"Try and take a few days out on your own, rediscover your head space a bit...
If you can even work out one solid thing about yourself, what you are looking for in your life, then you have done well."
-Russell, 33
That's what Russell said to me in an email the day before I boarded a plane to Bangkok, alone with a netted mess of problems threatening to take over all the good things left in me. The advice, as simple as sunshine, could not have come at a better time or from a more beloved friend.
***
So I'm sitting cross legged on a tiled balcony floor waiting for my hair to dry under Thailand's comfortably bearable heat. My mostly solo trip ends in a couple days and I'll be flung like a tiny pebble in a slingshot back to the existence I was so ready to get away from.
Have I learned anything to make Russell proud?
It's easy to sit alone in the jungle, or on the roaring deck of a speedboat cutting across the water, or with the ocean at your side and think of all the possible ways in which to change yourself. But it's when you get back to reality that all those goals go to shit.
Here is what I hope I have learned:
I am not proud of the person I am becoming. The excesses, the indulgences, the extreme selfishness.
The network I've kept for "passing time." You are all done.
I miss my family, the idea of them. This search for warmth.
And most importantly, I have learned that a pessimism has been planted inside of me. I don't know when or where it got there, or how it grew roots and sprung so quickly, or what fertilized it to grow (maybe it's just getting older), but I'm afraid it may have become too thick to cut down. It will only grow more. And it won't stop.
