Embracing the Unknown

You know how thoughts of home, particularly when on a long winded journey abroad, conjure up thoughts of security and comfort?  Well frankly, they currently don’t do that for me.

After months of deliberating, I decided to go home instead of stay in Thailand for another semester or go teach in another country.  There are multiple reasons for this.  One of them being that I realized I really would prefer to travel abroad much more than actually live abroad. 

The interesting thing about this decision is that not only was it difficult, but it felt so uncertain.   I decided to go home, but I’ve realized that deciding to go home was actually the more brave decision for me.  It took courage to book that ticket back to Los Angeles.

The reason for that is that going home is actually full of many more uncertainties than staying in Thailand, believe it or not.  Although I’m bored out of my mind here, my life here is beyond simple.  I have a job, not too many bills, a few friends, a crazy amount of time to relax and the ability to travel around (when I’m not teaching of course). 

However, I chose to go home despite the complete “up in the air-ness” that awaits me.  Not only do I not have a job or a particular field I want to go back to, I also will be once again living with my parents at the ripe age of twenty-five (almost twenty-six).  Don’t get me wrong, I love my parents and I’m grateful for their generosity, but I also have loved the independence of having my own apartment here.  I will go home to face the debt I’ve accrued while here.  I will also go home to an incredibly ambivalent relationship status.  Also, before I left I had been feeling over the last few years also that my circle of friends has gotten much smaller since my early 20’s which has been a difficult thing to adjust to.

So basically I’m going home to LA and yet I feel so much fear to go back to the reality that awaits me there.  I can already feel the reverse culture shock setting in.  I’m already dreading looking for a job as well as all the other things I have to figure out.  And yet, even with all the uncertainty and fear, I feel that it’s the right decision.  For some reason, as much as I love Thailand and think it would be wonderful to live in a bigger Thai city with a group of my foreign teacher friends next semester, I just know that I need to go back to LA.  It feels right.     

I guess the truth is that life is always uncertain, always full of mystery.  Life, after all, can and often does change in an instant, when we’re least expecting it.  In this situation, the difference seems to be that I’m expecting the mystery.  I already know that I have absolutely no idea what’s going to happen when I get home or why I’m even freaking out about it now, obviously that will do nothing but create anxiety which of course it already has.

I know things will work out, they always do and for now I will just have to trust.  So here’s to embracing the unknown as terrifying as it might be!  After all, life at its very essence is a big whopping unknown.