This post tells the story of a sweet hedonistic pot of chocolate where I stood out as being the sour mustard.
Before I start, let's get a little context: I have been in Los Angeles for 10 days now on a medical elective and the whole travel experience has been far from perfect. Now this has little to do with the city itself and much more to do with personal obstacles that happened upon landing here or that I had carried with me right before coming from Lebanon. With that in mind, let's get started.
In the past year I can honestly say I have lost a great deal of my self confidence and assertive behavior . Numerous times this year, I ended up merely a ghost who echoes what others around him do. I gave up principles, tried new things in the name of adventure and the need to cross items off the list before I turn 25. I drifted apart from good people, gained some unnecessary enemies, but more importantly, I lost a sense of identity that I always took pride in. Imagine my apprehension to find all of that confusion culminating on an uneventful California night. In the midst of yet another attempt to fit in an environment that is mot mine, I found myself packing my belongings in a gloomy coffee shop, walking back to my apartment here in Los Angeles with one thought racing through my mind: being in Rome still does not make you a Roman. Even if I am in the most laid back city on earth, that does not mean I am no longer the same pretentious existential young man I always prided myself of being.
The human race is a lonely fragile one. We want acceptance, we search for it wherever we go. We copy others, we convince some to copy us, we travel in herds like sheep and get chased by other packs of wolves on that jounrney. I can't speak for everyone out there but I know I have had major trouble embracing loneliness. I have traveled quite a bit in my life but I always looked for familiarities in foreign lands. Rarely have I actually embraced the foreign settings for what they are. instead, I turned them around to fit my reality. It is in this spirit that strolling down the champs elysee brings back Sabah's "allo beirut" playing in my ears, walking to the hospital in California brings marcel khalife's Rita and Croatia's Split is carved as the spitting image of Sour in my mind. Identity is a tricky entity. For someone who aspires to one day map the human brain, I am surely fixated on certain areas of my identity that seem to recur since early adulthood/ late adolescence.
It seems that a recurrent theme on this blog has been adulthood: what is it? Have I reached it yet? Is this confusion part of it?
At this moment, I do not have a concrete answer but I have a feeling that my character has deeply changed in the past 6 months. In fact, the copycat roller-coaster I was on has gotten me thinking that -for those of us unfortunate enough to have a flexible view of life- to find yourself, you have to look around for a while first. Yet the past few weeks have made quite a difference in that vision.
To make this unclear ramble more lucid: if you go to LA and still want the same things you wanted when growing up in Beirut, if the city's pleasure principle does not alter your pre-set personal ideals, chances are you have already found yourself a long time ago.
This post was supposed to include much more useless life theories and nicely sublimed personal conclusions from the last 2 months, yet instead it's ending with a different message If you are still reading.
This blog was never an attempt to gather readership or a shot at journalism. It was always intended to be a venue to vent my thoughts into a somewhat recycled lebanon friendly presentation. Lately I have been flirting with the notion of halting my medical training and pursuing a journalism degree, now I may be getting ahead of myself but I want to use this venue for practice purposes in the upcoming few months. So yes, another conclusion to come off from being placed in unfamiliar settings was defining what you want in life. To roughly paraphrase a young stranger I met in a New York pastry shop who holds a journalism degree and has now quit it all to start drawing for a comic magazine: "I've always known what I wanted, I just wasn't sure I was good enough."
On a closing note, "Too much candy gonna rot your soul...".
