Hello, Internet. Long time no write.
Like visiting an old friend after much time, I will just pick up where I left off, as if we were in the middle of a conversation, as if we never left it sitting there separately from ourselves somewhere in the void of time.
The last time I wrote, I was in India, on the cusp of just beginning to understand why I had gone there, and why I had felt pulled to go there since childhood.
I was only planning to stay in India 35 days.
I ended up staying 3.5 months.
Since the time of my last writing, life transpired to show me what I was looking for. What I have learned about myself in the past seven months was the culmination of a lesson I have been learning since the day I was born: why I am here.
Substantiating this rather nebulous statement will take time, so let’s take it back to the start.
When I was around six years old, I learned India was a country. Immediately, I was entranced, fascinated, and felt compelled to go there. It was quite distinctly the first time I had learned of a place other than my home and thought, “I must go there.”
As the years passed, the more I learned about India, the more my fascination grew. I read about her culture, people, philosophy, religion, medicine, and even folktales, and all of it was stunningly beautiful. It was like witnessing a perfect sunset filling the sky with a range of colors previously unimaginable, but seeing this perfect sunset over and over, each time noticing a new color.
While I studied the cultures of other countries casually and eventually formally in college, there was always a special, undefinable connection I felt when learning something about India. There was just something on which I could not place my finger, some adjective constantly flying away from my lips, some elusive feeling I could not rely on language to describe.
Though I would not know what it was until decades later, I always knew I would travel there. Somehow. Someway.
When I finally decided to go to India that fateful moment seven months ago, it was not a decision that I made with much forethought. I did not plan for weeks, save money, or do any of those responsible things society tells us to do before embarking on international travel. I did not even have a passport.
In fact, I only made one decision. This decision has come to define my existence since the moment I made it, and that decision was not even whether or not to go to India.
That decision was simply to follow my heart.
What the hell, right? If you are wondering just how trite, sappy, and pretentious I could possibly be by making that statement, trust me, I have gone over all that and more to try and argue my way out of it.
But, it’s true. My life has taught me many things in its relatively short time frame, but the most valuable lesson I have learned so far is the one that sounds the most ridiculous.
You see, early in the morning in mid-July 2015, after much tumultuous and tortuous self-reflection that commenced from the time of my undergraduate graduation seven months prior, I realized that after repeated emotional devastation and trauma in childhood, I had spent my life making decisions from my head. It was the safe alternative to living life openly wherein you risk betrayal, anguish, and disappointment.
During the fourteen years preceding this, I had prided myself on thinking in terms of future regret, meaning that my decisions were ultimately made based on which path my future self would look back on and most regret either traveling or not traveling.
This method reliably led me out of an existence doomed to end in statistical failure by any measurable societal means.
Anytime I needed to make a decision, I constantly kept in mind my long-term goals, analyzed the best route in life to take, applied my future regret method, corrected my course, then plodded forward, each time newly resolved in my fortitude to surmount any obstacle that came my way.
This was all fine and well, until it just stopped making any sense whatsoever, because I never stopped to consider the fact that this method would stop taking me where I wanted to go, because I never stopped to consider that fact that I did not know what I really wanted.
I had done all I was supposed to do. I had accomplished what my society told me I should accomplish to be a bonafide, contributing member. I had pulled myself out of a life of certain destruction, and transplanted myself into a Self I was supposed to be, the Self I had believed had been stolen from me in childhood by unavoidable twists of fate.
I had done the unthinkable. I had gone from a life of a poverty, never finishing the ninth grade, living in a car and a tent for almost a year at the worst, to successfully working in corporate land, getting married, graduating as valedictorian, and all only a mere seven years after I was “supposed to have graduated,” as compared to everyone else, those normal people who never seemed to know how good they had it. I could finally be like them.
This was the elusive happiness I had been chasing, the accomplishment to supersede all other accomplishments, the pivotal moment when I finally step into my Self and feel worthy to be around all those other normal people, where I no longer feel like a second-class citizen, where, at last, I belong to something bigger than myself that is not something to be ashamed of in normal, daily conversation.
Except, the life this Self was living had no meaning. No purpose.
This Self was supposed to be the happiest it had ever been, and instead, it was only more lost, confused, and miserable than ever.
The safe life I had built for myself made absolutely no sense.
Everything began to unravel, and this time, I just let it.
To Be Continued.
Milky Way over Mokuleia. North Shore, O‘ahu, Hawai‘i.