On nights like today when I stay awake until an ungodly hour, I’ll often think about it’s foreseeable reprecussions. Because I know I’ll wake up the next morning regretting my decision. I’ll know I could have spent my time more wisely. Without enough sleep, I’ll be more messy, less diligent and careful, less patient. But in the moment I’m making the decision to do something I know I’ll regret, I feel strangely free and alive. Like nothing, not even my own limits or consciousness, can stop my body from making a decision it has committed to.
I can only describe it as a feeling of possibility; like the world is open, and anything can be done at any time.
That feeling of being openness is one I’ve come to associate with recklessness now. And I’m starting to get worried, because I feel that’s life’s way of telling me I’ve lost some all sense of youthful naivety.
This past year, the past five months even, have been far heavier than I could have envisioned they’d be. Every single stimulus is like a car in rush hour traffic trying to force it’s way through a bottleneck; it has a destination and wants to get there fast by what ever means necessary. I’ve felt so inundated with these feelings lately that I find myself needing time to feel more coherent, more myself again.
But you know what’s scary about this? Is that I’ve always seemed to feel I had some control over time. That if I wanted to slow my life down, I could. But every single particle of my reality seems to only be stopping for a quick second before zooming away. As if expecting me to follow. And I’ve been wondering lately, do I have the energy to follow? And if my body is, in the literal sense, following, am I?
There’s so much in my world that is making me feel emotionally-laden, and I can categorize them into two buckets: the first, newness and the other, hopelessness.
Newness
I spent three months in Singapore, then one month in England this summer. It was supposed to be my blockbuster summer, and in every respect it was. I saw new things almost every day, and got a taste of what people say about needing to be flexible and adaptable to new situations. I thought that after coming home, the newness would stop. But it hasn’t. Turns out, there is “new: at every turn if you look for it. A new colour of the trees in the front yard. A new seat on your train to school. A new route to class or the lab. A new sense of panic, a new syllabus and new challenges. And as soon as I start to feel I’m getting acclimatized to something, the world changes again.
And even bigger are the things that are “new” that I thought would never change. A new feeling of sadness when I see something about Singapore. A new feeling of accountability and responsibility for my role at home and in my family’s lives. A new level of panic and new bundle of nerves. New waves of nostalgia.
It makes me detest the “new”. Because when I’m not adapting fast enough to what’s new, my brain becomes acclimatized to the new. And suddenly, “new” becomes the unappreciated norm.
Hopelessness
I cannot deny that my four months abroad have also made me a cynic. I just didn’t expect them to make me as cynical as it did.
I spent a lot of time observing structural inequalities in Singapore, a country touted as one of the world’s crowning jewels in governance and civility. Singapore is a country that has managed to cultivate a culture of kindness (if not for eliciting the emotion itself, its to force Singaporeans to do “kind things” by promoting certain behaviours). And yet, I met some of the most vulnerable and manipulated people I’ve met in my life in Singapore. Every time I met yet another Singaporean resident who’d fallen through the cracks, I felt a part of me dying. It was like my faith in governance, in the world and humanity was ebbing away as the revolving door kept being turned by yet more vulnerable people. And the worse part is that it was a part of my role in Singapore to help them, and yet it wasn’t an empowering experience. It was a devastating one.
Living in a less glamorous part of the country, too, meant I couldn’t really “check” that feeling of devastation at the door. I’ve rarely felt to trapped by my own reality and my own choices in my life. But here they were, the people that I could truly help if I devoted my day and night to them. But I didn’t do that. I thought that I could, but I realized that I just couldn’t change their living situation on my own. Upon arriving in London and Oxford UK, I say the same scenes but less overt; that there was need when you had the courage to look it in the eye.
I’d thought I was strong enough for this type of continuous environmental stress. But I didn’t realize that it was eating away at my trust in the world from the inside.
Today, I see myself as having become someone who’s less of a unique and more complacent with the world around me. I guess it’s because I saw how staying in line, respecting every rule and social norm, seems to provide some security and tethering to this world. It’s also because I stopped seeing the world as this place I could change if I felt truly compelled to; I stopped believing that I had the tools to do it all, even when I knew it was needed.
As I type this, my eyes are burning and are red. I know for a fact that my emotions are clouding my judgement, making my words sound more fatalistic and rash than I would hope. But I believe that sometimes the most human decision you can make is to bear yourself to the world.
I hope that in a couple years, I can start a job that will let me actually address socio-economic disparities and need. But there’s just so much desperation in this world. And I know how strong that word is, but I’m not using it lightly. There is desperation; there’s hunger and sleep deprivation, need for protection and comfort, affirmation and regulation. With all that desperation, who’s job is it address it?
While I am more cynical and devoid of hope from the person who left Canada to go abroad in May, I do believe it’s my and everyone else’s moral responsibility to do something. Even if something feels like something I can’t address. Maybe in the course of trying to do something about these wordly conceptual issues, I’ll forget that I’m tethered to reality.
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It’s undeniable that there’s something so vulnerable about the human experience. It’s also apparent that we have the power to feel and act in response to vulnerability, maybe even an ethical obligation to do so. Especially when that vulnerability comes from ourselves, we are required to help ourselves before we help others. I find it so difficult to look at certain parts of our current world and see room for hope.
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