Sadness Is A Blessing

I’m sitting on the Eurostar back to London after a few days in Paris with my sister and her boyfriend. We stayed in a little attic apartment in Le Marais and had a lovely time strolling around the city, sitting in cafes, wandering through galleries, cooking, drinking wine and eating offensively footy cheeses.

It’s been a couple years since I visited the city and I’d forgotten how seductive it is. I fell in love all over again on every street corner, with every beautiful Parisian that passed by.

Comparisons don’t always help much, but Paris has a beauty and infectious bon-vivantism that London can’t touch. It’s such a celebration.

Many of my friends say living in Paris is terrible and depressing and it kills the romance, but as I look toward the new year and my expiring UK visa, I see opportunity there - just like I’ve seen it in Barcelona and Budapest and a dozen other cities.

For a while, I’ve been viewing my boot from the UK (if I do get the boot) as a sentence to go back home, but in the end I can go almost anywhere if I’m willing to fight hard and make concessions. I made a lot of them to stay in London and even now, the fight is still daily for me.

I guess I’ll fight a daily battle wherever I end up next, though: my struggle with the world is not linked to geography, it’s deeper than that; it’s a battle with myself, with my ambitions and with the meaning of life. I can’t shut that off. There’s no snooze button for philosophical crises.

In the end, going back to Canada isn’t such a bad option, if that’s what happens. It would be great to spend more time with my family. Seeing them once a year is the worst. It puts too much pressure on hellos and far too much weight on goodbyes.

I do want the adventure of new places and spaces - it’s good for me to live outside my comfort zone, to start fresh, rebuild and learn to understand the world and myself in different ways. It would be nice if I could achieve that without neglecting relationships that are important to me.

Living abroad and having the freedom and mobility that accompanies that is an amazing privilege, but it also demands sacrifices and trade-offs. Saying goodbye to my sister today - and every time - hammers that message home.

Home - now there’s a difficult concept.

On the road, again.

Sitting in Vienna Airport, sipping a coffee on my connection to London from Sarajevo. I've enjoyed some time in Bosnia again with the Sarajevo crew - hitting the city for the fourth Ramadan in a row - during a whirlwind road trip through Montenegro and Croatia, then Venice and Budapest.

This is the first trip in a long time that hasn't lent me any sort of grand philosophical introspection or grounding perspective on the life I am taking a break from. I usually return from the road with a renewed sense of where I stand in the grand scope of things, a deep and aching sense of the world's beauty and tragedy.

But nothing. Part of me is worried I'm growing numb, losing my idealism and with it my ability to perceive truth and beauty in my experiences. I feel (almost unnaturally) uninspired, unaffected. But nonetheless, this trip has given me some constructive working points for projects and goals. And I have an ocean of past inspiration lurking in scribbled journal entries and photos. I have so much to tap into, I don't need to maintain the constant high of epiphanies and adventures and scandals that I once thought was necessary.

What's really necessary is focus and discipline, and I'm ready to write and work. I'm ready to cozy up this autumn and really get some work done. I'm ready for more.

I don't want to go back

It's rare that a weekend away changes you. Sometimes it gives you a glimmer of possibilities, of romance and adventure and new life. Sometimes it casts a heavy shadow on the places at home you already suspected were breeding darkness. Sometimes the shadow stretch across the areas you thought were bathed in light.

Life is confusing. We sit in such a delicate balance between beauty and tragedy, mostly unaware of the precarious nature of our position until the balance shifts. And it shifts so quickly and easily.

I know more than ever the future I want. I know more than ever that I can't keep putting off my calling - the calling I feel - for obligations. I'd rather have nothing than an endless supply of the wrong thing. I'd rather have a chance to try.

I don't want to be wrong.

Out of the void

It's been months since I've updated my blog. February was rough. I was at my wits' end. I had given up. I was done.

In the nick of time, things happen.

I remember reading this amazing essay by Jeffrey Essman back in the winter called Work Is a Four-Letter Word about a man who suffers through 15 months of unemployment, getting by through freelancing, temping, whatever it takes. He can barely believe it when he gets a job. Life changes over night. He can buy things.

It was an essay that meant a lot to me after 17 months of unemployment and 7 months of couch surfing and subletting, doing whatever it took to get by, while clinging to my dreams. It gave me some reassurance, to know someone else went through this and came out on the bright side. I didn't have the strength of vision to see my happy ending coming, but it did.

I'm now three months into a job - a good one - that I somehow managed to be beat out 1,700 applicants for. That number baffles me. It's a huge number! There's a comma in it!

Day by day I'm feeling stronger and more myself. I'm regenerating, coming out of the void.

Things happen, sometimes, when there is nothing more you could possibly do by your own efforts. And the victory is never quite as sweet, as when it is also your salvation.

Lament for a Generation

I am young, intelligent, educated, experienced. I have passion and ideas, vision and insights. I am gifted, beautiful, resourceful, refined, gracious and compassionate. I am strong and resilient, hard-working, motivated and empowered. I am intellectually and emotionally attuned. I respect diversity of background and opinion. I embrace change and technology and look boldly to the future, but recognize the lessons of history.

I am a number, a statistic, irrelevant, invalidated. I am unemployed, underemployed, unpaid. I am tired, weak, broken, fragile. I am homeless, wandering, searching, not finding. I am broke, in debt, past-due. I am losing hope, hopeless. I photocopy, staple, file, Excel, but I don't excel. I am undervalued, disowned, shut out and shut down. I am rejected, dejected, forgotten. I am lost.

"My Body's a Zombie For You"

There are only stories with pain. We need pain to learn, and a story needs lessons to matter.

Screaming and crying and broken glass and broken hearts - it's not worth it. It's too much. Love is as much of a construct as any ideology or religion or cultural custom that is qualified and deconstructed in every university classroom. We know better, but we still believe. We have to believe.

If there's anything in the world we believe in purely and truly, it is love. And we believe over and over and over again, even when love shoots us in the face and we lose so much blood that we almost don't make it.

It takes months - sometimes years - for the wounds to heal, and the scars never completely fade, but fuck, we still believe.

And worse: we hope. We desperately reach out our arms with tears in our eyes and pain in our chests and a rush of blood to our crotches, and we grab for that tortuously elusive someone that will fill our hearts and our holes and makes it all worth it.

But is it? Is it really worth it when so often in the end at least one of us decides that it is, in fact, not worth it at all. Not anymore.

Sometimes it makes for a good story. Good, perhaps only if we still believe. And deep down, we do believe, don't we? Don't you?

Learning

There's no starting over, no going back. Our lives stretch forward before us endlessly and heavy with promise only once. I am not that fifteen-year-old boy anymore. I won't be him again. I'm myself now, only.

But the future still stretches on, long past my dreams and fears, and far into a future that I am not a part of. But some 15-year-old boy will be a part of that future. And if I play my cards right, maybe he'll read my book.

Maybe he'll read my book and realize his life is already sand through the hour glass, and that he must run and fight and love and make beautiful mistakes with goodness in his heart, before his time runs out too. So much sand falling forever, forever, forever, until...

Another Year

Keats Island, September 2010

I've spent the last few weeks cozied up in Dalston at K and O's flat. I love them so much, and am so thankful for the hospitality they have shown me. I spent the Christmas holidays alone, for the first time ever. More out of choice, than necessity - there were people in London I could have spent it with. Instead, I spent the days cooking, drinking nice wine, going on snow walks, watching films, reading, writing, prioritising. It was a working holiday, in a sense, and I think it laid a good foundation to move forward from.

Being in Hackney has been a godsend. I've been waiting so long to live here, and it just feels so right. Staying with K and O has also been part of that, because I love them so much, and they really did welcome me into a 'home' for the time I was here. I'm leaving tomorrow, though - subletting a friend's room in Waterloo for the month of January.

After that, who knows, really? It is scary not knowing where one is going to hang one's hat a month from now. Or how one will pay the bills, stay afloat. I've been living under that sky of uncertainty for a while now, and you sort of surrender yourself to it, to a blind hope that things will work out. But it doesn't get any easier. You just learn to have faith and to not think too much about how scary it all is, about what happens with opportunities dry up and the generosity of friends runs out.

Not that January is going to change anything, just because another year has clocked in, but I do have hope that the new year will be a good one. The time for playing games is over, and I've got to grab life by the balls and press on. I think I'm less inclined to the bullshit and timidity I've had before about my talents and abilities, and that's a good thing. I know that life doesn't get handed to you on a platter. The idea that success and progress come quickly and easily is long lost in the idealism of my youth. I know it all comes down to work hard and making your own opportunities. I'm ready.

I know now, more than ever, what I want, and what I can do. I know sacrifices have to be made, and occasionally compromises. I also know that - as a passionate being with a highly moralised view of the universe and my life - I'm more inclined to sacrifice than compromise. That's something many people in my life can't understand, but I do think in the long run that may make all the difference.

2011 is going to be, hopefully, about hard work, about being truthful - to myself, to my talents and passions, and to the people in my life. I spent half the year being tortuously in love with someone I couldn't tell because I have always lived my life with unnecessary conscience. Conscience is important, but sometimes, when push comes to shove, we've just got to live.

Things I want to do less of this year: medicating, hiding, procrastinating, smoking, doubting, complaining, settling.

Things I want to do more of this year: writing, reading, networking, socialising, earning, corresponding, learning, running, risking, loving, succeeding.