An honest thought

I’ve been wanting to write something meaningful about life for a while now. It is like all the sorrow, longing and hope that ever was and ever will be have been building up in my chest with no escape route, like a pressure cooker filled with beautifully carved sunsets, half-said goodbyes and sweet existential crises, all melting and spilling their peculiar essences to each other.

Is like feeling that life has unveiled before your eyes with a wink; like when you know that things will be all right eventually, except you don’t know it yet because you’re halfway through the book of your own making. It is also like having to bear the secret of life to the cost of seeing people and you love drifting away, further, and further into the past, further and further into an everlasting nostalgia of golden moments that are no longer, of a version of yourself that just doesn’t exist anymore.

I’ve been struggling for quite sometime now with that feeling. A couple of years ago I left home, and in the process, I lost something that was dear to me. There is no easy way to explain it, but it is if like the part of me that knew how to love carelessly got lost in the intricacies of multiculturalism and adulthood. Don’t get me wrong, I have had the fortune and pleasure of continuously meet exceptional people out there, is just that nobody told me that somewhere down the line my innocence would get lost somewhere across the Atlantic.

Since then, I’ve found myself shedding pieces of who I thought I was; challenging assumptions I had about myself; and letting go so many things that sometimes it feels like I don’t know what I have to offer anymore. It has been the greatest embodiment (at least for me) of what letting go must mean. Letting go the idea of romantic love, letting go the need to be the ultimate savior of my reality, letting go the comfort of having close the ones you love the most, and above all, letting go the expectation of having an extraordinary existence.

Now, what this means is not that I feel no love or passion anymore, but that I’ve found in the need to build new narratives for my stories; tales that are closer to who I really am outside of the nurturing context who made me this person. I am trying to tap into a version of myself that feels free of guilt of who I am, meaning having to heal a story of feeling like an outsider of what at that time was my universe. Healing has become such an important part of my truth: healing the idea of not fulfilling my expectations, healing the idea of abandoning my family for a new adventure, healing the pain of not being honest enough to make the choices I really wanted over and over for the sake of others, and guilt of now knowing how to belong somewhere.

I am trying to discover bit by beat-there is no typo here- what getting to know myself actually means. What it feels to accept the things that thrill me, what makes my heart jump; and to take conscious choices of following those things and those moments into the abyss. I am also trying to discover how to be okay by myself, what confronting me demons actually looks like, and even sometimes, what befriending them means to my happiness. They are baby steps, and there is still so much to shed, but I do know that this time there is no going back.

What I wan to say I guess, is that living is an exercise that takes up to the last drop of our effort and sanity. But if we are courageous and kind enough to ourselves, we can jump into it and let it crush us with the might of everyday so that in every crack, we can finally and truly feel what our own skin feels like: There must be no greater joy than to experience the pain and the love with nothing else that our own histories, just for the sake of being alive.