It is really weird to be sitting here, bringing this chapter to a close. I have always been someone who is obsessed with time- a weird paranoia wrapped in incentive to do as much as possible. A weird fear of missing out on life that was totally bound in paralysis.
It really does seem like it was just yesterday (but also an eternity) since I was leaving home, ready to puke my guts out from fear of moving to a new place. I was so scared. I promise you, I do not remember almost anything from that 15 hour plane ride. I landed in Johannesburg and raced to catch my flight to Cape Town, but also, as soon as I landed, I was already looking around and trying to figure out the way things worked here. I stood at the elevator with my luggage cart and a white family walked right in front of me and took it. I thought "well maybe that's just how things work here. I don't know." Two different families cut in front of me and took the elevator. I was too shaken by the reality that I had finally left home to be mad. I just waited patiently, while taking deep breaths so I wouldn't have a panic attack.
Looking back, I realize how foolish it was to be so afraid. But that is the thing about decisions and fear, we never know how simple or completely not scary they are until we finally decide to take that first step. I have been living in Cape Town for four months now. I fly home tomorrow. I landed here in August and spent my first two weeks counting down the days until I could leave. I tried to create an escape plan and panicked a whole lot. There was absolutely no rational reason for me to want to escape so badly, but it had been a very long time since I had been in one place for an extended period of time. The idea made me very uncomfortable. I wasn't sure if I was ready for Cape Town to become my home, little did I know, it was exactly what I needed.
Since the summer of 2018, I had not stayed in one place consistently for more than a month. My average time in one place was really just two weeks. It began as a funny thing pushed by indecision about where I wanted to live and what I wanted to do.. it turned into a really weird safety net. My anxiety had never been so high in my life, but committing to staying in one place, I had decided, was going to keep me from pursuing my dream of living in a foreign country. In reality, I was just afraid to make a decision.
So, South Africa has been my only real home in the last year and a half. It scared me a whole bunch at first- I did not think I could even last six weeks… but now, 130 days have passed and I can’t even imagine still being someone who hid behind indecision. Someone who pretended fear of failure and disappointment were not the real issues going on inside of me. Home became scary to me, because it was representative of what I had lost.
Most of my days were spent replaying loss over and over in my mind like a cinema. When you focus on loss, you have no space or vision left to notice the goodness and sunlight around you. I lost a lot in 2018, it is true. It was one of the darkest times in my life, and I could not see the sun- even though I tried to see it. Thankfully, I have found it again. The lessons I have learned from those dark days have changed me and molded me into a different person; the person I have been hoping I would be for so long.
I fell in love with some of the most different and wonderful people, and a place completely different from the one that raised me. Now I can pinpoint a place that gave me back the excitement and gratitude for life that I used to have - before I let the restrictions of my environment, mindset, and other people strip that away from me.
Whenever people ask me what the best part of my experience has been, I find that I list the simple things. Like watching the sunset with people who are as excited and grateful as I have learned to be, people who have also left their homes for the unknown, people who like to drink white wine from the bottle because it feels like freedom and is actually super funny.
I don’t know where South Africa will fit into my future, or where my home will be. Even though that's sad for me, I have finally realized something important: I get to choose. I don’t have to keep pining over someone just because I loved them once, working at a job because it’s where I’ve been, continuing on a path because I spent a lot of time paving it, or accepting shitty people just because they are presenting themselves to me. People are going to act however they choose to act and dislike you to make themselves feel better if that's what they decide. That's their decision. We have no power over that. What we do have is the power to smile anyway. To walk away when we need it, and pave new paths.
Every person we lose is just freeing up space for a little more unique and fresh sunlight in our lives. I came to South Africa alone, in a very bad place mentally and emotionally. I had no sunshine in me. I am so thankful that days spent staring at a mountain and opening up my heart to people from all over the world took the sun and placed it right back in my hands. And now, as I head to the airport with more memories than I can even begin to recount, I will wave goodbye to my different life. I will take the sunshine that was placed in my hands and put it back in my heart where it belongs.
Here’s to the future. And to being whoever it is I choose to be.
