When I graduated from college in 2015, I was deeply bored for ten months.

I can
remember it felt like a state of being in-between, like a sustained transition in which my
search for meaning was restless, but it was impeded by my flight from responsibility
and fear of failure.

I had a huge desire to find that something worth living for, but my resistance to not
feeling insufficient, or getting lost along the way, prevented me from seeing the
spectrum of valuable possibilities around me. I did not sleep properly, but there were no
concrete reasons why to stay awake, projects to think about, there was emptiness in my
self-projection. As Sartre points out, there was simultaneously too much and too little in
my life, like too much convenience and too limited freedom of creation.

My motion for a search of meaning was misoriented and stolen by my will to power, my
will for pleasure, ending up with a blind understanding of what I was really missing. I
wasn’t facing my spiritual needs, I was flying away from them, because I didn’t want to
face my reality, my human reality, in which I had to face the possibility of failure, of
feeling not enough, of feeling small, and also having to give up expectations of a
“better” future.

I was not aware of my battle against responsibility, which suppressed me in a dense and
adjourned state of waiting, and waiting with no-sense of what for, maybe for something
to come and change my life, but I wasn’t responding, I just waited. My lack of
response-ability, became a frustration of my ability to responde to the existential calls I
felt deep within me.

After ten months of this feeling of stagnation, of dead-end pleasure searches, I had no
choice but to surrender, to change my attitude to one that Elisabeth Lukas calls the
surrender attitude (Lukas, 2001). I learned about the surrender attitude various years
later, but I know that’s what finally changed in me. I gave up expectations, my ego
stopped fighting and, instead, surrendered to its reality.

By that time, I read a lot about responsibility. I understood I was invited to respond to
the questions that life was pronouncing me: Why is your life important? Which will be
your choice, under this conditions and possibilities? What truly makes your life worth
living for? What choices are more coherent with your inner calls for meaning?

I changed. I gave myself the opportunity to leave a human life, with ups and downs,
with gains and losses, gradually clarifying my vocation and orienting my life to what I
started discovering gave meaning to my life and to others.

Lukas, Elisabeth. (2001). Paz vital, plenitud y placer de vivir. Los valores de la
logoterapia. España: Editorial Paidós.