(A note for me),
I hope you’re having a fantastic week so far! I wanted to share a little story with you today. I hope you don’t mind.
I also wanted to let you know that starting next week (hopefully), I’m going to send out a Throwback Thursday publication. Send some of my favorite posts from Medium that you might have missed, as well as provide some audio commentary (there’s some juicy stories to dive into with that).
Speaking of audio commentary, I have a little audio snippet at the bottom.
Anyway, thanks again so much. Have an excellent rest of the week,
Greyson
Live Your Life For You
A million voices.
A million reasons to go. A million reasons to stay. To pick up everything and move. To remain contempt and remain.
The desire to explore a new life. To try a new location. To experience new surroundings. And yet the thought of others tugs at you like a firm hand. Your family, your friends, your nieces, and nephews and the guy who knows how you like a sandwich made.
It’s all there, pulling you back, whispering into your ear to stay. To remain. But do you listen to yourself and let your own mind decide? Or do you listen to them?
The million voices.
The voices telling you how to live.
Living For Others
I’m what you might call a free bird. Most of the strings at my feet fell away long ago, and so far I’ve managed to avoid clipping my wings. With my work, I can live (almost) wherever. I can jump to another state if I desired to. Move to another country, as long as I secured the right paperwork for pets (a bigger headache than the move itself).
People often tell me I’m lucky. In some ways that might be the case. Kind of like telling someone who built a garage they are lucky to have somewhere to park their car. I chose this path long ago.
But I’ll talk to others. Friends stuck in jobs they hate. In careers, they’d rather burn to the ground than continue working on. And yet they stay. They remain. You probably know someone like that. Perhaps you yourself are someone like that.
I’ll ask them why do they remain? Why don’t they look for another place of business? Something else maybe in the same field, but in a new location. Yes, I know easier said than done, but that’s usually not the reply. It’s not the: “I would if I could but I can’t” answer.
Instead, I’m often told, “I would, but my family is here.” “I would, but my sister just had a baby, and I need to be around.” “All my friends are here.”
The thoughts of others dictating how they live. They live for others and yet I don’t know if they realize it.
A sister’s allowed to live, to expand their family, but they can’t go off and search out their own happiness. Maybe they don’t want to and it’s just an easy end to the conversation. Perhaps their feet are cemented down and it’s too hard to ply it from the earth below. A million reasons. None truly their own.
Both of my sisters have children. I’ve missed more than I’ve seen. Part of me regrets it. Wishes I had been there for the birthdays and the loss of teeth. For the freshly gaped smiles and the discovery of a cartoon I once watched as a child.
Things I can’t rewind.
And yet it’s not my life. I’m sad I miss those things, and yet I’d regret it more if I didn’t go on my own path. My own journey. I’m the mysterious uncle with the dogs. They like the dogs. They ask about them. My mom says they ask about me too. I’m not sure if that’s true, or if she wants to avoid hurting my feelings.
It wouldn’t either way.
We’ve All Lived For Another Life
I couldn’t do it.
The thought of what my mom would think consuming head-space. Dominating my thought process.
A woman I loved deeply, a woman I would have given every cell of my body to, given every breath for, brought up the idea of marriage. At least in a round-about kind of way. She’d managed to secure a visa to travel to the United States from a Middle Eastern nation. It’s not the easiest thing to do for women. There are a lot of hoops and permission and dancing around. But she secured it, yet she knew when the time came, she’d need to return. And if she returned, she might not ever have the opportunity to leave again.
She brought up the idea of marriage to remain in the country, but not marriage to me. That a friend of a friend she knew had offered. I didn’t like the idea. We’d been apart for so long, had seen each other so sporadically, we never had a chance to date. To go to dinners or watch movies or to laugh or to have fights. I wanted all of that.
At the time I didn’t understand the likely inability for her to return.
And I thought of my mother. What she had gone through of late. How she’d been tasked to withhold a secret of another secret wedding. Of a secret pregnancy. Someone had laid it out onto her from out of nowhere and, until my mother broke down and unloaded all of it onto me, it weighed her down. It almost broke her. I didn’t want to spring a surprise wedding onto her like that.
So maybe I did understand the situation the woman I loved was in. But I sunk my head into a hole and closed my eyes and plugged my ears, so I couldn’t hear. Apparently, I could give her every cell in my body, except for the cells of my brain that couldn’t do it because of my mom.
Instead of living the life I wanted. I lived it for someone else.
And in many ways, it cost me everything.
All For Another
You see, we’ve all lived our lives for someone else. We’ve let our lives turn one because we couldn’t move away from friends. Because what we might do might not be looked favorably upon by a parent.
Sometimes we realize it. Other times we don’t.
It’s easy to look back and to wish things had changed. I know I do.
Perhaps there are still one or two strings holding me back, keeping me from fully taking the kind of flight I desire.
But to live your best life. A life as free of regrets as possible, you need to live life for you, not for others.
Because there will always be others. There’s only one you.
Hum, I get this! My son left the US after college and never looked back. He is fluent in Mandarin, Cantonese and Thai. For some reason, he says his brain feels better in those languages and developed a love of reading as a result. We have always been very close, we talk at least five days a week and we see each other several times a year. Do I miss him? Yes! But, I’m also happy that he is living his best life without any guilt. I’ve also been a traveling fool for the past 33 years, it seems to be in our gene pool. Blame it our gypsy roots!
I think one thing you don’t seem to understand is that to some, their loved ones are their lives even if it means having the shitty job.