How to Not Be a Fish
Reflections from Indonesia

I remember feeling trapped in high school. For anyone caught in a routine, you can recall the tedium. It was the same scenario every day for four years, the same irritations and dull amusements. I felt chained to the vertigo of boredom, a retrenchment into ennui. The only thing which kept me going was the fertile dream of university, the freedom to achieve everything I always wanted.
When I arrived at Western, I found what I had been coveting. My vision for total freedom had arrived, which I believed would be the key to happiness. I had what I thought I needed; I was having fun, I had a pullulating social life, I felt interested in my classes and I was fully stimulated. For two years, I believed I was happy — that I was living life to the fullest.
This year was when things started to go awry.
It began on New Year’s Day of 2018. We were floating in the waves of Cayo Largo, Cuba, when one of my best friends told me she had decided to leave school to pursue her own creative ambitions.

This was an unexpected shock. She was telling me that she no longer needed to rely on the validation of society to achieve what she wanted. She had independently decided to anchor her emotional well-being and self-worth in the place where it belonged — herself. She no longer cared what anyone else thought, and she was going to stop wasting time pursuing other people’s dreams.
When I saw my close friend do this, it made me question the validity of my own choices. Suddenly my rosy life did not seem so perfect after all.
I internalized this change without knowing what it meant. By February, I was stuck in the same rut that gripped me in high school. My surroundings did not reflect my internal conflict, and increasingly I felt like I was faking it; pretending to be happy, to be the person everyone thought I was.
As a result, I would spend interminable hours talking to people, wasting time until sun came up. Socializing and vacuous conversation were my sole sources of happiness. At the time, it seemed fine — I believed I was cultivating a wealth of human connections. If I was ever alone, it was reluctantly, and never lasted long. I could scarcely concentrate on myself for more than an hour without some form of social release.
I didn’t know it, but I was living inauthentically.
By March, things were much worse. My anxiety increased, and I felt I was living a lie. Happiness was fleeting, punctuated by plodding periods of itinerance and self-doubt.
I immediately knew I needed to get away, fast. I spoke with my friends, and they agreed that solo travel would be the necessary salve. It always sounded like something people do when they feel trapped. I didn’t believe I was chasing a voyage of self-discovery, because I thought I knew myself. I merely wanted to experience new things and see the world, find the elusive excitement that I had yet again lost.
I applied to an exchange in Sumatra, Indonesia, and was accepted. For a moment I was thrilled, expecting to travel and meet new people, finding new sources of stimulation. I would adventure abroad, seeking more of the freedom that I craved.
When I arrived, it was not what I expected.
The first days were difficult, and not just because of the twelve-hour jet lag. I was suddenly living with total strangers who scarcely spoke English. I had no phone service, I had no way to get around. I couldn’t even order food. The toilets were strange, and we got all our water from a well in the ground. The sun was blazing, and the air was thirty-five degrees.
I felt totally alone.
This feeling lasted for two weeks. It only abated after one special weekend.
Twenty exchange participants decided to spend a night on Sebesi island, journeying to see the majestic Krakatoa volcano. We took a four hour boat ride from the southernmost tip of Sumatra, to hike the mountain illegally, beholding its thunderous eruption and smoky blooms of poison gas.
On Sebesi, our accommodations were less than stellar. We had been given a single empty room, with twenty mattresses in a row and no electricity. There were bats in the ceiling, and a snake had crawled into the bathroom. There was ossified residue in the toilets, which had evidently never been cleaned.
These conditions affected the mood of the trip. Everyone wanted to leave, believing they had made a mistake. Some even tried to get back on the boat.
On this trip, however, I was searching for something. After two weeks of loneliness, I wanted to not feel alone when I was with myself. That would be the first step.
I took this as an opportunity to divorce myself from the throng of miserable students. I went to the beach, and walked along the pristine shore for three hours in perfect solitude. I wandered across the island to the opposite face of the mountain, where across the strait lay an archipelago of islands and cliffs crowned with verdure. It was a mesmerizing scene.
In a moment of youthful energy, I tore off all my clothes and jumped into the water, fully naked. There was a coral reef beneath my feet, and the sun sparkled in the azure waters. The mountain towered over me, its peak ringed by pearly clouds.

I suddenly felt very aware that I was on the other side of the planet, away from my entire life. I had been stripped of everything I knew, all the various elements of my identity. I was no longer Gareth the university student, but I was still myself, liberated from the trappings of society. I suddenly felt more alive than I ever had. I was free of my identity, and yet I was still me.
Over the new two weeks, I started to feel renewed. I was no longer intimidated by the strange new environment, and I was doing it all on my own.
Soon after Sebesi we took a four day trip to Bali, a florid paradise that has to be seen to be believed. I was excited to see all the spectacular sights, but more importantly to finish the journey which I had begun.
Bali is an explosion of colour, exactly as it appears on postcards. It is a land of spice and wonder, smelling ceaselessly of incense and offerings. Its towns are woven between jungles and terraces, its trees crawling with monkeys. Intricate statues and ancient temples can be found on every street corner, along with exotic fruit vendors and art markets. Its beaches are a perfect cerulean, the pure reflection of an unobscured sky.
On our final night in Bali, we arrived at Kuta beach at the exact right moment to see the sunset. I remember gasping in shock at first glance. It was the most glorious thing I have ever witnessed. The sun was swollen to twice its size, wrapping the sky in a crimson banner. The silken sands were coated with glassy sheets of water that exactly reflected the brilliant heavens, and the world became a ribbon of copper splendour, perfectly symmetrical.

I was swept up by the scene, and ran into the distance, with nothing to stop me. I ran into the ocean, along the sand, and there was no one in sight.
And there was one word which kept running through my mind — freedom. I repeated it many times, screaming it out loud, and I couldn’t conceal a smile.
In that moment, I realized I finally understood what the word freedom means.
Freedom is not something you achieve or unlock. It’s not something that you can gain by leaving home, or leaving school, or travelling. It’s a perspective, an outlook on life. It’s a mindset which can be applied to anything, and it can be found anywhere.
Freedom means liberating yourself from other people. Freedom means relying on yourself, and yourself alone, for your self-image.
I realized at this moment that the only reason that I wasn’t doing absolutely everything I wanted is because I cared too much about what other people think.
And there was one question I kept asking myself. If you aren’t living for yourself, are you really living at all?
It was time to start living.
As I stared into the golden sun, which was dipping below the horizon and sending rays of honey into the purple night, I looked down and saw a group of baby turtles swimming into the sunset, emerald wings flapping. It was the most beautiful thing I had ever seen. A few stray tears crawled down my face, and I was the happiest person in the world.
The whole trip to Bali I had been taking pictures with ancient objects, timeworn temples and medieval monuments. But I realized then that the sun is the most ancient object we know. The sun is five billion years old, and it rises and sets every day in between. The sun came before us, and it will outlast us.
We are but the minutest fragment in the mosaic of life. Our civilization will be swallowed by the sun, and in the heat death of the universe all conscious material will disappear. In this infinity of being, our lives are meaningless.
We are only living for ourselves. The only thing that matters is how we live for ourselves.
I realized that this trip was the first time I had ever lived truly for myself. I organized it and paid for it, without any help. I separated myself from everyone and everything I know, to live on the other side of the planet with complete strangers. And I survived. It felt amazing.
But it felt amazing precisely because, for once, I had decided to do something just on my own. I didn’t need other people’s validation to do it, nor did I want it.
As I stared into the vanishing light, I realized with breathless amazement that for my whole life the source of my suffering was that I allowed myself to be dictated by other people, and their thoughts, judgement, or opinions. Because I cared so much about my social status, I wanted people to like me. Because I cared about my appearance of intelligence, I needed high grades. Because I needed to appear successful, I had to have an impressive resume. My sense of self-worth derived from other people’s validation, but the consequence of this was that I was always anxious to achieve approval, and disappointed in myself when I did not reach it.
I always thought I was a highly independent person, but really I was dependent on other people for my perception of myself. I saw myself through the lens of how others saw me — and rather than trying to be myself, I tried to be the reflection I saw of myself through their eyes. I tried to play roles — to laugh a lot, to seem happy all the time, to be everyone’s best friend. I thought I enjoyed my reckless socializing, gossiping the day away. I thought I was successful, with a list of accomplishments to my name and a glowing resume.
These are illusions. They are not surrogates for true happiness.
In Bali, I finally realized what many people have always said. Happiness is an attitude. It is not something that can be achieved. In fact, chasing achievements is guaranteed to make you unhappy.
I had always blamed materialistic people for believing that possessions could bring them happiness, but I realized that I was just the same. I relied on people, treating them like possessions.
But true happiness comes from within.
Happiness is not something you can wait around for other people to provide. You have to find it for yourself.
And so, the morning after this sunset I knew what I would do. I walked into a tattoo parlour around the corner from my hotel, and got the word ‘freedom’ stamped into my skin permanently. It was written in the elegant Balinese script, a string of winding black curls, representing my journey of self-acceptance.

I thought that I might be homesick on this trip, that I might miss the relative comforts of my previous environments. But I didn’t. It’s not that I don’t value those places or people, but I finally found a true home. My whole life I had been looking one, and now I realize where it was all along.
Home is not something that surrounds you. It exists within you. Home is something you find in yourself.
I could find this home because I finally accepted the fundamental fact of life, that thing which used to terrify me — universal change.
All human activities proceed within the anxiety of time. Civilization exists to prevent change by creating permanent structures, from skyscrapers to governments. All abstract symbols exists to arrest the flow of time by creating ideal concepts. We try to annihilate time through the creation of fixed identities, imposing immutable categories.
All our actions respond to the terror of change, and are desperate attempts to prevent it.
But they are all illusions.
Change is the driving force of the universe. Systems break and structures collapse. Entropy is the final destroyer, not Shiva, or Satan, or Baal.
But at the same time, change is the author, the creator of the universe. It is that force which calls all things into being. Creation and destruction are two words for the exact same thing.
But most importantly, if you recognize this fact, and truly understand the nature of your fleeting existence, then you can be the only constant.
If you live your life at the mercy of other people, you will be just as fleeting as they are. You will live your life according to their momentary feelings, and you will disappear when they do. But if you truly understand the insignificance of your life in the face of eternal change, then you will be free.
Freedom is how we truly escape time.
If you embody freedom by separating yourself from the endless flow of people and places, then you will be independent. The vagaries of human life will be of no consequence.
People will come in and out of your life. Jobs will change, houses will change. You are the only thing you always have.
I thought of an analogy in the water temple at Pura Tirta Empul, swimming with the koi and bathing in the holy springs. Time is not an arrow — it is a river. Every moment water runs and is replaced by more, and the river retains its shape.

Human beings are fish, swimming through the river upstream. We can only go in one direction — forward. We journey on, and then we die, never to go back.
But you don’t have to be a fish. You can also be the water — always changing, but always staying the same.
Freedom is the key to happiness. We can be free, if we want to be. But it is a choice. Happiness is a choice, and most people don’t realize that. Nothing, and no one, will give it to you.
You are the constant. You are home.
But only if you choose to be.
