My New Year’s started in April. What I thought would be my most productive year yet turned into a quicksand of indecisiveness. The plans I kept structured in an Excel file on my computer lost all meaning, as I lost my motivation to keep moving forward.
Last year, after quitting the Organization, I spent time trying to fit in the society of the country where I was born, and destroy my life-long dream to move abroad. Having devoted six years working as part of a team who’s objective was to make this place better, I left feeling desperate, because it all just got worse – socially and politically. But I was ready to look past all the hostility, had I secured a sound circle of friends to count on, a stable profession with an array of job opportunities and perhaps a romantic interest. Following a seemingly exciting chain of events, I found myself in a dead end by December. One by one, each requirement would prove impossible to meet. I didn’t even try to isolate myself – it just came naturally.
To account for all the months I’ve been absent, my mood slowly fell into disrepair until time felt like frozen. For several months I did nothing but lay in bed all day, staring at the ceiling and occasionally opening Netflix, only to browse. I had successfully fooled myself into believing that I’m comfortable where I live; that the people are not that bad, that my career is promising, although I lack many important skills for it, and that maybe sometime and maybe someday I might meet someone and finally have some development in my personal life.
Having spent the entire winter in an unknown emotional state, I tried jolting my desire for happiness back to life, when it dawned on me that all this time I’ve been chasing a lie. I was wrong about building my future in the same place I grew up in. Now I’m faced with an improbable decision to make – I have to either numb myself by staying or move elsewhere and barely survive.
The blunt truth is that all of this is impossible to happen where I was born, simply because it’s not allowed. Here you can only like what’s mainstream, because there are no outlets for anything else; you can’t advance in your career, because people higher up are more incompetent than you; lastly, the issue is not the lack of integration for sexuality in the law, but the lack of sexual diversity in people: it seems that I’m all alone, in every aspect. What’s worse is that I never see anything like this the moment I step beyond the border and it feels like I’m greeted with open arms everywhere else.
If I stay, I maintain a humble job, a small social circle, some personal history I can rely on, as well as knowledge of the rules that helps me exploit them. But I’d lead my personal life to a cliff’s edge. My interests lay in fields and genres that simply don’t exist here and I can’t force myself to like what everybody else does, especially in romantic or sexual sense. It’s completely normal to seek development only in your career, but it’s not embarrassing or evil to want to create your own family either. Yet, I’m forced to focus only on achievements that only matter to me.
I’m done. I don’t have anything to hold on to anymore. It’s time to move on and away…
TOMMY EXPLORES THE WORLD 