Have You Seen My Rose-Colored Glasses?

Note: I was hesitant about posting this particular entry, as it is not a Pollyanna-ish one about traveling. However, I thought some of you might appreciate knowing that even a traveler like me couldn't avoid having those thoughts while going abroad. I would like to emphasize that I am getting by all right :-) 

My weight is fluctuating. My hair is coming out in lumps. My skin is becoming darker and more freckled. My flip flops are wearing out. I am more confused than ever.

I am falling apart. 

In other words, I am an ordinary adult currently dealing with an existential crisis. 

Or more accurately, I am simply a blabbering fool who is mystified by her ability to live a life, whatever it is. 

Again and again, I sit down and write, eagerly pouring my heart into a story, only to walk away in frustration. I do not know what I want to talk about. Hell, I don't even know what I am talking about. 

Life confuses me. I am okay with this confusion, but I loathe this terrible sense of wondering, "Okay, so why do I bother doing this?"

I write a truth only to come back and find it a lie. I write a story with no beginning and no end. I say things I believe in only to realize I no longer believe in them the moment they are uttered. I sprout out everything that means nothing. I talk like I know what I am talking about only to admit I do not even have a remote idea what I am talking about. 

I am plainly a blabbering fool. 

Am I supposed to tell you that traveling has transformed me into this even more wonderful, wiser, and happier individual?

Am I supposed to help perpetuating the myth that you are nothing if you do not travel at all? 

Am I supposed to be grateful and appreciative every single second that I am far away home, that I am living my dream? 

Perhaps I should insert cackles between these questions. A cackle of self-doubt, a cackle of confusion, and a particularly Voldemort-like cackle of existential crisis.

Nothing is the truth. 

You are what you choose to be. If you manage to be even more wonderful, wiser, and happier, so be it. If you are the exact opposite, so be it.

If you feel that traveling is a change you long for, then travel. If you feel that traveling will bring nothing into your life, then don't travel. Either way, you live the life on your own terms. You do not miss out on anything, no matter what others might tell you otherwise. 

If you could not manage to muster up a small ounce of gratitude and appreciation into your soul, make peace with that. If you could, be peaceful with that. 

See?

I am not even sure why I am saying all these things. I could be wrong. I could be right. 

I am talking because I am confused. I am talking in hope someone will interrupt me and go, "Hey, sweetie, that's okay" while patting my hand and solving the mystery of life for me. I am talking to sort out life. 

I find myself starting to disregard people's advice when they go against my desires. They may have good intentions. They do love me enough to offer advice, but I find my eyes shut to their advice, particularly when it comes unsolicited. 

Am I getting old? Am I starting to prefer my own wisdom, however fucked up it might be, to those of others? Am I learning the gift of following my heart?

Ah, I don't know. 

To me, the meaning of life is changing. While I am blabbering on, pretending I know what I am talking about, deep down inside me, I am vigilant like a hawk. I am watching myself. I want to study why I pretend to know it all and why my appetite for life is so fucking unsatisfied. 

Just by listening to my inner chatter, I am left breathless by the depth and the width of my unknowingness. I have no fucking clue. Thoughts float around inside, playing the chord with emotions that appear and fade away in their responses. 

I am adjusting to this existential crisis. In fact, I suspect there is no such a thing as an existential crisis.

I mean, you exist, you don't know what to do with your life, and then you die. All these three things are probably what we all would agree upon as three most constant facts of our existence. 

Ah, I could be wrong about that. 

I could no longer tell the difference between right and wrong, kindness and meanness, and all the other shades of life. 

I have tried to be right, kind, and all the good stuff. God knows I do, but sometimes I fail even at that because of many unexpected events, some of them involving only the state of my own mind.

What does it mean to be all the good stuff? Am I simply pleasing people when I should just let go of the fact I could not be perfect?

What does it mean to be imperfect when people poke at your flaws and insist at you improving your flaws? Am I supposed to tell them to shove it up their arse? 

I have been wondering about what it takes to be truly myself. It certainly takes a lot of strength and a lot of self-love to just be myself. It is hard. Especially when I am not sure what it means to have a self. 

Frankly, I am feeling so anxious and so shaken up by the shock of actually having a life to live out.  

Am I okay? Yes, I can honestly say yes. I eat. I sleep. I smile. I have my moments of happiness and sadness. I feel human. 

Am I not okay? I can also honestly say no. I freak out. I overthink. I do the opposite of what I intend to do. I feel like I am losing control over myself. I feel abnormal. 

In my quiet moments, whenever I could shut myself up, I recognize that regardless of whether I am okay, I am gradually growing into someone who is coming to terms with herself and is working diligently at making peace of having a life to live out. 

Phew. Isn't it exhausting just to be human? 

Ah, I will be all right. I've seen so many people managing to get by with their lives. Simply by accepting their unknowingness, they make me feel somewhat reassured. I am managing to get by so far. 

After all, I've managed to get myself thousands of miles away from Perth by choosing a rather unconventional method, a method I shall attempt to spin into a sweet tale in my next entry. 

Breaking the Habit

The very first night in Putrajaya, Malaysia with my new Malaysian and Indonesian friends (this little Malaysian lad gave me a brief crash course in BKM--Malaysian Sign Language--and proudly showed me foreign signs he had learned from other travelers. A future traveler is indeed in the making!)

I have been genuinely enjoying my solo adventures thus far. 

Malaysia and Singapore brought people--the Malay, the Chinese, the Indian and even the French--into my life, the people who helped shifting my perspective on my own culture, on others' cultures, and on life in general. I left these countries with a sense of gaining something akin to humility and wisdom. 

Hmm.

Let's forget that I'm traveling for a few moments.

Life stops for nobody, not even a globe-trekker. So, please allow me to get on the soapbox . . . 

While I was in India, someone told me that anger is a habit.

At first, I was stumped by the concept of an emotion being a habit, rather than a sense triggered by an event.

A habit is something you have control over. You can make or break a habit. Some habits have been formed over time and it is getting harder and harder to break them because you are so accustomed to using them to define you. Other habits are not the central pieces of you, and when you give them up, you just chuckle to yourself and think, "Well, good riddance!"

Now, let's consider the possibility that an emotion could be a habit. 

You react once to a certain event and believe this reaction is a proper one, so you begin to develop a need to feel this emotion every time an event happens. 

You feel validated or vindicated when this emotion obtains a kind of response you want to see from others. You feel violated or offended when this emotion fails to push a right button in someone else. 

When you do feel violated or offended, you begin to blame others for not giving you what you want. You want compassion to your anger. You want love to your sadness. You want kindness to your meanness. Others are to make up for what you could not give to yourself in the impassioned moment of a particular emotion. 

You become accustomed to appreciate and like someone who reacts beautifully to your emotions. It becomes a habit to scrutinize someone and deem whether h/she deserves to be in your life based on how well they respond to you. They happen because you are taught to listen to or even ignore specific emotions to help you navigating life. 

It becomes a habit, maybe even a reflex, to feel the same emotion every time a similiar event occurs. After all, it feels familiar and you like to know what to do rather than have to come up with an utterly new way to respond. So you falls upon your habit of feeling a similiar emotion.

Now let's imagine you breaking this habit of feeling the same emotion every time the similiar event happens.

What would happen?

Maybe you would discover a power within yourself to direct your reactions in a way that you can walk away from an event feeling free instead of feeling guilty. 

Maybe you would recognize the deep well of peace inside you that swells up and washes over you as you allow your habit coming up purely for the sake of recognizing and acknowledging an experience.

Or maybe it would make your life even more miserable because thinking that your emotions are not you and that they are nothing more than a scratch of an experience gives you an absolute freedom of consciously choosing a reaction. This absolute freedom overwhelms you because, hey, you've opened a can of worms and let out infinite possibilities to choose from.

Okay, now consider this: 

I am angry because I am frustrated with my struggle to choose a path in my life. I am angry because I am despairing over my own cluelessness. I am angry because I do not know how to make life easy for myself.

Anger is a habit, as a friend in India told me.

If it is true, then I am going to break this habit. 

I am fighting for inner peace. I am insisting for self-acceptance. I am demanding love for myself. 

And I am going to direct this habit, turning it into a perspective that offers me a means rather than an emotion blindly governing my reactions. 

I will transform this anger into an action. An action that will change the way I live my life.

What action?

I do not know.

However, in order to break a habit, I have to try. I have to experiment with different ways of breaking a habit. I am going to keep on trying to break, break, and break this habit until it is broken.

I am going to make decisions that will surprise even me. Some of these decisions might be mistakes. 

Big mistakes, probably. Or a long, agonizing series of tiny mistakes that add up. 

These decisions or mistakes probably will help me to eliminate all the distractions and all the ideas I thought I should have. They might lead me to find the core purpose of being myself, the principal objective of my life. 

I am angry. I am filled with passion to take the bull by the horns. 

I might be one big disaster of bad decisions and foolish mistakes. 

But I will shed all the habits, to unfold the origami of myself. I will find what it means to surprise myself. 

Watch me. 

I am going to raise my red flag. 

Bull, bring it on. 

Lining up to get my first taste of Singapore's own special ice cream sandwich. An yummy treat, tru biz!

Posing next to the most famous landmark of Singapore: Merlion. 

Raising the Noah's Ark (Manila Bay Sands).

Bumping onto two Singaporean-born Gallaudet alumni at the Singapore Association for the Deaf! 

Times Are A-Changing

Sampalco, Manila, Philippines

(photographed by Jordi) 

It's February now. February 2015. 

A new beginning, literally and figuratively. 

January had been one of the most confusing and strange months during my trip, and because of this, I did not write. 

I am afraid to write, to be truthful. I am afraid to confess my fears to you all. I am afraid to reveal the somber side of myself to you all. I am particularly afraid to show you that I am filled with far more questions than answers. 

Until now. 

Almost five months ago, I left home to give in to this soul-gnawing urge to see the world. 

Five months. So many things have happened. 

India. Nepal. Thailand. Myanmar. Laos. Vietnam. Cambodia. The Philippines. And now Malaysia. 

At the beginning, I chose to follow my heart's desire because it was the only thing I knew what to do with my life. It was not easy to tell my mother that I will not follow the conventional path of life after graduation. It was not easy to watch others getting married, having babies, and starting careers while I was off living an entirely different life. It was not easy to wonder whether I was pulling a Peter Pan on life, avoiding launching myself into real life by traveling instead of working. 

However, back then, I was determined to grant myself the permission of living out my dreams. I did not want to have regrets. I did not want to spend all my life wondering what it was like to follow my heart. I did not want to leave any question of my heart gone unanswered, any stone left without being turned over. 

Traveling was the only answer my heart gave to me. It was the only thing I know I should do.

This determination was so strong that I had to make it happen.

So it happened...

Fast forward to now, at this very moment. 

Times are a-changing.

At the beginning, this journey involved my friend. We spent nearly five months celebrating holidays, riding trains, sleeping in hotels, eating, and living together.

Eventually, as all the chapters must end at one point, we turned the page and a new chapter revealed that the time had come for us to leave each other's company and continue on with our journeys separately. 

I am now a solo traveler. 

Still no return date. 

I still do not know when I will finish my journey. I still do not know where I would be at the end of this journey.

Although I've traveled alone before, this trip is different: I am not traveling with this kind of mindset of collecting stories, both good and bad, so I can return home chuckling at those memories and using them to start conversations. 

Instead, I am going through both good and bad times with this wretched hyper-awareness of wondering how they would define me and what they are teaching me. Those times prove to be even more challenging because I find myself sometimes feeling lonely and exhausted from asking far more questions than finding answers. 

I am also starting to feel a longing of finding a new home. A new life with a career to build and a place to plant dreams and watch them grow. 

However, my heart doesn't ask me to return home to have a home. It is asking me to continue on, to march forward, until I find a place to call home. 

It feels surreal. I feel afraid. In fact, I so want to allow myself be overwhelmed by fear so I would be paralyzed by it and thus give myself a reason to rescue myself by hurrying back home to my dear mother's arms. 

But no. No! 

I must push on. I must follow my heart. I must pat the head of this frightened little girl inside my head who is shrieking for comfort and march forward. 

Something is coming for me. I am looking for it. I am getting closer. 

I do not know where I am going. No fucking idea.

But I am starting to feel comfortable not knowing. Sometimes. 

I am afraid, very afraid, yes. Very confused, too.

I am only glad I now have a new mantra: "Courage is when fear prays."*

I'm afraid, but I'm praying with all my soul.

Sapa, Vietnam

Lotus Lake, Mui Ne, Vietnam 

Phnom Penh, Vietnam 

Angkor Wat, Siem Reap, Cambodia

Sampalco, Manila, Philippines (photographed by Jordi) 

Sampalco, Manila, Philippines 

*This mantra is found in the book written by my new favorite author, Paulo Coelho. Read "The Fifth Mountain" and you'd want to worship Coelho!