Time
It’s been awhile now since the last time I wrote or drew anything, which I must say is an absolute failure of my resolution to write and draw something every day. In retrospect that may have been a mite ambitious. It’s kind of ridiculous how much things change when enough time passes. Every part of your body has a threshold before which no cell currently present was alive. Neurons are one of the few things that last long enough to be with you from birth to death, but even then they change, forming new connections, dropping old ones. The person you are today is almost nothing like the person you were 5 years ago…If you’re doing it right anyway.
Think back to who you were, what you cared about, what your plans were, what filled your days. One, Three, Five, Ten years ago. Or even just half a year ago. Each one of those for me has an entirely different answer, though that may just be because I’m still young. When I was younger still time seemed stretched out to a point where I think this argument would have been hard to see as anything other than completely obvious. Day to day, month to month, an 18 week semester was an impossible amount of time ago, and everything was constantly new and changing. When things I wanted to change didn’t happen immediately it seemed they never would, when carefully laid plans in the evening didn’t take any hold come morning the whole ordeal was clearly a complete failure.
I remember when I was in high school, staying up at night intensely imagining how I would confidently approach and open up and charm the pants off everyone I met. But by morning I would be back reacting the same old way, staying distant from everyone and doing my own thing, reacting only marginally to anyone who approached me.
Five years ago I was embroiled in a passionate online relationship that consumed every moment of my day and hers, despite being utterly and completely doomed to failure across every corner, but we refused to see that.
Three years ago that relationship was over and I started a job doing phone support for a DSL provider. I wanted to be able to catapult myself to any location on the planet so that I wouldn’t be subject to any physical limitations. I quickly forgot that goal however and applied myself to doing the best job possible and enjoyed socializing and improving myself in different ways.
One year ago a friend I had met there asked me if I wanted to go with her to China. I had had enough money saved up that the cost wouldn’t bother me, and the idea of travel was always something that I’d never have said no to otherwise. Shortly afterward I was looking into the cost of buying my own house, as the real estate crash made that a very real possibility, without having to ignite my fear of large mortgage and rent payments.
After my first offer got completely negated based on a bank deciding they would only accept cash up front from the buyer(and less cash at that), so they could accept another offer over mine, I found myself less and less invested in the process. That was around the time I realized that the money that I’d saved up could easily be used to support my living day to day for quite some time. My old goals came back to me, and it occurred to me that travelling from country to country, living a month or two at a time paying costs equivalent or less to rent, would be the same cost or less as living in my home city and continuing to work at a job I was quickly growing out of.
So I never bought a ticket back home.
Six months ago I left, and now I’m staying in Bulgaria with a beautiful and intelligent american girl I met in Athens, and after 3 months of being here with her, I’m heading to Germany(thanks to the curse of the 90 day tourist visa). Somewhere between 3-6 months from now I’ll be heading back to America before my savings run too low. I still haven’t quite gotten a handle on things well enough to be confident in getting a high enough paying job overseas for it to be legal, but maybe by then I’ll have changed enough to make that happen too.
