A Wild Patience Has Brought Me Here

While you are waiting for back bones to heal it is discovered that there are a limited number of activities you can accomplish to help the time pass. You sleep in with no call to prayer to wake you up. You spend all day strapped into your pajamas by your back brace. You gorge on copious amounts of dairy disregarding the carnage it will inflict on your digestive system later. You spend an entire day binge watching Keeping Up With The Kardashians and silently judge their life choices. You eat brownies. You eat brownies while judging the Kardashian’s life choices.

It has been four months since I was sent home to recover from a freak bike accident I sustained while playing with kids in my community. Four months of healing, waiting, wondering and grappling with how it feels to fail unexpectedly. Sitting at home watching tv and chowing down brownies made me feel like the ultimate failure. This was not what my 24th year was supposed to look like! At age 24 I was meant to be in the thick of my Peace Corps service. I wasn’t supposed to be reading People magazine while getting a pedicure! I needed to be doing something that was gritty, gratifying and life changing! My poor off-road biking skills I was able to come to terms with, but what made things worse was the internal ringing inside that clanged “go back to Indonesia” and “don’t” simultaneously.

As these conflicted emotions grew stronger, it seemed as if fate had nailed another nail in the proverbial coffin in May, when I learned from my counterpart that my host family was no longer able to host me should I return to my community. With Ramadan’s strict fasting and praying schedule looming, there was no way my counterpart would be able to find me a new house until it ended a month later. Without a place to live, I would not be able to return to work. I put my reinstatement paperwork on hold with relief, grateful I had more time to think about what I wanted to do and waited. Was returning something I really wanted for myself at this point? Was moving on to something different a cop out? What was the right thing to do? The ringing grew louder.

While my bones began to calcify, my self-image started to crumble. If I couldn’t be a Peace Corps volunteer, who was I? In the life blueprint I had drawn up for myself, there was a big blank space post Peace Corps. Thoughts of graduate school, alternate jobs, relocating to different states and different countries raced through my brain like slides on a projector. I applied to a job in West Africa. I mapped out an 8-week hike across Colorado. I seriously considered medical school. All these options felt like desperate attempts to whip up a new version of myself. None of it felt right.

In May I went out for Indian food with a beloved family friend. Over naan and curry and all the delicious foods I lamented I wouldn’t eat if I went back to Indonesia she told me “you already know what you are going to do. The decision is buried somewhere inside and it is up to you to dig it out.”

She was as usual, right.
I once watched a TedTalk on hard choices. I don’t remember much, except that the speaker talked about chocolate doughnuts and the way tough decisions define who we are, and who we become. I also remember I thought that the thirty-something year old speaker had already forgotten what it feels like to be a twenty-something year old.

I think what my elders say I will miss about this time in my life is the very thing that drives me mad. What I will miss later and don’t miss now is the feeling that nothing has started yet; that the future towers over the past, that the present is merely a planning phase for the rest of my life. What an overwhelming privilege it is to choose to go back to Peace Corps or move to West Africa or apply to medical school! What I don’t want to forget about this age is the loneliness of it all. If everything is ahead then nothing is behind. You have no ballast. You have no tailwinds either. You hardly ever know what to do, because you’ve hardly done anything yet.

This is why the choice I had in front of me was a difficult one–I had no prior “hard” life experiences to draw on to back myself up. By having no former knowledge of what to do in a situation like this my decision would become a characterization. What kind of young woman did I want to be? Was I a person who returned to Indonesia because she stuck to her guns and followed through on her commitments? Or was I a woman who understood that sometimes it is better to let go rather than to hold on, and move forward in a different direction?

Wondering if I was returning to my Peace Corps service or moving on has been a lesson in growing up. Probably no one ever feels like an actual grown up, except for certain high school math teachers or members of Congress. These past few months have taught me the importance of the progressive, the “ing” ending on grow. It was realizing that most of growing up is an exercise in being something other than what we used to be while remaining fundamentally–and sometimes maddeningly–who we are. It was noting that all of us on a gut level already know the answers to the questions we ask. How difficult. How divine.

24 has been a big year for me, a painful, wonderful, deeply necessary year. A long relationship I was in ended and continued forward simultaneously. I trimmed my hair with a swiss army knife, met interesting people, butchered a cow, and could feel the engine of my life quietly revving up beneath me. I took a pottery class. I tried listening to jazz music. I couldn’t afford books on Amazon but sometimes I bought them anyway.

My decision to return to Indonesia is at the same time surprising and not to me. That both could be true is the very mystery of becoming that Rilke so beautifully writes of; the notion that you can know and not know yourself at the same time. There is a sense among many of my friends and peers that these next couple of years are the precious few we have to make something of ourselves. To grow into the people we want to be; to manifest the vision we have for our lives. The most important lesson this injury/recovery has taught me is that transformation is often quiet and sans big revelatory bangs.

We grow into the people we want to be and also already are. Looking back, I wish I had trusted more in my ability to make the right decision. I should have felt for the quiet blossoming of truth that would ultimately be the choice I always knew would take me to where I need to go. It was not the frantic transformation of growth but a wild patience in myself that has brought me here. And so I am returning to Indonesia to finish my final year of Peace Corps service. I am nervous about the traffic I will have to once more navigate on my bike (my back can’t take another fall!) I am jittery about laying down a foundation yet again with a new host family, and rebuilding the relationships I left so quickly back at site. My language skills need brushing up on. All of this is simply an indication that there is more grow(ing) and learn(ing) to do.