And Yet…
A Letter to Myself
I am living the dream life. Many people where I come from would murder to be in my place. And yet…
I live in France, work a job that I like, live in a building that is a historical monument, everything around is both beautiful and pretty, the nature is verdant and blossoming, and yet… I cannot help but feel sad.
Yes, I live the dream life. But a dream that isn’t mine. I am far too intellectual, far too faraway to be enjoying it. I am making a career in a thriving, growing enterprise. My boss is kind, our president is strict but just, there are many opportunities that present themselves in my way, there are ways of profiting well from them and yet… I hate it. And I am made desperate and exhausted by it.
I know what I want from life. I want greatness. I know a way of achieving it — its essence hides within my writing, my academia and yet… I keep on choosing my plan B instead of my endgame because I am so terribly afraid of making an error and later being judged for it by my parents and having no money, and not having money is the most unattractive thing in the world in a man, as F. Scott used to say, but… Maybe things have to get worse before they can get better.
I am really dependent on money. I am used to a certain level of life, a certain level of luxury which has now been equated to a basic need in my spoiled head, and I fear that foregoing it may hinder my productivity even further, and yet… It also appears to be inevitable if I am to achieve my true, end goal.
I feel that if I were just to let myself go I could collapse crying thunderously in the middle of a work call. It takes all of me to keep myself at bay, but my strength is waning… My strength is waning…
I want to hold my darling baby niece that was born in my absence. I want to hug my middle nephew and squeeze his chubby cheeks. I want to shake my older nephew’s hand, like the men we are both destined to become one day; to hug my sister, to kiss my mother; to sit in the resonating silence with my dad and smile at each other, because we both know what each other’s souls hold, and yet… I am here. God knows where, doing God knows what…
Every day that goes by without me seeing them is like a droplet that falls into the fossilizing jar of my regret, that seething, arsenic liquid that melts my bones from within. That invisible force that is, one day, going to say to me, ‘enough,’ and overflow and burn me to the ground before I can rebuild myself again. For God knows which time in a row. But there is a way of evading it.
I could allow the utter blessing of inspiration, of passion, of love for art to engulf me, to swallow me completely and spit me out as the person I am meant to become. As the person I actually want to be.
I am only 22 — the age when most mistakes in life can still be made, while I have no family yet, no one dependent on me and yet… I fear it. I fear not even this ruminating possibility of error, but of making the jump. So many things depend on me, I have put so many at an inconvenience to come here, I have made so many people wait and yet… I cannot do otherwise but to let them down. Such are the pains of overly-reliable, overly-dutiful people. I will have to finally let someone else down, so that I may not let myself down. As the old proverb goes, ‘insolence is the second happiness.’
I need to let go of this fear and make a leap of faith. Because even if I crash, I would have tried, and that is better than sticking to the same old routine, hating myself and blaming others for my own misery and misfortune, never trying what I wanted to my whole life. Besides, I am confident that I will not crash, but soar into the sky.
Footnote:
This essay is the continuation of a piece I wrote for Age of Empathy, titled I Have a Homeland. The two must ideally be read together for better understanding.
