kinda good to fail spectacularly, actually. Next, I tried learning Mandarin online. Spent three weeks on it, mainly just confusing myself with tones. Gave up. Then, because why not, I bought a cheap telescope and spent a few nights freezing my butt off in the backyard, trying to spot Saturn. Saw some fuzzy dots, but mostly just shivered a lot.
Most of it was just flailing, honestly. Felt like I was just throwing darts in the dark, hoping one would stick. My weekends went from predictable to chaotic. My friends would ask what I was up to, and I’d tell them I was “researching” or “exploring,” which usually meant I was butchering a new hobby. There were days I felt even more lost than before, surrounded by half-finished projects and books I barely understood. It was a proper mess, like my life had become a disorganized junk drawer. But I kept at it, kept trying, kept writing down what stuck and what just… didn’t.
And then, slowly, something started to click. While trying to figure out why my telescope wasn’t focusing right, I spent hours online, reading about optics, about electronics, about the physics of light. And it wasn’t the stars that hooked me, it was the how it all worked. The problem-solving. The dissecting of a system, figuring out its components, and making them work together. It felt… exciting. It was a similar feeling to when I actually managed to fix that leaky faucet, or when I debugged some weird script for work that no one else could figure out.
That wasn’t in any horoscope, was it? No tarot card ever told me “go learn more about obscure engineering principles.” But it was my own “detailed reading.” All those fumbled attempts, all those random detours, they weren’t wasted. They were leading me somewhere, pushing me towards what actually sparked something inside. I realized that my joy wasn’t in following a predetermined path, but in the messy process of discovery itself. It was about taking things apart, understanding them, and then putting them back together in a way that made sense to me.
So, I started digging deeper into that. Read books, watched more docs, started some small coding projects just for the sheer puzzle of it. I even went back to that half-assed Mandarin course, but this time, it was the structure of the language that fascinated me, not just memorizing phrases. It wasn’t about finding a definitive answer, but about embracing the quest for understanding. That’s the “reading” I got. Not from the universe telling me what to do, but from me finally listening to myself, through all the noise and all the trial-and-error.
