Welcome to my blog and my very first post here! This long post provides some context around my life to give perspective for this blog. I’m now a ripe thirty and a half years old and one by one my friends are also leaving young adulthood. Each time I find myself looking back at my past and evaluating my current circumstances. The following story underpins a lot of my recent and hopefully better life decisions.
Crash and burn
I entered adulthood relatively late in life. My college years and early 20s were fraught with recklessness, avoidance of my responsibilities, and depression. I was buckling under the stress and expectations laid out by my parents, society, and myself.
I buried my head avoiding reality. This intense procrastination came to a peak at the end of 2011. I didn’t check my email, texts, or login to Facebook. My friends in college thought I went missing. I didn’t show up for classes for who knows how long and eventually, even the university thought I went missing. They sent police to my parents house to check on me. Needless to say the phone call afterwards was an awkward conversation.
I failed out of college and crashed hard. I spent the next few years in limbo. Old habits die hard and those years weren’t much different from college. I spent each day trying to find an escape, trying to find other souls to commiserate with. That escape usually involved finding any excuse to get absolutely plastered. Alcohol was a way to drown out my own insecurities and for a night become a more confident version of myself.
Keeping on
In 2014 and I was living in Detroit with a handful of roommates taking classes at Wayne State University to regain financial aid eligibility. One evening in April I decided to go to an underground dubstep show at The Works to see Goth-Trad on his first US appearance. All of my friends were busy studying so it was a solo night.
Goth-Trad was slated to plat at midnight or some other ungodly hour. I had to kill some time. I then had the constructive idea to visit some friends at the library bearing gifts of caffeine in the form of Four Loko. After dutifully helping my friends study I killed some more time at our home bar 3rd street. The bar was conveniently located across the street of our apartment.
It was just past 10pm and there were only a handful of people at the bar. After the Four Loko and a beer, I had just hit that narrow bit of drunkenness where you have a solid mellow buzz. Where you feel warm, confident, and are still fully coherent. The setting was picturesque. The local dive bar with lights casting a beautiful glow, real or imagined, across the scene.
I was chatting with a couple a few years older than me and we went out for a cigarette. The girl was genuinely curious about my life and conversation was flowing. Then she hit me with a question that hit harder than a bag of dicks. It was the equivalent of nuclear bomb although I hadn’t realized it at that moment. She asked me what I wanted to do with my life. I automatically gave her the usual canned response. I was trying to become an engineer because I was good at math and liked cars. Then she asked the question again, really emphasizing what I want to do with my life. I’ve never really given the question any deep thought before. I stammered and couldn’t answer. I was just trying to stay afloat and was living the life that fell into place purely through circumstance. None of it was a conscious decision, I had no idea what I really wanted. We talked about our lives and the circumstances that led us here. I then bid my farewell to go check out The Works alone.
Digging deep
I got there pretty late. Of course it wasn’t late by The Works standards. It was a Thursday and the place too was sparse. By the time Goth-Trad come on there was only a little more than a dozen of people watching. His style of dubstep is dark and heavy, ruminating and rolling. A perfect time to obsessively contemplate on what I actually wanted to do with my life. It was a turning point of my life. I was committed to figuring life out and improving my situation.
I then worked my way back home. It was around 3am when I got there and I still couldn’t sleep. I ended up cleaning the house listening to Adrian Lux’s Make Out ep on repeat. My dad had passed the year prior and his belongings were still around because my mom couldn’t sort through those things herself. Needless to say it was an insanely difficult thing to do. Going through the paper work, I had a second hand look into the struggle my parents went through to provide for our family. Being a first generation immigrant is fucking hard. There were checkbooks there and I could tell that we were living paycheck to paycheck and I knew both my parents busted their asses off to make ends meet. I just never knew to what extent they went through.
I was an absolute mess crying while sorting through the documents listening to depressing music on my headphones. This was rock bottom. This experience solidified this day as a turning point in my life. Life takes work and I resolved myself to it.
It was 6am now and the sun came out and I went to sleep. Of course life wasn’t all sunshine and roses after this. Every bit of it is a struggle out of depression, addiction, and now anxiety from trying to actually take responsibility for my life.
What now?
Back to the present, an old college friend had just turned thirty and I wished him a happy belated 30th. He asked “How’s life?”. I found myself in a new situation. Life's good. I have all the things I need to be reasonably happy. I can say that I’m content with the velocity that my life going. I replied, “Life is good and that I’m slowly figuring out the whole adulting thing.” More accurately, I’ve been an adult ever since my rock bottom when I started becoming responsible for my own livelihood. What I’m really trying to figure out now is how to actually live the life I want.
For the first time in my life I realized that I can make a descision of what I want to do with my life that is fully my own. I’m not completely shackled by claims on my time or responsibilities. I don’t need to distract myself with mindless consumption, the next material possession, or another new experience. In fleeting moments I can see clearly through societal expectations and make decisions grounded in my own values.
I am fortunate enough to find myself in this situation and can deliberately build the life I want to live.
I know I’ll be making some mistakes slowly figuring out how to live, but I’m only thirty and have some time. This post was a result of my first deliberate choice. I’ve been meaning to start this blog for a long while. While the question that girl asked me that night, “What do I want to do with my life?” comes up now and then, I have a better idea now. All that’s left is making it a reality.