How Do I Stop This From Happening Again?

You start a project to rebuild yourself. You’re going to be 33 in a month. You have a long list of half-accomplished things in life. You were the prodigal son who never realized his potential. When you were young, you told yourself you were going to be someone when you grew up, and now you’re all grown up and you live in the pandemonium of your failures.

Carrying all this frustration and working a job where you know you are not having any meaningful impact, you start writing from frustration — writing about your project that is about rebuilding yourself. You are writing every word with the ugly honesty of how you are testing something, experimenting, failing, and keeping going until you overcome that obstacle. With this process you actually realize that you are enjoying this because it is reintroducing yourself to you.

The you that lived in the depths of your gloom.

Now you start unraveling. But this unraveling is about shedding every layer of skin, pulling open your ribcage so the you in your depths can come out and breathe.

It’s a month now since you started and you have been having fun. But suddenly, as if fate wants to test your resolve, it starts blowing winds, gathering a storm around you. Your workload doubles overnight. You are barely finishing work during work hours and sometimes you bring that work home with you. You are tired to your bones. You barely have the energy to walk out and get food, but you have to survive. Your eyes barely stay open after eating but you write a tweet every day. You just have to. It’s you telling yourself — I am still walking. This path that you chose, you can’t give it up now.

You are balancing too many dishes in two hands and you need to keep walking, but you don’t notice that the kitchen is catching fire and in a few blinks everything around you catches fire. You see a picture hanging on the wall. One frame has you performing comedy in Europe. You look happy in that picture. But you feel the grief of giving up on your love for comedy. “But what could I have done? I couldn’t find a job to extend my visa. It was out of my control.” Just as you finish that thought, you see your degrees hanging on the wall — the diploma, the bachelor’s and the master’s degree in mechanical engineering. Yes, they look impressive, but you feel a ball in your throat you can’t swallow because you know you did it all just because your father wanted you to be “The Mechanical Engineer.” But you couldn’t even find a job with it, making you lose your love, your comedy. You look away and your eyes fall on the rough sketches on the shelf — your drawings from when you were young. You remember how free and happy you felt while drawing. All you wanted to do was create cartoons and live doing it, but the adults said that was not a realistic career and never gave you a choice to pursue it.

You look away again. Your eyes fall on a flower pot next to your bed and suddenly you drop everything. The dishes scatter into pieces and you rush towards the flower pot without a thought — no thoughts, no emotions. You just grab the pot and start rushing out of the burning house.

You let everything burn — the framed picture of your comedy days, your degrees, your sketches — because you gave up on them, telling yourself it was out of your control. Those are just tombstones of the dreams you buried. But this flower pot you’re holding — this means something. The stem in the flower pot has a bud that hasn’t bloomed yet and you can’t let it die. This is not another dream you are going to bury. This bud didn’t sprout on its own. You are the one who planted it, cared for it every day, because you know what it will bloom into.

This is not like before. This is not out of your control. You are responsible for making sure it blooms.

You are going to be 33 in three days. Now you know better than you knew when you were young — when people, the market, or fate could take things away from you. But now you understand the mechanism of fate, at least bits and pieces of it, and you are not going to submit. You are rushing out of the burning house asking yourself one question.

How do I stop this from happening again?