Never one

To harbour an idea, (I won’t say dream for that seems needlessly embellished for this piece) for a good many days, months and even years, having gone through very distinct phases – of thinking it in the first place, of establishing it as one to pursue, of wanting to act upon it but not, of acting upon it and failing, to actually achieving it has served as an eye opener of the first order for me, and though I don’t completely comprehend its ramifications, here’s what I have understood so far. 

For once in all my years, I set out to chase something that I believed (and believe) would ultimately become my profession. At last, to the relief of many and myself, I had a singular direction and the only visible trajectory was forwards in a linear motion. Though I am not one for jotting notes, it was all charted in my mind, organized according to serial number, colour and topic. I’d do the usual and achieve something mind-bogglingly grand. I’d escape the nest to find my calling and transform (read: metamorphose). I’d excel in class and lead a lifestyle akin to Instagram fitness gurus and return home with a six-pack. I kid you not, I harboured these ideas. 

It is still to my surprise and I’m hoping yours, that since the first day I got everything but. 

This was the content of the 'moving out' article they never wrote. It was the advice your concerned relatives (who went there for a vacation) and abroad-return friends never gave you. They mentioned it will be hard. Alas, they didn’t mention it will be odd.

Of course, my parents warned me to ‘focus on what I went there for’ and I was fuel-pumped enough to do precisely that, and oh well, I indeed did exactly that, and yet my every day served me a new idiosyncrasy for breakfast. Initially, it was my life that did a 360-degree cartwheel into a new order where I found myself alone in a new house with zero culinary skill and in a global university that made me feel minuscule. To even think about conquering these didn’t feel like a heroic task and definitely not exciting. Why so? Because it disrupted my linear mission for which I came fully equipped but all the other factors rendered me obsolete.

Self-doubt and the feeling that I wasn’t capable pounded in my head like my morning alarm that sadly, didn’t come with a snooze option. You’d argue here that I didn’t strive hard enough to manage to live by myself, didn’t act upon all of those lifestyle changes I hoped to create, and didn’t work my hardest at university. To all of these I say yes, I didn’t. The reason was that along the course of my striving for one goal, somewhere I started appreciating the life I had started to create in parallel. Which obviously was full of more failures. Except that it made me laugh and take them in my stride. And this strangely wasn’t a defence mechanism. You'd probably see that as deflecting, meandering far far away from one true purpose. I am writing this today to challenge that very notion. What if it's merely an act of embracing some of the other things you trod on along the course of your mighty mission? 

It required some re-wiring when it came to my mindset. Surely did I come here with one purpose but what I was offered, from the start, was never one. And that was alright. It wasn’t a cardinal rule to dodge a multitude of factors to reach a place if I didn’t want to yet. Perhaps, a whole wave of stimuli was more enriching than what I set sail for? 

Ever since I got here, probably the best (and worst) recurring movie I watched was of my alter-ego leading her flawless life and doing things in her own perfect way, following a strict timeline, eating right, going to a gazillion places that added to her intellect, acing class work, and treating herself to the best self-learned homemade food. She was all I wanted to be, how I wanted to be seen. However, I could only become a fraction of her. This saddened me but perhaps I was forgetting I was becoming many more fractions of someone else. Of myself. I was carving my own trajectory, replete with my own set of experiences. 

I was seizing from the dogma of becoming a person I imagined I would be. 

To say this is to assert confidently that I am moving non-linearly, dabbling into the list of things I didn't plan even mentally, and chasing simply, things that interest me more in the given moment. One might read that as - deflecting from one's goal, wasting time in the pursuit of the unnecessary, and chasing loss. It is undoubtedly a matter of perspective, my only aim being introducing one that isn't spoken about as widely and proudly. 

As for me, it boils down to the little things -  that one time I got lost in a remote part of the city in the dark without any charge on my phone whatsoever, the time I tried and tried and perfected a dish with an aroma that reminded me of home, the time I shared my culture and the way I thought with strangers who I now call friends, that gave me a sense of belonging and identity, coupled with my area of study. It was never meant to be one thing. Never one.