I remember on my first week at Medium, I was asked to introduce myself to the company, and one of the questions was, “What do you do for fun?”. I answered, almost embarrased, “I contemplate on life.”
20 months later, I was having a conversation with Joyce, and she was telling me how she feels, day after day, passing by cold and hungry people in front of our office.
I alluded to her that I was having similar feelings – except that I am having a chronic fatigue of having these feelings. It was in that moment that I realized once again, that I really don’t have a separation of work and life. At work, I think about how to make people care about financial inclusion, out of work, even before working at Stellar, I’ve been reading, writing, conversing on how to facilitate change. It is what I do out of work that defines me, it is just that I am really blessed to do the same at my day job.
I was tossing and turning in bed last night, and I had a sudden onslaught of panic, where I had another realization that I will never be able to get away from my thoughts, ever. I’m stuck in my own head – I have claustrophobia, and I can tell you right now that that moment wasn’t very pleasant for me. This is why people meditate, and also why people kill themselves.
The worst thing is, I can’t think of anything else I would rather do. It is not like I can give up being myself, or the work I care about, and go on a party binge or something. I would still be stuck with these feelings, these thoughts, wherever I go, whatever I do.
I don’t have any answers for myself, except I will probably need to work out how to transmute these feelings of weight and fatigue. I go through these phases where I feel like I’m growing into a new self, and I am like getting to know myself over again. This is where all my previous assumptions of myself will fail, and it is extremely uncomfortable.
I am in one of such phases right now, where I am trying to put pieces of myself back together again, in order to fit in new pieces, and throw away the ones which no longer fit.
Perhaps, just perhaps, it is easier if I simply accept that these pieces will never truly fit together, and the protruding edges are what that truly makes me, me.