Moving On

As I turned twenty-three this year, I had come to a realization that my life was a roller-coaster trip, with all its ups and downs and the terrified screams of fear and laughter. Everything happened so fast yet nerve-wreckingly slow at times, and I have been taken to unbelievable places that I never thought was possible for me to go to.

Being a huge dreamer that I was back then in junior high school, I was living each day of my life with my own fantasy of what life should be – shutting down reality out of my mind and drowning myself in my own world, playing guitar and drawing sketches after sketches of pictures imitating those characters from comic books until two in the mornings, waking up at six to be ready to go to school and catch up with friends.

Even though I still felt lonely when being amongst them. There was a hidden yet existing feeling that I never really belonged.

Senior high school took the biggest turn ever – as I set myself off to the land of the unknown. At least that was how it felt to me. I never felt so foreign in my whole life and that was who I was, a foreigner.

When I look back, I always wonder whether I will always stay a foreigner.

I was a lost identity just trying to find out who I really was, just like everybody else. I kept searching, fighting, struggling, winning, losing and trying to get through the tough phases of being a teenager, of coming to terms with myself, of accepting who I was, of knowing that I would never belong with the popular kids, of standing up for myself no matter what others would say or think.

I thought I would feel safer at last, getting into university and be the individual self I had always wanted to be. But by then it was time to really bid a farewell to my youth. Thoughts about the future and what I wanted to do with my life sunk in and I was petrified of having to choose and make so many decisions without the guide and help of anyone at all – not because I couldn’t ask, but merely because I knew whatever I chose would have to come from myself, not others.

And somewhere along the journey, there was love. It came and went, stayed and left, appeared and vanished. Though with it, there were tears being shed and they wouldn’t have been the first. But there were also joy and laughter, which would remained inside this yet fragile heart that became a lot more protected as the years go by.

Perhaps it was love that made me stronger, and perhaps it was also love that allowed me to be softer. It didn’t have to come from others, because I never really summoned up the courage to love myself enough.

But now I’m here. Feeling like I’m back to square one, although this time I’ve come with a lot more extra baggage and life’s experience on my shoulders, coming along a lot tougher, having lesser fantasies and dreams and more strength and courage to face the reality. Not enough optimism perhaps, but enough to get by to a point where I told myself off whenever the cynical part of me loomed out of my own conscience.

And so I move on. I am terrified, but there is no where else to go but the future – the one which I am about to make.

2 comments

1. 

   ..sylvee..

   Posted on December 3, 2005

   we’re all scared ther.. so do I.. but we still have to go on right?
   
2. 

   therry

   Posted on December 4, 2005

   At least we can be scared and overcome that fear together right Syl?? )