Starting Over

Theoretically, writing should just be like riding a bike. But I doubt that my muse will be easily forgiving. I have neglected him so for quite sometime. In my effort to find a balance that would make everyone happy, I have forgotten to consider the things that make me happy. I was supposed to trim and simplify my life a few years back, yet I only managed to complicate it even further by creating a word-tree of justifications as to where I am now.

And where is that? Back to the very beginning. I remember quite well the day I talked to my very first boss as I handed in my resignation from my very first job. I asked her if she believed that everyone had a calling. My reason for leaving the most ideal job situation I would ever have in the next twenty years was to respond to my calling. A voice inside of me that told me that it was somewhere out there, the way to make the world a little better using the unique brand that makes me who I am.

But I was the lion without courage then. I thought I had to prove myself by working to make a living. My adopted mother kept reminding me as I was growing up that I had a brain and I had the responsibility to use it. I felt my writing was a cop out. Every single time I got lost in my world as I wrote, I felt like I was retreating in a world that only I knew. It seemed self-serving. How could something good and productive come out of that? I was young, I was ideal and naïve.

So I decided to live in that real world of adults, the world of fancy business attires and unsmiling faces. I chased deadlines, conformed to budgets and challenged company policies. The entire time I was pretending to be someone else and becoming angrier by the day. Blaming only myself for being caught up in ambitions and materialism. Was I making a difference? Did I make someone's day brighter? At the end of the day, I was spent. Every payday, after bills were paid, I asked myself, who have I become?

In the race to the finish, I had neglected relationships most of all. I told myself that my family would understand if I had to skip this dinner or that birthday. I told myself that connections were hindrances, that commitments only slowed me down. Then one day, I woke up. The day after my biological parents celebrated their fiftieth wedding anniversary, I looked at myself in the mirror and asked myself, What did I have to show for it? If I haven't loved, then who am I?

Was life really meant to be this empty?

Twenty years and here I am with one bold truth to tell: that work-life balance that I have been chasing all this time is a myth. In the last week of November, I sent my boss my resignation letter from my last job via email. I was hoping to hand it in personally but timing didn't work out well enough for me to do that. My job was in Canada and I have been staying in Manila for over four months now. It feels like there is a finality to it. The end to my corporate life.

I worry that I will backslide to the easy life of regular paychecks. I worry that I will try to find regular employment where I can pretend to be brilliant, awesome and amazing! as I often become. I am a chameleon, The Pretender like that tv series from the late 90s, able to easily adjust and shine in a new role.

So I need to remind myself that this is my time to chase my dreams, to follow my own path, for which the only guiding map is my own heart.  I need to find the voice I have been neglecting. I need to listen to that voice and write.