[Recap 2010 - 2015]
"You fucked up dude. No excuses. You fucked up"
"Yes, I did"
"Good. What are you going to do next?"
"I don't know. Sit back and see where this is all going to go to?"
What else could I do? What else was there left for me to do?
This was September 2013. Or was it 2014? I don't know. I really do not know. So much has happened, and yet nothing has really changed. I'm still here, you're still here reading this, and the earth continues to twirl, whirl and hurl itself through space.
To you all who have been with me from the beginning, here is a recap. To those of you who don't know me, here is a good point to start from. To those of you who know this story or have been part of it, this is how I remember events and I still love you all.
Part 1: Save Point
In 2010, an idea that was lurking in the back of my head finally matured: it was time for me to grow up and move out of my parent's house. In 2011, I graduated from our beloved VTU, had my heart completely destroyed and I enrolled myself at the University of Texas at Arlington. I flew half way across the planet, started a new life with absolutely nothing but myself and a little financial support from my family to pay for my school.
Long story short, The University of Texas at Arlington made me the person I am today. I had a lot of growing up to do and I had a lot of issues in my life that I wanted to fix - I learnt to live with and accept an imperfect world filled with good people and good hearts. I found friends. I made friends. I let go of some of my old beliefs. I strengthend some of my old beliefs. The world continued to twirl, whirl and hurl.
In 2012, I was playing Ultimate Frisbee one day. A guy on my team walked up to me and gave me the best advice I had received in a long time. "Man up!" he told me. "Stop complaining, deal with pain, deal with exhaustion and man up". And I did. My life changed forever
Part 2: A New Hope
"The only thing left inside the jar was Hope"
Few people are lucky enough to find Hope when they need it the most. I didn't just find Hope, I kissed her. The odds of me finding someone so perfect is so incomprehensibly small that I was left wondering if there was something other than a rational, deterministic universe at work here. If I needed any fixing to be made, she helped me fix it. I learnt to trust, love and laugh. I learned to Hope. I fell in love. I found myself a job, I purchased my first car, I got my first paycheck, and I was making more money than what I would have ever dreamt possible.
If fate was a person, living, breathing and moving, she would have a very cruel sense of humor. In 2011, when I was at the bottom of a deep black depression, I had asked if anything was worse than living with a broken heart. In 2013 I found the answer - I broke the heart of the girl who gave me hope and I had to live with it. We tried to see if we could work around fate, see if I could avoid having to see her suffer, but it could not be so. Fate is a harsh mistress, and I can only suffer for what I have done. The world continues to twirl, whirl and hurl.
If fate was a person, living, breathing and moving, she would have a very cruel sense of humor. In 2011, when I was at the bottom of a deep black depression, I had asked if anything was worse than living with a broken heart. In 2013 I found the answer - I broke the heart of the girl who gave me hope and I had to live with it. We tried to see if we could work around fate, see if I could avoid having to see her suffer, but it could not be so. Fate is a harsh mistress, and I can only suffer for what I have done. The world continues to twirl, whirl and hurl.
Part 3: Enter the Void
Wake up. Shower. Morning traffic. Meetings, email and cubicle buzz. Evening Traffic. Dinner, podcast and bed. Repeat 475 times. This is not meditation. This is not discipline. This is just boring ol' adult life.
Welcome to being an adult. Where friends are hard to find, surprises are never around the corner and a weekend doing laundry is more desirable than a weekend with alcohol and hangovers. Every day is the same as the day before, every hour is just a relentless military march of seconds tick past, never slowing, never stopping, never giving a moment's break to pause and take a breath. My job description does a better job at describing my entire life better than it does describing my regular job. I have a shoe box filled with failed hobby attempts. I have to calorie-count to not grow any more fat. If my computer breaks down, I would rather buy a new one than dig through config files and ubuntu forums. My box of 16 pastel colors could have been 16 shades of greys and I would see no difference.
The world continues to twirl, whirl and hurl
Part 4: Learning to Fly
I have a theory - every once in a while, the world runs into something unexplained, and wakes up its inhabitants with a violent jolt. This is not physical. This is quite possibly not even real. But it is helpful to think this is real in order to understand what happened to me next. I woke up with a jolt.
I had fallen asleep without knowing I had fallen asleep. I had explained away a long string of life events as a simple consequence of good and evil forces playing a tug of war with my Facebook timeline as the rope. Today I have woken up. An old fire, perhaps one put in here by Eru Ilúvatar himself, has been rekindled, and finally I want to live again.
It is time to let go of the void and learn to fly.
I hope you all will join me for this ride. Let's go and explore the unknown.
