It’s almost the 6 month anniversary of when I quit my life and decided to start a new one. Almost 182 days since I left home to travel. 4,368 non-stop hours that I’ve spent with my best friend and fiancé. As I lay in bed, doing the mental math (ok, I cheated and used my phone calculator to help), I find myself unable to doze off.
Sometimes when I try to shut my brain off, it tells me, “no thank you, I choose this moment to broadcast vivid recollections of mundane details that you previously gave no fucks about – enjoy!” On this particular night, I am thinking about my old dating profile. I don’t know why it popped into my head (it was several years ago), but I can’t seem to shake it. It’s this one section – my response to a default question that has given me insomnia tonight. I keep rolling my 4-year old words in my mouth, like a hard candy, and I’m left with a dull, metallic taste. I know it doesn’t matter now, but I really hate what I wrote. It bothers me more than I am comfortable with, so I allow myself to reflect.
These last couple of weeks have been hard. For the most part, I am in love with my life right now. 90% of the time I want to pinch myself, because it feels like I’ll wake up from this beautiful dream and realize that I’m late for work and that my cable bill is overdue. But that 10% can be the death of me if I let it. That 10% is all of the stuff that I wanted to leave behind – the crap that I got fed up with carrying, so I tried to leave it in Toronto. Turns out, it may have followed me on to my AirEva flight and through the customs gate at Suvarnabhumi Airport. Having no support system; no security; no stability – it’s been rough on me. Even worse, not having to worry about mundane things like work deadlines and my best friend’s latest Tinder drama, has given my mind a lot of time to roam and wander. And occasionally, despite my best efforts, it finds its way through a labyrinth of hallways that lead into a secret room with no windows. I thought I threw away the key years ago, but turns out that my brain is an excellent lock-pick. In this room is a single filing cabinet, locked and chained, and hidden within its drawers are carefully labelled manila folders that contain all of my Bad Thoughts (in alphabetical order, of course). On the train, on the plane, in a tuk-tuk – even sitting in a restaurant waiting for our food to come, occasionally my sadistic brain decides that it would like to open one of those files and do an audit. Yes, even paradise can be a bummer.
And now I realize why I’m so fixated on something as seemingly unimportant as my old dating profile – it’s a warning.
Don Draper says, “if you don’t like what someone’s saying about you, change the conversation”. Well, I don’t like what I said about myself back then, so I’m changing my internal monologue and saying something different now. This is for myself; a reminder that it’s ok to be a little lost.
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