Theloopylululog

Advice is that annoying sack of dead weight that we carry on our backs as if we are beasts of burden. Atleast the bad ones that are droppped on us like unexpected bombs surely are. They are aplenty and strewn everywhere like bags of single use plastic. You can neither stop them from coming at you nor can you ignore them. So we leave them hanging in the air…like a forgotten hanky on a clothes line.

Like the one that’s thrown at me every single time I face humans. Why don’t you use hair colour? You would look so much younger! Err…ever thought I actually like being 44 and love my salt my pepper hair? Dunceheads.

Anyway digressing. This is not about that kinda advice.

The year was 2019. June had already begun to bud and the sizzling earth was being drizzled with the first rain. One such evening while cutting vegetables for dinner, I threw it out there. My little idea.

I want to visit Kenya.

Surrounded by my parents and older sister, I was riddled with trepidation.Not knowing how it would be received.

Before you go asking why, let me take you to March, 2019. I was blogging here on a different blog. I had made some good friends from all around the world. One was a Kenyan living in Nairobi. No. Don’t you go about thinking I was heading to Kenya to meet him.

A post about something whimsy by him led us to have a long thread on his comment session. Turns out it was by his friend. This friend followed the thread and sent along a song suggestion that reminded me of my childhood home.My post on this childhood home led him to read my entire blog. Yes. All my posts! Who does that anymore!

Cutting the chase, a song and a mail later, I was in love. A few months down the line, he suggested we should meet. And just like that an invite to visit Kenya landed on my lap.

Here is where I should tell you that although I loved to travel, I was never really keen on international travel. Heck, I didn’t even own a passport.

The blog incidentally was begun so I could write about all my adventures during travel. I did not see anything else coming my way. Not in my wildest dreams did I expect love to come knocking. I was a year into the sabbatical since I shut shop. A decade of being an entrepreneur, especially in India can leave you burnt out and totally disillusioned. The blog was an effort to put words to who I am beyond my identity as an entrepreneur. Former.

So…when the idea was raised, I was gobsmacked. Ofcourse, I wanted to meet him. But travelling to a new continent?…I wasn’t sure. I was both excited and scared. I wanted to go but wasn’t sure I could.

I was doubtful of taking care of myself. Being a middle child has it’s agonies but it does come with perks. There’s always another to fall back on. Both my siblings have always rallied around me, so I didn’t really have a chance to bloom into an self confident independent woman. I hear you ask, but didn’t you say you were an entrepreneur?

I was. But that was a dream I had worked for. In a field I was passionate about. This was life. Love. A 3 month long stay in a new country amongst new people. To me the stakes were much higher and there was a lot to lose. Except a couple of men, I didn’t know anyone there. None offline, mind you.

If you knew me, you would understand the soup I was in.

Cut to June. When I raised the idea, I was kinda sure my family would shoot it down. I had managed to surprise them with my oddball choices throughout my life but this was throwing the ball out of the park.

BUT.

Oh there is always a but in an Indian melodrama.

My mom spontaneously, without missing a beat said something I will never forget. I cannot even if I try.

Just because your business didn’t do as well as you expected doesn’t make you a failure. Just because you didn’t earn as much as your sister or your brother doesn’t make you a failure. Just because you shut shop and took a sabbatical to figure yourself out doesn’t make you a failure. You are different. Your path is different. So if life is offering you a chance to go on a tangent, then don’t let go of this opportunity. Maybe this will help you find yourself. Maybe this is God’s way of telling you to go explore your options. I never got a chance to go out of India. Here you are with an invite to visit friends. You won’t be alone. So just trust in yourself and GO.

This one piece of advice that I didn’t see coming is the most profound piece of advice I have ever been given. I didn’t even know my mom thought so highly of me. She had seen me struggle to belong througout life. So I assumed she would be the one who would say No. I had no inkling my mom would become the torch bearer of what was to come.

As a reminder here, she didn’t know I was in love with a Kenyan man. I just told them I had made some writer friends from Africa. If she did, maybe she wouldn’t have said all that she did. If you know what it means to be smothered for identity in an Indian home, especially as a woman, you know what I mean.

BUT.

Her advice gave flight to my new dreams. Literally. Months later after many scary anxious moments, I did board a flight to Kenya and it literally changed the course of my life.

No. We are not together anymore, him and I. But meeting him forced me to meet myself beyond all the layers of Oh, I am strong masks and overcoats I had worn all this time trying to create an identity for myself under the sun. Society can be cruel to all of us. It is a monster of the worst kind to someone different from the rest. All that heavily made up facade crumbled in his company and probably for the first time ever I came to see how much I had to heal in myself.

I won’t bore you with the rest of the story, but one thing led to another and step by step I walked a long journey that finally led me home. To myself.

So…the most profound advice I have been given, one I never asked for or expected, but received in the form of those encouraging words from my mom, all while prepping for dinner, led me towards something I lacked since childhood: trust in myself. Believing I am capable of seeing anything though that life challenges me with, changed everything.

Sure, it didn’t happen in an hour or a day like in the movies. It was hard work. I was close to pissing in my pants many times. Almost came to cancelling the whole thing a week before the d-day.

BUT.

It had stopped being an international solo trip anymore. It was a journey to chart my own course, map my own destiny and write my own story with my own hands.

I was a lost, unhealed mess before the trip. I touched rockbottom during the relationship in those months I lived away from everything I knew. But it led me to shed my old self, my patterns, my comfort zone, my conditioning and recreate a new me from the scratch. I found what lay on the other side of the ocean. Literally and metaphorically. I found the answer to my lifelong quest.

Myself.