At Negative Delta G

Since I decided to begin yet another attempt at writing for my own sake, I shall bypass any formality here. Words will find their way through. I won’t take pains to choreograph them; they’ll dance as they feel like it.

Well, how to begin.

My life at the moment is overwhelming. It constantly feels like there isn’t enough room to breathe, figuratively and literally. One day after another, one week after another. It isn’t exactly monotonous the way you would normally characterize it; in fact, it’s quite the opposite. I am constantly on my edge as new knowledge gets poured in my head every day. And being the over thinker that I am, I think that perhaps sometimes I make up too many nonexistent worries to fill my own mind.

There is a constant conflict that I must battle with through all this. On one hand, there are things that I “should” do: recognizing, feeling, and appreciating the privilege and opportunity of receiving a rigorous education, supported wholeheartedly by my family who has worked industriously over the years to bring me to where I stand today; pursuing a “passion,” whatever that means these days, so that my life is “purposeful”; and more practically and put in a cliche way, working hard to the best of my abilities.

Yet I would be an utter hypocrite if I were to proclaim that I am having the time of my life. I feel quite out of balance, like weights are steadily added to one side of me, but since nothing is added to the other side, I am struggling to withhold the weights so that I won’t crash. I want to balance the weights, obviously, and live “happily and healthily,” but the difficulty lies in the fact that I have no idea whatsoever to balance this scale—perhaps intrinsically I was constructed with only one weight pan, if I could still be called a “balance” this way.

I am trying to find myself again. “Again” because I used to be self-assured in the journey I was undertaking and possessed a sense of mission to my life. Laughably, what probably granted me entrance to the place I am now involved similar statements of self-assurance; they call it “personal statements,” which are basically words in which seventeen- and eighteen-year-olds try to find their voice and condense the story of their lives to the single most paramount and representative moments or ideologies that make themselves sound driven and smart. Of course these to-be adults are driven and smart. It’s just that it’s important to recognize how foolish they also are at the same time.

I am now in full consciousness of how humungous of a fool I was (and am). I have never truly “found myself.” The kind of assurance I once put on my personal statements is a kind of self deception, in order to present, amidst the feverish competition, to admissions officers that I was worth their investment; and moreover, to convince myself that I was actually able to construct a coherent narrative that depicts my “notable past,” my aspirations, my philosophies, my soul. The undercover, though, is that I did not know anything about life and what it means to live a meaningful one, so I must put together words that seem to make sense of the chaos in some way as a form of self solace. Indeed, it turns out I am very good at fooling myself and being fooled.

Such is the (mere start of a) journey to dive into my ignorance and total unpreparedness to enter what humans value so much and call “life.”