Sick Thoughts

Written from a fever dream in Madrid.

You know, I think I am starting to learn what the meaning of life is.

It was never a definition that I researched about, never about achievements or academic greatness, never about finding someone to go through life with—perhaps it’s about truth.

Perhaps it was, or still is about understanding the meaning behind my name; about staying up contemplating why God enabled my parents to name me after such a powerful activist. I would do endless research about the socioeconomic status of the world and come to the conclusion that I am going to change the world. Then years later, I would have a mid-life crisis after not achieving all the things I thought I would—I would go home to my parents and ask again: why did you name me after such a powerful woman?

I am only nineteen years wise: I have grown up too fast, learned the pain of this world too early. Emotion hit me with whiplash—too dreary, too grown, too fresh, too raw.

To be honest, I don’t know where this essay is going. I am laying in bed in Madrid during my semester abroad, having caught a cold after the whole night out, thinking that I have somehow found my way closer to the formula of defining life.

How?

This life is nothing short of a complex formulaic version of my complex imaginative annual cycle of sadness, enjoyment, failure, and achievement.

There it is, that meaning of life I find so easy to understand.

On an inner note, there is an understanding of life that I have learned from travelling as an adult for the first time. The beautiful nuances that come out of seeing the different paths of life—beliefs, attitudes, and values of people other than mine—are unlike anything I have ever known. It’s as if I am growing up and out of a shell I have been in all my life.

I have come to terms with the fact that I was meant to be a traveller, someone whose meaning of life is contingent upon that very lifestyle. The freedom—or rather my addiction to freedom—has been so wholly satiated in my travels to all of these countries. It was an itch that I never knew existed, a craving so deeply engrained into my soul that I do not know my life without it.

I need this life so desperately: a continuous escape from the realities I live in, physically and socially, mentally and emotionally. It is a reminder that my being a dreamer is not a curse in this life, but a blessing: one that will ease the turmoil that comes with giving my life to a career I do not know I love.

Travelling will be my pride and my joy and my escape and my peace.

Travelling will be my symptom and my illness and my treatment and my release.

Travelling will be mine and mine only and mine wholly and mine…

I’ve run out of rhyming words, you get the point.

---