Meandering

-“Losing hope, is freedom” Hope, in what sense of the word? Perhaps the knowledge and awareness of where each step will lead you, or perhaps simply not needing to know because you’ve arrived at a place where you know each path will lead you to some discovery, and each discovery will only add to you, who you are. We run around in our daily lives, frantic, wondering what comes next, what sand castle can I, now, build.
When I was a child, I thought like a child. Too often I still feel like a child. But even as a child I felt this, anxiety, creeping in me. It was the reason my first year at school was so stressful. I suffered. I felt the world was imploding on me and I was still just at the starting line. I worried, in my first year, about the loans I was taking out for school and about how massive that debt would be once I graduated. Now I find myself here, years after graduation and there have been moments when I’ve fallen into the same kind of catastrophizing, but I think I’m better. I still yearn for a certain detachment. If I close my eyes and move forward will I still be able to walk? I think that’s what I yearn for, if not because I’m ready for it, then because it will make me capable of it.
I need to get to that point, not simply where I know that whatever comes, I will continue, but that point where I know that from everything that comes, I will extract what is most positive, even in affliction.
I shaved. The scruffy look now gone. Clean cut. I look sixteen, but still my hair line betrays me. I figure, to go to a different place, I must be someone else. Twelve months will do much, I am sure it will be more than enough time to find that point at which who I go as, who I’ve been and who I have become will meet. I wonder who I will be at that point. But I’m sure it will bring me closer to where and whom I need to be.
So I’m leaving. Half way across the world. Where people are small. Smaller than me anyhow. I stand six feet two inches. Where their tongue is indecipherable and where I have no idea what awaits me. Perhaps this is the way, the way to discover who you really are, to throw yourself into a situation that is completely foreign and only you remain what you are. When everything around you is unknown and the only voice that sounds familiar is your own.
Oddly enough, I look at what I leave behind, my friends, my family, those who are closest as well as those who are furthest, the coffeeshops I stop by, the room in which I dream, the twelve channels of HBO and one of IFC, the Hollywood film community that has not opened a door for me, the school that won’t again accept me, all that is familiar, the many places that hold traces of the many manifestations of me, and I feel I leave myself behind. So there is no choice but to grow, in my cross the world meandering.