The path taken

Two more weeks and I'll be a twenty-five year old moving back in with her parents. Sort of. My parents haven't been under the same roof for more than a couple of hours in a decade or so.

I'll be a twenty-five year old with no career progress and no stable financials, pretty much like a failure.

I haven't thought about how would it be after I've left. Would I erase it like I did with my life in Form 6? Like how I almost did with my life between the end of Form 6 until the beginning of my degree?

Life in Form 6 started with me literally being dragged into the compounds of SXI. School has already started for nearly a month and I had refused to be let off early from National Service to start because I never had wanted to start. A year and a half later I thought I gained friends for life. And over the next half decade, I lost them.

In between 2007-2009, I barely acknowledge the various part time jobs. I don't remember my life working as an admin in Areca School of Arts. I don't remember much of life as a student doing a twinning degree at INTI. All I remembered was an ignition of love and respect for the classic and jazz arts, and a couple of friends that I still have from a little group that truly kept me sane and alive in INTI.

Then I realise why I don't remember. I shut it all out. The blog posts I wrote about it was deleted. A permanent erasure of nearly three to four years. The following three to four years following my life as a zoologist undergraduate had the same fate not because I hated it, but because they just happened to be in the same blog. I know I wrote the longest post about my experiences as a volunteer with Bronwyn who stumbled across my blog because she set up a GOOGLE alert on anything that mentions 'eastern quoll' and God bless her if she finds this again because she didn't turn it off.

She's been on my mind a lot lately because she is to me, the epitome of what it means to be never too late to do something that you truly love.

I've hit a roadblock in life whilst everyone else is cruising. But I need to see if I've broken down and need dire repair work or is just a hitch between gears and I need to start back up again. For that, I need patience, and the diagnostic time that goes with it. This means I'm too old to just close my eyes and pretend the bad stuff isn't there. Pros and cons, highs and lows, ups and downs, it was the start of a dream came true but what those fairytales didn't warn you is that when dreams that come true in reality, it's never always pretty. It's just another path with the requisite twists and turns but at least a path I chose, a path I aimed for, with all the cracks and uneven surfaces.

I chose this. I walked this far. I will live through it. For this is mine.