I have been traveling back and forth from the United States to Southeast
Asia for most of my life. My mother,
father, and I moved to Patumthani, right outside of Bangkok in 1995. We lived on the Asian Institute of Technology
campus where my father could further pursue his doctorate on the system
dynamics of the Mekong River. We were
back in the States little more than a year later but would return sporadically
during winters and summers with my father making his home in Phnom Penh, the
capital city of Cambodia, in 2006.
Though I have visited my father
on extended trips as often as possible, this stay is different. Previously, timid and intimidated, I would
try to hide my tall frame and blond hair behind the welcome figure of a chaperon. Trips to the market were in the company of my
father’s former wife or one of her employees who would direct, translate and
deflect Khmer and customs from their shy, awkward charge. I would like to say that at 22 years old,
educated, tested and tried, that my first inclination is no longer to withdraw
to the background, that I have outgrown my awkwardness and embrace
opportunities for exploration with relish.
And to a certain extent this is true, but it is an on-going process…
I transferred my junior year of
high school to Deerfield Academy, where, it seemed, the cultural and
circumstantial shift brought to the surface latent and subcutaneous
tendencies. Supremely uncomfortable with
myself and my environment, I barely spoke, avoided eye contact and emanated
disdain in a desperate attempt to defend myself from…from what? From seeing my own self-dislike reflected
back at me, I suppose. Needless to say,
junior year sucked ass.
But it is not human nature to
give up on ourselves. Our journeys,
while varied and unique, have a common thread of redemption and as my
depression grew, so did the unwavering and ever-present voice that attested to
my value and inherent self-worth rise from a whisper to a shout and from a
shout to action.
My senior year at Deerfield, I
made the conscious decision to jolt myself from my self-imposed protective
layers. I registered for acting class, a
creative writing workshop in which personal work is exposed and critiqued,
tried out for the school play and got a job at the school grill. Anything and everything to force myself from
my shell. It was terrifying, and for a
time predicable panic attacks and discomfort ensued. Slowly but surely, I started engaging with
other students and faculty. It was a
slow process during which I often had to remind myself to smile and to respond
to polite inquiries with polite inquiries of my own. At first, this felt forced and
unnatural. Opening to people, even
marginally, means giving them the opportunity to reject you. But I found that being genuine, or at least
on a path towards a semblance of it, feels so much better than imposed
isolation, that it is worth any risk.
For my senior meditation, I
wrote an intensely personal essay detailing parts of the upheaval of a period
of my life before Deerfield which I titled, “Waiting to Breathe.” It was selected by a panel to be read during
a school meeting at the end of the year.
I remember walking up to the podium, shaking, sweating, afraid I would
stutter or sneeze or cough or not be perfect and I remember afterwards the
silence and then the slow clapping and the standing ovation as well as the
tears of some of the faculty to whom I was closest. I realized in that moment and in that being
of connectedness and sharing with my school, that my fear and loneliness had
been my choice, as had been my acceptance.
What this boils down to and what I’m trying to convey, is the lesson
that I’m continuously learning wherever I go and whatever I do. A lesson in vulnerability and the power we
choose to give our self-judgments. That
above all, there is a pervasive fear of being vulnerable. That our judgments of ourselves are so harsh
that we remain closed or only parcel out genuine pieces of who we are in
certain circumstances to certain people as if love is a limited resources only
accorded to a worthy few. And yet, it is
only when we let go of who we think we should be and share ourselves, only when
we let ourselves be excruciatingly, devastatingly vulnerable, do we find that
we are, in fact, invulnerable. The only harm we are capable of is blocking
our natural state; that of sharing. Of
loving and being loved. When we allow
ourselves the possibility of being vulnerable, we allow ourselves to truly
live. What we are is not subject to the
destruction and shame we fear we are hiding in the recesses of our mind.
Whew! So, what does this have to do with Phnom Penh
and adventures in general? Well, I want
to go to the market on my own. I want to
travel independently. I stick out like a
sore thumb and have little to no grasp of the language. Self-confidence and the ability to handle
confrontation with grace and skill (essentials for bargaining and getting
around in a foreign country) are attributes I’m in the on-going process of building. But I know that being afraid is something you
learn how to deal with. It isn’t
something that goes away and getting comfortable with being uncomfortable takes
practice and the willingness to experience discomfort. So here I go, off into uncertainty one baby Zilla stomp at a time, armed
only with the readiness to look silly, get lost and have fun doing it. Here’s to vulnerability and the courage to
fail.
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