Today marks 8 months since I came back from Wellington and I have to be honest that I am having trouble readjusting to life back here in Indonesia. I feel that there’s an amount, an unhealthy amount, of absurdity and ignorance that I have to endure in order to live and not merely survive at this place that I sometimes reluctantly call home.
It’s not merely about living in a society with a stark difference in values compared to life in Wellington, but at the heart of the problem is the problem of ‘me’ and moving back with my family. To live in a house with so many memories of silenced anger, confusion, self-centerdness, regrets and grief. To once again live with people when I have become too accustomed to living alone for most parts of my life.
There’s an indefinable stress that I can feel trudging on my mind, slowly yet surely making me easily, unconsciously irritated with everything around me. I know I am teetering dangerously on an edge of which I cannot fully understand of why I am here in the first place and how I can get out of this.
Or perhaps I do know why and how.
It’s the willingness to understand all there is to life that is depleted, as I am just too tired to even try to understand why.
Too scared of myself or the reality of myself that I know that I have to confront when I understand all this.
And when I look around me, my friends, my loved ones, everyone seems to be just as tired, as dazed and confused, as unfathomably anxious as I am, of course due to a myriad of complex, personal reasons but nonetheless the results, so it seems, are similar.
It is easy to talk about life, to critique and to try to understand life when things are at ease. When everything around you is just simply supportive and nothing is really much of a burden for you. When the people around you understand and share the same values or outlooks on life as you do. Life becomes easy when life is easy. What becomes the issue isn’t really when life itself is hard though, but what to do when life becomes hard. What are the choices we make when things aren’t going as we want.
I know right now that I am filled with a hint of unwarranted hate, with a bucketful of senseless anger and unresolved sadness because I am living in denial, I am rejecting my current reality that I have to face. It seems ironic, I know, that I have instinctively chosen to reject my reality which in the long run is much more devastating for me rather than to accept this reality I live in and must live in.
Acceptance is initially harder, rejection is deceptively easier but only with acceptance, which I have understood from past experiences, is undeniably more helpful for the health of my mind. However, talk is cheap and easy. Even duplicating a tested act based on experience is soul-wearingly hard.
Rejection is automatic and so ingrained with how I react towards my perception of reality that I can’t seem to act beyond this automaticity or at least am having a very hard time doing so.
I’m tired. I’m tired with every single thing right now. With the traffic jams, with the amount of time wasted on the road just to get a decent coffee, tired of people being so immersed in themselves, tired of the unwavering mass ignorance that I witness and experience daily. I’m tired of life but I don’t want to run away from it, I want to find a solution to this inward misery.
And when I’m tired, when i’m rejecting the reality of my world I can feel fear creeping up on me. I’m tired, i’m refusing to accept, and I am afraid of the world. Much like everyone else it seems.
The past haunts me, the future petrifies me and everything seems so abstract for me now.
Yet despite all this, and oddly enough, this pessimism is tinged with some much needed optimistic realism: that the way out is with me here and now. All I need I guess is to shut up a bit and welcome that unnerving silence that brings so much memories of pain, crippling anxiety but teaches me to accept, however horrid it is.
We’re afraid all the time of what the future will bring—afraid we’ll lose our jobs, our possessions, the people around us whom we love. So we wait and hope for that magical moment—always sometime in the future—when everything will be as we want it to be. We forget that life is available only in the present moment. —Thich Nhat Hanh