Gratitude
It was June 25th, I was sitting in the immigration office waiting to get my passport back after submitting all the paperwork to extend my visa, and I felt gratitude like I never have before.
My entire life has been preparing me for this journey on the other side of the world, and I felt gratitude for all of the beautiful and painful moments that have lead me here. For the longest time I’ve held the belief about life that I didn’t ask to be here, none of this was my idea. Whatever happens - that’s not on me, this was all someone else’s idea, and all I can do it make the best out of it. It means its ok if things don’t work out, its ok if things don’t go according to plan. I developed that attitude because life didn’t make any sense to me, it was a coping mechanism.
I don’t know why anything in my life has worked out the way it has. I don’t know why I couldn’t finish college like all my friends did (I’m a freshman drop out). I don’t know why I’ve spent the past almost 20 years in a cycle of repeating the same relationship mistakes again and again. There’s so many things I don’t understand about why I have to do things the hard way. Like why I had to quit the best job I ever had at the peak of my career (thats something I’ve always said that I’ve never been able to recover from, but now I have to change that language), or why I ended up with not one, but two therapists I’ve seen every single week for the past 2 or 3 years PLUS a psychiatrist… I’ve been spending $10,000 a year on that, along with some pretty serious self study work.
Actually… after all that therapy, I can tell you exactly why all of this stuff happened, but I couldn’t tell you that any of it meant anything beyond “I didn’t ask to be here, and I’m just trying to make the best of things and figure it all out”. It was in this moment in the immigration office that I gained a true appreciation for all of the strength and wisdom I had learned from dealing with my life’s pain and suffering because of how well it prepared me to take this leap of faith to go on this journey I need to be on now. Have you ever ran a marathon and you pass the finish line, and you just say to yourself, “I did it. I really did it” and you feel your own soul giving you a hug like the kind your mother would give you when you’re little when she was really proud of you, and you just collapse, crying tears of pure joy? It was kind of like that except the marathon has been going on for 41 years.
The Visa Extension Process
This was a big scary thing for me. I was low key dreading it for the past month. I knew I would be able to figure it out, but what if it was really hard? I had many small hurdles that all gave me anxiety.
I had to print out a bunch of documents. That meant figuring out how to go to a print center and print out a bunch of documents. I had to go to a dingy little shop with one employee, an older lady who didn’t seem too interested that I had walked in, despite the place being empty. I arrived sweating bullets and out of breath. It was 90 degrees or more, and close to 100% humidity, and i was trying to hurry on this half mile walk because it was about to start pouring, like it does every single day for about an hour this time of year. Thankfully, after almost a month in Chiang Mai, i learned to carry a small towel to dry myself off with everywhere i go, and I even managed to beat the rain.
The shop wasn’t very inviting. It had a big roll up gate, no doors, there were barely any lights, everything looked pretty old, especially the computers and all the machines. It looked like somewhere that tourists probably don’t go to very often, so I was also worried about language barriers. Then there was the whole thing about having to email sensitive documents to a random gmail address in order to get them printed out.
It all worked out though, I printed out about 12 or 15 pages of stuff for 10 baht, about 30 cents. So far I don’t think my identity has been stolen yet. I was seriously marveled at the price, I questioned if she even covered her costs.
That was a huge success for me, and called for a celebration. I treated myself to the classic Chiang Mai special: drinking a Chang beer by myself on my balcony, in the sweltering heat. Chang is a local beer, im not sure what kind. Its close to a PBR or something like that, i don’t know… You can get a 2 pack of 16oz cans for about $2.50. My celebration might sound sad, but it really wasn’t. I came here for solitude, and I truly felt grounded in the presence it gave me. I felt relief for getting these documents all figured out.
Waiting in line
There i was, I did it. All I had to do was wait for them to give me back my passport. All the things I was worried about ended up being straight forward. All I really had to do was… show up.
The possibility of having some kind of real difficulty or bad experience aside, I still could have also been more stressed out and scared than I really was. I don’t have to look back very far to find my past self that knew this really might be too hard for me.
The whole way through all of this journey, that version of myself has been watching with astonishment the grown up me right now acting completely self lead, without fear, and with enough confidence and calmness to make that old me feel safe enough to relax, and trust the me that is able to demonstrate some self mastery.
This whole trip, is me doing the one thing I’ve been absolutely positively sure I would never ever do in my whole life - travel alone for an extended period of time on the other side of the world with no help and no plan, in places where they don’t speak the same language or use the same alphabet. I have never been interested in travel, it was always too scary and stressful, and I have this guilt about the environmental, and local socioeconomic impacts of global tourism. Truly though, I never actually believed that I could really do it. For as long as I can remember, until very recently, every time I thought of traveling like this, I actively told myself that I can’t do it, that’s its too hard, and too stressful, and that I wouldn’t be able to handle it, and that even if I could do it - all of these fears mean I wouldn’t be able to enjoy it, and it wouldn’t be worth it.
Here is a short list of things, that, at some point or another, I thought would be more likely to happen than me traveling alone for months in Asia without much of a plan. None of these are a joke, these are all things I’ve seriously thought about or worried about.
- Becoming homeless
- Living as a monk
- Getting married and having kids
- Moving somewhere remote, but probably still domestic, like Alaska
- Living out of an RV or van
- Killing myself
- Settling forever and never really pursuing my dreams
In my moment of gratitude, while waiting at the immigration office, I realized something really important. It wasn’t just that I did something big and scary all by myself, and that I was proud of myself, and relieved it went smoothly…
There was something even more surprising about all of this that i could only see when it was over: I wanted to stay here longer. I didn’t want to leave, I didn’t want to go home. For the first time I realized im actually doing something I’ve wanted to do my whole entire life, and that I had been actively rejecting it and refusing to even allow myself to consider the idea. I never understood that, but somehow my life ended up leading me here in a way where this path that I’m on has become the only path that makes any sense to me, and now… it doesn’t just feel like its the right path, I actually really love it. It feels better than I ever could have imagined. My dreams aren’t just dreams anymore. Im learning how to make them real.