Being Afraid
Freedom, fish and water, and the passage of time.
I have started and stopped writing many times since coming home in August. Every time I start again, I have different thoughts that I want to elaborate on. So, for the remaining 2.5 hours of this flight, I’m going to get as close as I can to finishing something, because if not, I don’t think I ever will, and all the original thoughts will be forgotten.
July something, 2025
I’m feeling incredibly nervous about leaving Colombia. I’ve been living in this country for nearly a year, and every day has been some breed of adventure. Just a week or two ago, I didn’t feel worried about my departure. The thought of going home excited me so much. I wanted to go home and visit my favourite restaurants with my family, eat my weight in raw fish, take my dog on many walks, drive among towering pines, swim in unbeatably beautiful lakes, and see people who feel like home. I still want to do all those things, and listing them out makes me feel more positive about the whole situation.
Saying goodbye to Medellín the first time around was already so hard. Watching my friends leave Bogotá was bidding another piece of my heart goodbye (leaving the city itself wasn’t as hard, because a lot of home is people for me, so by the time I left there wasn’t much to stay behind for, minus the acai and the familiarity). I don’t want to partake in another goodbye, especially one that feels so permanent.
This year seems to stand out compared to the other years of my life. In that way, it feels far away, like 300-something days that only I was there to witness. As though the year, along with the lessons gathered during those cyclical sunrises and sunsets, could all fade as soon as I stop reminiscing and recalling. I could go home, and this could all be reduced to a blip in the timeline, a year that feels more like a story that someone told me about rather than a year that I truly lived myself, feeling the emotions and tasting the fruit.
I know time feels so broad and seizable while we’re in it, drinking a cup of coffee or walking a familiar path. But before I know it, I’ll be waiting at my respective gate in the Medellín airport, feeling stuffy with all sorts of different emotions and probably utterly, completely confused. Confused about how to feel. Wondering how it’s possible for time to be so thin and malleable that I could stick my finger in it like a still, cold pond, or hold a day, or a whole year in my hand as one Thing, delicate and unseeming. All those songs, books, meals, trips, laughs, people, firsts, lasts, and tears rolled into one.
I feel loved here. These cities and these people have known me so thoroughly at this point in my life. I’m afraid to be unknown. I’m afraid to be unloved. I’m afraid of things ending (the goodbyes, the forgetting, the moving on), and I’m afraid of loneliness.
Things I’ll never lose (I hope):
1. People I love
2. Spanish
3. Certain engraved memories (especially if I write them down)
4. Songs saved in my playlists
5. Pictures and videos
September 15th, 2025
The first few days at home, I was pleasantly surprised by how stable I felt. I soaked up the diverse faces and languages filling the airport, my family’s love, and the familiar turn into the driveway. I savoured those first few walks around my neighbourhood, sleeping in my childhood bedroom, and many pounds of tofu. In my optimistic haze, I thought that stability would stick around.
Unfortunately, it did not. The novelty of familiar home wore off quickly. I began not only missing my time in Colombia, but also how happy I had been. I was, and still am, scared. I think that’s the best way to put it. I’m scared to move on, I’m scared to be unhappy, and I’m scared of a future without personal fulfillment.
At the end of the program’s return retreat, each student who had spent a year abroad gathered back in Quebec to reflect on their time and share. I was still feeling very low. One activity involved writing a letter to our imaginary past selves for them to read before their departures. I can’t remember exactly what I wrote now, but I remember scrawling messily on the page, telling myself over and over not to be scared. You’re going to learn so much and have so much fun. You’re going to meet people who change your life. You are going to love more than you thought you were capable of. Don’t be afraid!
The whole thing felt emotional. I felt like I was rushing to explain how amazing everything had been, and that I didn’t quite have the words to capture it. We were then given back the letters we had written ourselves over a year ago for our future selves to read once we had completed our years abroad. Reading my letter made me a gazillion times more emotional. I wasn’t scared back then, not even a little bit.
I couldn’t believe how much I cared and how intentionally I had been thinking and writing. I couldn’t believe how genuinely happy, how relentlessly optimistic, and how effortlessly confident I was. Which scared Current Me even more. Why do I feel sadder and more insecure now? Especially when Past Me had written things like,
I hope you can use what you’ve learned to live kindly, honestly, and fully, and that you practice humility, include others, and search for meaning always… Do you believe in yourself more? Do you feel more spontaneous? More open-minded? Do you think you have changed a lot?... I hope that you are happy, inspired, and full of gratitude. But I also hope that you have felt sadness, anger, fear, worry, and pain, and that you have become a kinder, more understanding person from it. I encourage you to be questioning, critical, and to hold yourself to a high standard, but to love yourself and others deeply, to let dissatisfaction and feelings of content to coexist beautifully. I hope that you practice being gentle and laughing a lot. I hope that you look back with deep gratitude, love, and deep understanding. I encourage you to look forward with hope. I encourage you to navigate the chaos with belief in yourself and not to always fear the passage of time. … I believe in you very much. And I remind you that life is full, full, full of questions and beauty – so much of it, so much to learn, and so many ways to change. And though you might not know the answers, the connections with others you have are so beautiful, too, and we are all trying.
Rewriting that now still scares me. Or rather, it makes me sad. I know I still have much excitement, intention, happiness, and confidence within me. But I have a lot more dread, aimlessness, sadness, and insecurity recently.
During the months preceding my year in Colombia, but during which I knew I was going to be leaving, and during my entire time there, I could always hold on to the Anchor of being on a Big Adventure. In that way, I was untouchable. Even if things were terribly sucky, I told myself that I was learning and seeing more of the world. It is still true, it is still true. There is so much out there. Even if I stayed in one small town for the rest of my life, I’d still be learning and seeing more of the world. But I can admit that for a year, I had a type of novelty and adventure that superseded all the previous novelty and adventure I had experienced in my life. It was hard to know that it was over, and it was hard to know that I would have to retire that anchor of consolation and reassurance. I’m more lost now; there is no steady narrative grounding me.
It makes sense that I’m confused and that I’m questioning myself. I am not the same as I was, and Montreal isn’t either (Lashyn keeps quoting Heraclitus: “no man ever steps in the same river twice, for it is not the same river and he is not the same man.” Which makes me laugh, but is also accurate.). This is normal, this was expected, but I think I repressed it a little bit. It felt obnoxious to act like I was all transformed from my time away. But I should be honest with myself. So much happened. Of course, I am different. And these new experiences and imaginations are hard to balance as I’m trying to move forward, unsure of where to place my next step.
Although it feels hard, I’m grateful for it. I don’t want to convince myself of some sort of idea that I’m not free anymore. People vary in their freedom in real senses (legal, financial, familial). I know that in those real senses, so many things are up to me. Being somewhere else for a year and feeling such a wild extent of freedom taught me a new way of living, but that doesn’t mean I have to lose it all because I’m not there anymore.
Speaking with Lea and meeting her family during the past week was comforting. I loved witnessing their candour and humour and noticing the ways they love each other. They are each their own person, which I admire. Lea thought it was a good thing that I was experiencing doubt, because if I wasn’t I might be limiting myself, which she thinks too many people do. I asked her parents if they feel they have lived x number of years or if they feel that time has gone by much quicker, to which they both responded the latter. I asked them for advice. Lea’s mom said that taking the long view of life is not always necessary. The idea of having to find your one true passion and live out your dream can be suffocating and cause you to miss discoveries right in front of you. That made me think of two fish- and water-related parables. The first I read in David Foster Wallace’s 2005 commencement speech1 upon my sister’s recommendation, “This is Water”. I’ll include what I think are the most relevant lines below (my bolding):
There are these two young fish swimming along and they happen to meet an older fish swimming the other way, who nods at them and says “Morning, boys. How’s the water?” And the two young fish swim on for a bit, and then eventually one of them looks over at the other and goes “What the hell is water?”
Worship power, you will end up feeling weak and afraid, and you will need ever more power over others to numb you to your own fear. Worship your intellect, being seen as smart, you will end up feeling stupid, a fraud, always on the verge of being found out. But the insidious thing about these forms of worship is not that they’re evil or sinful, it’s that they’re unconscious. They are default settings.
They’re the kind of worship you just gradually slip into, day after day, getting more and more selective about what you see and how you measure value without ever being fully aware that that’s what you’re doing.
But of course there are all different kinds of freedom, and the kind that is most precious you will not hear much talk about much in the great outside world of wanting and achieving…. The really important kind of freedom involves attention and awareness and discipline, and being able truly to care about other people and to sacrifice for them over and over in myriad petty, unsexy ways every day.
That is real freedom. That is being educated, and understanding how to think. The alternative is unconsciousness, the default setting, the rat race, the constant gnawing sense of having had, and lost, some infinite thing.
[The capital-T Truth] is about the real value of a real education, which has almost nothing to do with knowledge, and everything to do with simple awareness; awareness of what is so real and essential, so hidden in plain sight all around us, all the time, that we have to keep reminding ourselves over and over:
“This is water.”
“This is water.”
It is unimaginably hard to do this, to stay conscious and alive in the adult world day in and day out. Which means yet another grand cliché turns out to be true: your education really IS the job of a lifetime. And it commences: now.
The second is from Pixar’s movie Soul.2 Near the end of the movie, (spoiler alert), after the protagonist comes back from the dead to play in a famous jazz show, his ultimate dream (I haven’t watched this in a while, I’m sorry if I’m butchering it), he realizes he doesn’t feel as amazing as he thought he would. The famous saxophone player in the band asks him what’s wrong, to which he responds,
“It’s just, I’ve been waiting for this day my entire life. I thought I’d feel different.”
To which she says,
“I heard this story about a fish. He swims up to this older fish and says, ‘I’m trying to find this thing they call the ocean.’
‘The ocean?” Says the older fish. ‘That’s what you’re in right now.’
‘This?’ Says the younger fish. ‘This is water. What I want is the ocean.’”
Lea’s dad said to be brave and live sensitively, which I thought was beautiful, and might steal as my life mantra from here on out.
September 15th, 2025
Montreal has been especially beautiful lately. The sun says hello, then farewell through the gaps in the trees. Well-dressed people whizz by on bikes. The city is colourful and kind. Today, Varusha and I moved from bench to bench licking our Biscoff gelato as a beautiful stranger sat and played guitar for the benefit of all park visitors. As we walked home, a toddler ran up to me and gave me a hug! That must be a good omen.
I feel lucky today, which I hope sticks around. Coming back to Canada was hard. I’ve been lower this August and September than I have been in a long time. Although I do try to remind myself of how heartbroken I was at times, and how my apartment in Bogotá was infested with bugs.
While I may be romanticizing the past a bit, I also admit to myself that my year in Colombia was one of the best things that has ever happened to me. I can’t believe how much I loved and laughed. I can’t believe how the most incredible people continued to make their way into my life. I can’t believe how much happened. The sprained ankle with Lea, who laughed then helped me up. The horrible walk in the Panama airport, when I thought I’d keel over. The hike with my family and how happy my dad was at the top, and how sweet Ernesto (our tour guide) found the whole thing. Walking around campus for the first time, then going to Ikea with Maisie and Sonali. The two cakes, the gifted book on my desk that made me feel so special, and the funniest game of charades, during which I felt so whole and safe. Doña Elcy crying in the doorway and the letter Don Jose read out loud, moments I cling on to.
I miss my life and who I was very much. But life is moving, each day walking forwards and bringing me along with it, whether I’m skipping or trudging. I am trying, and want to keep trying, to live in a way I won’t regret. I don’t want to lose track of the days that I have now. Rereading the above journal entry reminds me of this albeit cheesy but sweet post on Pinterest I saw a couple of days ago displaying a few paragraphs written by author and blogger Renuka Gavrani. A few lines I like are as follows:
“You don’t have to wait for everything to be back to normal… Do you have the courage to choose to enjoy the best thing you have at the moment, or do you want to clear the shit until the hot chocolate isn’t hot anymore?”
I want the hot hot chocolate!!!
I was also reminded of another post I saw recounting a diary entry from November 13, 1977, by Michael Palin, an English actor/comedian/writer/TV presenter:
“Today, helped no doubt by the hard, bright freshness of a cool, sunny November morning, I have a feeling of completeness. The world makes sense this Sunday morning. Even the weather seems to be resting, peaceful and mellowed after the angry squalls of the last two days.
Yesterday I read through the novel so far and was greatly heartened. I saw much that worked and I also saw clearly what didn’t work. I can see the way ahead and I can’t wait to get going again tomorrow.
I am perfectly well aware that around the borders of my life are problems, difficulties, painful decisions, even human tragedies demanding my involvement. I know I cannot live in a continual vacuum of happiness – but a day like today restores energies, tops up batteries, rebuilds whatever faith one has.
Today there is nothing more I want than what I have.”
The trying I’m doing is in nights under yellow light with people I love, or in the sweaty, neon salsa/bachata social, or in the lines that make me think in the new books I start to read.
October 4th, 2025
I keep framing things in terms of things I’ve lost, but maybe the more accurate lens would be one of gain. Because I never owned those things – that walk to campus or those stretching bus rides with the always unfathomable views, foggy and cold and green, non-human, the nights in 901, Zair’s laugh. The being in love part, all of it. The second family, living with my best friend, countless empanadas, wandering streets late at night, just following. I never owned those things. They were gifts to me. I wasn’t meant to walk those streets or bike those roads or meet all those beautiful people. Marvel, wonder, luck, they collaborated to bring me there to that dream of a reality. I miss them, but I didn’t lose them.”
I wish I could take you there for a moment. I want you to feel what it was like to be on that overnight bus by myself to El Cocuy. When I woke up at around 5 in the morning and took off my blindfold and looked outside and it was so bright. Everything was covered in fog, but there was so much green and so many flowers and so many tall palms, and it was so cold. I want to put in a jar that kind of wonder I felt so that I have it around forever. I want to take your hand and bring you to that grassy mountain on that hike when it started to rain and I had no idea where I was, but I was among around fifty kind strangers, one of whom gave me a big poncho to wear. I want you to be there when Jose, Lea and I were walking downtown and passed a sign displaying the lowest price for empanadas we had seen, oh, I can’t remember the price now, but we all collectively stopped and looked at each other and within minutes we were each biting into one.
A few weeks ago, I saw a photo my friend Matt took of a grand temple he hiked to during his year abroad in China. It made me weirdly emotional. I couldn’t believe he saw that. I couldn’t believe he was there. Everything is going on all at once, my history teacher used to say.
I think of a paragraph from Upstream by Mary Oliver, which I bought when I first got home and finished reading a little while ago.
“And whoever thinks these are worthy, breathy words I am writing down is kind. Writing is neither vibrant life nor docile artifact but a text that would put all its money on the hope of suggestion. Come with me into the field of sunflowers is a better line than anything you will find here, and the sunflowers themselves far more wonderful than any words about them.”
And that makes me think of another line that I love from her:
“In the beginning I was so young and such a stranger to myself I hardly existed. I had to go out into the world and see it and hear it and react to it, before I knew at all who I was, what I was, what I wanted to be.”
In some ways it is not true, because it seems my going out into the world has made me feel more confused about who I am, what I am, and what I want to be. But then, I do feel that my time in that different context made me meet myself differently. I do not think I am a stranger to myself, but I do think I have seen so much more of how I can be and how life can be, and that is confusing. But maybe that is good. There is no knowing oneself entirely. What would be in the point in that? It feels good to surprise myself.
Medellín and Bogotá will always be two of my favouritest cities in the world. But so will Montreal. Cities, languages, people – there is so much intimacy in each of them, so many details that we all notice differently, so much to love.
“To be surrounded by beautiful curious breathing laughing flesh is enough, to pass among them… to touch any one… to rest my arm ever so lightly round his or her neck for a moment… what is this then? I do not ask any more delight… I swim in it as in a sea.” – Walt Whitman, “I Sing the Body Electric”
I will leave you with a memory I hope I never forget.
I’m in Jose’s hometown for the third and last time during the year. Everything is the same. Everything is different. My pants are too baggy. They keep getting caught in the bike. I use a hair tie to secure the problematic pant leg higher up on my calf. We bike to Jose’s grandma’s sister’s house. Before saying hi, I make sure to untie the pant leg, because I look like a fool. We share a warm greeting. I re-tie the pant leg, and we proceed on our bikes. I struggle down a rocky hill. I get off to pet a friendly cow. I get sweatier than I thought I would.
We decide to turn back. It’s Jose’s little sister’s boyfriend’s birthday, and we scored invites to the birthday dinner despite our last-minute arrival in town. The sky is orange, I’m still a little hot, and I’ve got to use the bathroom, a little more urgently than I would like.
But everything is perfect. The orange sky, the orange road. The freedom, most of all. I pedal forward, feeling a gentle sort of awe. Amidst all the nameless chaos, a series of coincidences, each one linked to the next, has brought me here. If life is that, a series of coincidences, then I couldn’t be more grateful for this one.
Such beautiful and touching writing! Full of tenderness and love: to the past, the present, and the future. We ARE in the ocean. Enjoy the swim 🏊♀️