It’s always the silence that’s the most deafening
There I was again, basking in the silence I once upon a time hated. Do I love it now? I still don’t. But if there’s something I wanted to do more this year, it was to enjoy my own company. And boy did I realise how much a boring company I am.
Writing was an outlet for me since I was young. It is one of the two things I actually enjoy doing that I think I know how to do. The second, well, that remains a secret. I was randomly watching Youtube videos when I once again stumbled at Nathaniel Drew’s video. Everything on his transcript resonated in me, like I was speaking to myself, only it was a different, more pleasant voice. I saw myself in him in the way he articulated his mind, and so I asked myself, why do I not do this anymore? I immediately logged on and reset my website password, and here I am rekindling my interesting fascination to listen to what my mind tells me and to make sense of all the abstract it produces. it is when I am surrounded by silence that I could hear my mind the loudest and the end of that video gave me the vacuum to hear my own thoughts.
The last time I wrote something was at the height of the pandemic to which now is just a faint memory. In the past, when I wanted to write something and publish, I feel a tinge of cringe and wrapped with the fear that the people who reads it would find it the same. So, I will always end up deleting my post and let the recycle bin be the only recipient of a piece of my mind. It later dawned on me that I wasn’t writing to impress, that I wasn’t writing to build traffic. I was merely, writing. So, from the momentary halt, I continued.
In the silence I heard my own voice, this time it wasn’t Nathaniel’s anymore. But I imagine it is a question he probably asked himself at least once. In fact, probably most of us did. What do I want to do next?
The last month has been a peak for me, it was a series of celebrations of finally reaching the stars I once aimed for. Looking back to my lowly beginnings as a small-town boy, I am now a galaxy away and for that, I am truly humbled. It paid to dream the big dreams even though the cost was high.
I am grateful to say, sometimes aided by a pinch on my skin, that today was once my yesterday’s hope, and I say that with the purest modesty. But getting past the curtain call, when all the blissful dust has settled, that’s when it dawned on me. I realised that although those dreams seemed colossal at that time, I am now dauntingly discerning whether they were really big enough? In spite of branding myself as a dreamer, I have not dreamed past this point so even though I have finally reached the destination, I have felt more lost than ever. All these years, I have been eyeing that one direction not anticipating that the landing point is just an entry to multiple invisible paths. I recognise that hearing these from my head was a seemed conceited and so I tried to shun it, in jest thinking, what a first world problem to finally have. But the thoughts just keep rushing back and I am nowhere getting closer to an answer. I then realised that I function better with end goal in mind, like a bull aiming for a target. That’s when every fibre in my being work cohesively to aim for that Muleta. However, it only works when I badly want something. At the moment, it feels uneasy not to have a target locked in, so there are times when I would randomly come up with a new goal, but at the risk of me not wanting it enough but only so that I have something to look forward to, somewhere along the way, I know I would lose the motivation to and that dream, when not reached, I would see as a failure.
But I also realised that it doesn’t always need to be fast paced, that I don’t need to replace a dream with another dream, that I am allowed to bask in where I am at, not discounting the journey it took to get there.