Full Circle?

Monday, February 08, 2010 11:48 PM

I’ve come a long way to wind up in a familiar situation…

I sit here, at my desk during a time of study, in what seems like a late night (the standards have changed) on the same computer, screwing around the same way like there’s nothing better to do, and listening to the same music.

I’ve been here before so many times. Alone in the relative silence of the night. Alone, sad, confused, thinking, and listening to Jose Gonzalez. It’s first year in UBC all over again. In so many ways, it’s the same, but it’s the differences that tell me just how far I’ve really come.

First of all, I’m not really sad. I’ve got a much better grasp on my mental health lately though I still have lapses from time to time. Even if I was sad, it would be much different than it was this time two years ago. My concerns are not even close to the same that they were before. The things that trouble me are no longer just completely related to myself but now I find that I think about someone else just as much as I think about myself. I’ve found something that I’m actually passionate about and matters more than anything else to me. Something that motivates me and consumes me unlike anything else there ever was. It isn’t poverty or injustice or anything like I expected and kind of hoped for but it’s still something and it’s something that I’d like to do something constructive with though I haven’t yet found the outlet or the means to do this. I’m sure it could spin into a positive thing.

Typing up a blog when I should be studying. Denying myself some sleep but that’s just the nature of things. If you read my blog back from my first year in university, you would find a lot of “this may be all for now because I’ve got a lot of papers and exams…” and then you would also find a lot of lengthy posts in that short time where I promised there would be none. I often find myself not studying when I ought to but rather having the deep conversations with my peers or thinking and evaluating life which to me will always be a much more meaningful exercise and is indeed what I remember much more than the content of any course I’ve ever taken.

Yes, the parallels between this time now and parts of my life from two years ago are remarkable though the differences are really the best part. I haven’t really been able to dig my mind out of the timeframe of the last year until recently so I haven’t really put this into the context of my life considering who I was at UBC or in high school. Now that I’m able to start to see this and evaluate it, I’m actually much more proud of who I am now, what I’ve done/been doing, and the growth or change that occurred is much easier to see. This is a place I’ve been working on coming to for a long time and I had forgotten just what it was like to be in the planning or pre-planning process where I couldn’t even honestly imagine myself here or what life here…

I pause because there’s some sort of uproar going on… I thought I heard a car crash a minute ago but now everyone in the dorms is just shouting and running around making noise. I can’t explain this and it’s extremely strange. I have no idea what’s going on so I think I’ll try to investigate a little bit… No idea. I’ll find out in the morning.

Where was I? Oh yeah. Just remembering that first year of university. Many nights spent alone in my room, wasting time on my computer, listening to music and just thinking about life. I feel like if I could talk to myself back then, he’d be proud of what I’m doing now but I don’t know yet if that’s just because people may have a glorified conception of what I’m doing here or maybe it’s just that I haven’t come to understand the significance of this yet. I’ve been talking with Dylan a lot lately and just trying to make sense of things here and understand or process what we’ve experienced here. I can’t remember what my exact expectations were before coming here but neither he nor I feel fully satisfied now at the conclusion of our time here. Neither of us really feel like we’ve accomplished something and I don’t know if this is just because we haven’t gone back yet and seen this in retrospect or what it is exactly, but it might be because they tell you that study abroad is supposed to just be some major transformative experience that changes you and makes you all badass but it seems like the last four months have just been defined by frustration and confusion.

…the voices come crashing back in towards the dorms. They seem jolly or something, maybe they just need some relief from studying and can only thing that shouted conversations are the way to do it. My current theory is that it was just some car crash nearby and it’s just their culture to rush and go check it out. I’ll find out in the morning…

Off track again. Maybe a sign I should head to bed as I’m less than 8 hours away from my final exam in the morning. I really thought I was onto something here but I’ve been a bit distracted and the same feeling that inspired me to start writing this post is gone. Unfortunately that’s often the case and my indecision to just start writing or my struggles with phrasing and formatting slows me down and the white light fades before I can articulate it.

I think the point I was trying to make was just that I don’t feel like some awesome world traveler or some weathered voyager to Africa like everyone you ever meet who comes back from far off destinations seems to portray themselves as. That’s something I referenced very early on in this blog and I don’t know if I’ve changed into that guy that I never really liked being around who seems to be so enlightened, almost to the point of being condescending, because they’ve been able to travel extensively. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again though: if I do come across as that guy, call me out on it because that just isn’t right. Maybe that comes next as I’m about to do some cool traveling stuff in the upcoming break, unlike I’ve ever done before. Maybe that is what does it and inspires the traveling bug. Who knows? One main point I wanted to make is that I do feel like I’ve changed since I got here and I acknowledge this, it just hasn’t really been in any way that I had expected and I’m still not sure the extent to which it occurred. I’m sure I won’t know until I get back either and I can evaluate what’s different from before but I’m still not even really halfway through my time here so there’s no reason to jump ahead and skip that huge unknown that’s coming up.

What I do know is this: I can easily see myself still in Vancouver at this time. The olympics are about to start and I am severely disconnected from those people I used to be in contact with so easily, even as recently as last year when I would stalk that old life I used to live and imagine what could have been. It’s different this time because if I was there, I would be imagining myself here so I think it’s right that I’m not so concerned or heartbroken about not being back at UBC as I used to be. This is a place that I worked hard to get to and have been trying to get to for some time. I’m glad to be here and I can see the significance of it a little more each day. It’s very different than those other alternatives that I would be living out right now but I think this is what I’m supposed to be doing. I think that by the end of this, I’ll be more glad that I did it than I was expecting to as recently as a month and a half ago.

It’s too bad that it took me so long to figure a lot of things out and I know I still don’t have all of the answers but I thank God that I’ve got the chance to extend my time here and spend some more months here now that I’m actually understanding things better. There is tremendous potential to make this next phase very powerful and I’m getting closer to being prepared for this. I don’t want to have to write on this blog with bad news. I’ve realized that I’m where I only imagined before and I think I owe it to the old me to do this right. I don’t want to disappoint you and I don’t want to disappoint myself. I’m sorry if my grades don’t turn out flawless after these upcoming exams but so long as I don’t fail my classes, I’m going to be satisfied with learning the more important life lessons and having the thoughtful conversations that will always mean more to me than proving my ability to regurgitate information in an “organized” form so that people can assign points to it.