This post has taken nearly five years to get published, hence the title. In the thick of lockdown, in my wee apartment in East Vancouver, I rediscovered my inherent need to write . . .
It’s yet another day in self-isolation. There is a powerful wind outside. Through slightly dirty glass, I scanned my balcony. A Home Depot plant rescued two years before finally yielded a recent bloom of camellia. The other greenery that have been surviving the seasons, while facing north with only partial sun, are making their way back from hibernation now. I could hear the intense rustling of leaves and wondered if I should worry about them. The tops of the trees were swaying violently as the lower layer of fluffy clouds raced just under the overcast sky. Soon the rains will come. I can see it in the colour of the sky and smell it in the air. The turbulence of the weather outside mirrored my internal condition.
Looking back, the part of my life where self-discovery started under the care and security of my family provided a solid foundation. It probably felt shaky and cracked when I left my parents home to try to be my own person and make a life for myself. But being on my own allowed me to expand my understanding of the world and how I might fit into it.
In his essay Being and Nothingness, Jean-Paul Sartre said, “Being is. Being is in-itself. Being is what it is.” After establishing that we exist, he further asserts that understanding that we exist is what helps us find out why we exist. I found Jean-Paul Sartre and many other writers and philosophers in university. This was the time that my love for literature grew and I became obsessed with existentialism. I followed the words of widely known thinkers down the rabbit hole to try to make sense of my power and purpose. I engaged in a never-ending exercise of slowly constructing my identity, only to deconstruct it and find the inescapable paradoxes. It’s human nature to be positional, to take a position, but through my own experiences, I realize that many things are not simply left or right, in or out, red or blue; many of the things we do in our lives operate within a range between extremes. Personally, accepting this fact allows me to change and adapt based on what is happening in the moment.
Be open. Be curious.
My late teens and twenties were a blur. There are so many things that happened that it’s really difficult for me to find a linear and logical way of explaining it. This was a time of discovery and it was when I was at the height of my own creativity. This is when I first attempted to write a book that I might publish. This is also when I lost the first and only handwritten draft of the book when I decided to mail it to my mom in Vancouver, when I was in the Algarve. Needless to say, it was either lost at sea or in a giant Canada Post warehouse where unclaimed mail ceases to be. Bits and pieces of the first few chapters were in the hands of friends who returned what they had in the hopes of me re-writing it. In the wake of 2020’s existential crisis, I thought about dusting it off to share thoughts from a time when I was young and stood before so many paths and opportunities to choose from. It was a time when all I did was dream and contemplate the life I wanted to live and the person I wanted to be. I started to transcribe the pieces I had left and weave together parts to remake the book I had once written, but too much time had passed. I started to rewrite and edit parts, which I knew would no longer make the book a representation of who I was and how I made sense of my world at that point.
Now nearing my seventh regeneration of self, I’ll shift from sharing a reboot of a book I once wrote to writing something new and see how that goes.