I’ve recently brought up the issue of finding work abroad with family members and they seemed quite receptive and encouraging. They were glad I’m finally opening up to the idea and pondering spreading my wings and leaving the nest, so to speak. One of the reasons they’ve cited for me to pursue this is that I’ve “got nothing to leave behind.”
While in a way, it’s true, it’s also painfully revealing of my life thus far. I’ve recently turned 25, you see, and against all my will, all my ridiculing on the matter, I think I might have unwittingly stumbled into the feared “quarter life crisis.” Funny what a few little words can do.
Perhaps the first thing that comes to mind is the part about the love life, or lack thereof. Four years in college, three years in the work environment, four self-help books, and dozens of acquaintances later, I’m still lacking. Recently, I’ve argued that it’s a matter of choice. Yet there are times I’ve wondered if I’ve been a little too ambitious for my own good.
Following closely is that of my career. Three years of working my ass off has still kept my salary well below what I had expected when I was back in college. Heck, in all that time, I’ve only managed to raise the cost of my services by just a mere four figures. Then there are the stories – my efforts at immortalizing my thoughts, opinions and experiences, to broadcast them to the world to make a world event. Of course, the world event lasts only as long as the ink does on the paper, or the cache does in Google. My billboards — my petty little claim to fame — that used to stand proudly in four prominent locations in the metro are now gone. They’ve been tucked away into a filing cabinet of aggressive marketing, long forgotten thanks to the rival brand’s relentless hard sell tactics.
Then there are my personal projects — little things I scribble into a little red notebook that cost too much to bring to life — an ambitious magazine here, a new way to phase out money in a mall, a job recruitment agency cum educational institute. None of them have gone beyond brainstorming coffee breaks, much less a feasible financial viability study.
And Destiny, my Destiny. I’ve got such great plans for her, plans that were made the day I first drove her to school – promises that have yet to be fulfilled. Indeed, things have been made easier to keep these with her, but despite all my negotiations, one thing I can’t seem to give her is time. And yet she’s waited for 48 long years.
As for family, spirituality and craft, they’re now, perhaps, worse off than when I started. There’s been so much abandon, so much compromise, so much putting off thanks to the pressure of work that I wonder when I’ll finally begin working on them rather than adding to the growing list of To-Do’s on my phone.
Perhaps it’s because the one thing I keep working for is what I hope will buy me more of this precious time in the future. I’m prepared to make more sacrifices and am struggling to tick off things from my list as I go along. The trouble is, when I do come back, will there be any of this “nothing’s to leave behind” left waiting for me? At the end of the day, all I’m looking for is something to come home to.
