Ideas and words, images and songs, scrolling and searching for something that screams at you and makes you rememberthat this is all here, for you, to take and give and love and make grow.

How amazing this all is.

I would like to believe that I’m on the right path. That there is some guidance in this universe and that everything that I’m doing is in some way right, and even if it isn’t, it’ll all work itself out. I will work it all out. 

Right now I’m in a fairly stable job. Part time with the possibility for full time, and generally a lot of room for growth. And I like this comfort of being financially stable. My middle-class upbringing has made me a certain way and it’s very difficult to unlearn certain aspects of this lifestyle. But oh, the bourgeois guilt. 

Sometimes I lie in bed at night, unable to fall asleep because I’m constantly struck by anxiety; I am terrified about my life choices. What am I doing right now? Who am I trying to please? And most importantly, why can’t I seem to change? 

Maybe a greater effort needs to be put forth. 

The goal at the time being is to stick with this job as a way to support myself while I pursue my writing and photography on the side. Someone said to me that it’s no good to have a Plan A and a Plan B, because every plan should be Plan A. As great advice as that is, for some of us it’s just not practical. When you have people relying on you, when the force of culture and family weigh in heavy on your shoulders, the more difficult it is to break from it because once you do, once you decide to live your life the way you want, you become selfish, arrogant, and ungrateful. 

Maybe I just care too much about what my family thinks of me. And maybe I care too much about what my mother’s friends think about her and her gay son who still lives at home. 

Maybe it all has to do with shame. 

***

Sometimes I think dreamers have it the hardest. Because to be a real dreamer you really have to have no shame. You have to be unbelievably resilient against all of the criticism directed towards dreamers, also known in some circles as freeloaders, hippies, and “artists”. Some dreamers live out and proud, while others are a little more hesitant to reveal their dreams to others. Scared, because dreamers are silly and to have a dream is obviously something to be embarrassed about (How dare you not be practical! We are in an economic crisis!). But what sucks most of all are the dreamers who dream with no action, their feet cemented into the ground, out of fear. 

My mind sometimes drifts back into history and I think about everyone who has ever had to claw their way through life just to survive—women, people of colour, and queers, just to name a few. Time and time again, some asshole will try to bring them down. But I’ve learned that to have a dream and to fight for it is to guarantee your survival. Maybe not your physical body, but your ideas, your convictions and your hopes—they live on in someone else. Because dreamers don’t stand still.

They’re moving and shaking and changing. They’re creating, dancing, making horrible mistakes and rising from the ashes. Always loving the hardest. Always working towards making the best happen. Turning nothing into something.

Straw into gold. 

I lost myself completely in a job that soon meant anything to me. I hadn’t spoken to my parents in weeks. I hadn’t read a book or done laundry or gone to the grocery store in two months. I hadn’t seen the best friends — the ones who had not long before dubbed me their unofficial fifth roommate — in just as long, which meant that I didn’t know one of them had been in an accident. I had disappeared from my own life, was a stranger inside of it, and couldn’t seem to find the time or strength to think of a way out.

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Between Toronto and Vancouver, the possibilities are endless. While home is obviously Toronto, I am never fully sure if I want it to be Toronto. I have several things keeping me here, like the potential for work with an established reputation in a community where people know me, several good friends and of course, my family. At the same time, as someone who craves life, I often wonder if I’ll ever be able to flourish, let alone want to flourish. 

As a writer, I am drawn to new experiences. I want to live as many lives as possible, but this requires stripping all of the intrinsic value that I have been taught to embue with the world around me. As Kai, I am drawn to the safety and security of family and friends. I’ve been taught to put family over everything and everyone else.

Moving to a different city would be lonely—but I do well alone. I like being unnoticed, with no one asking about me or worrying about me. The fact that I like this so much, sometimes even desperate for moments of anonymity, scares me because it puts into question everything that I have been doing for the past 25 years. What does it say about me if I can just pick up and go? What does it say about me that I can look at my life, at all of these “things” and in a split second, it can all just look so… worthless?

And while I try to do the right thing, live the life that I have been given, with all of the strings attached, I find myself panicking, waking up in the middle of the night with anxiety attacks. 

If you were presented with the freedom to pick up and just leave, move to a different city whenever you wanted, would you? I mean, I guess it would all depend on your circumstances. Are you running away, or just trying to find a way to survive? Am I fearful of commitment, or just too in love with the world to let it slip by? 

This may sound silly, but it was getting braces that made me think of this. I realized that I couldn’t just pick up and leave for months on end. I made a monetary commitment, and that alone leaves me a little more restless than usual. 

Why am I the only one out of everyone I know who feels so ambivalent about the familiar? 

And so it is with great tragedy that I admit to myself that I am lost. And flawed. And not perfect, not even close to the ideal person that I wish myself to be. With every argument I partake in, I only serve to reinforce the idea that I am trying, desperately, to boost my own ego. My logic is far from logical and my perception of reality is no more true than that of Rick Perry’s. 

All of this has been brought to my attention in the last few weeks. I have been struggling to create some sense of structure within my life, and considering that I am jobless with nothing to really “do”, mounting pressures to find a job and start a career are starting to wear me thin. 

In addition, that British voice in my head who sounds like Olivia Williams via Adelle DeWitt has been on repeat for the past two days: “Nothing is what it appears to be.” My relationships with various people have been revealed to be more strained and troubled than I had previously thought, which of course begs several questions that I can’t even begin to write down because they are so complicated. 

One problem that I know I have is the fact that I take a while (and sometimes months later) to respond to certain things, and this includes everything from an article in a newspaper to a criticism from a friend. I think this partly has to do with the fact that I don’t know what I want and I don’t know exactly who I am. I have trouble speaking up for myself and finding my own voice. I have always sucked at asking questions, and ironically enough, I constantly question myself. Oh, and I’m also a pussy. 

Unfortunately, there isn’t a Yellow Brick Road for me to follow or a Great and Powerful Wizard for me to sneak some courage from.

Then again, there are two sides to a curtain and both sides are never what they appear to be. 

It was easy to dream.

Deep down, a part of me refuses to chalk it all up to some idealistic phase of my early twenties. And for a brief period, I envisioned myself, along with my friends, changing the world. Or at least, our corners of the world. 

But somewhere between pre-grad and post-grad, it finally hit me. If for the past six years, my dreams have yet to motivate me towards some concrete goal, perhaps it isn’t meant to be—at least on the scale that I once imagined. It’s difficult to turn dreams into reality, to have the practical sense of making them real. 

One of my greatest fears is not having enough time to do the things I want to do. My mentor told me recently, and I may have brought this up before, that my problem is not that I lack in ideas—it is that I have too many. And so, I need to choose one, make the commitment, follow it through and move on to the next. My fear of commitment and my tendency to run away comes from my parents. I have an inkling that it stems from watching my parents commit to things that have ultimately turned to crap. At the same time, I have to remember two things:

i ) my parents’ marriage is not an indication of all marriages,

and 

ii) their insane hours and lack of free time is not an indication of my future career. 

The sacrifices my parents made were for the benefit of the family. Everything they did, they did for my sister and myself, and my mother will never let me forget that. And whether or not I agree with their choices is of no real value. I can’t change the past and I can’t change my parents. 

So then what is the most practical decision for myself? What will I do to not end up like them? I’m going to make some choices. For a lot of my friends, and maybe even for a lot of you, our parents were forced to do things in order to survive. These days, many of us have the privilege of taking our time—but we have to remember that it is a privilege and not a right, and therefor, at some point, we have to give it up in order to move forward. 

By making a choice and holding onto a commitment, I will be forever changing my life. The ideas that I once held dear to me may lose all relevance, while others will grow to become invaluable assets. I’m scared of losing myself and I’m scared of what the world will make of me. But if I can remember why I made these choices in the first place, perhaps I’ll always be able to find a way back to myself. 

What’s been up in my life?

So ya’ll remember LV from a while back?

Well it turns out that we’re both really bad at reading each other. Either that or we’re both just really bad at giving signals or vocalizing our interest because we’re both really awkward at the end of our dates (two so far). So we’re going to watch a movie tomorrow night and I’ll update you all Friday and tell you how that goes.

I really have no idea where this is going; we’ve had fun so far and he’s super cute, but at what point of dating do you start talking about the important stuff? Like what you want to do with your life, and things like politics? What if he’s not political? What are my dealbreakers? How do you decide if someone is worth the time to continue these really time-consuming commitments? Ugh, now I know why all my friends kept on telling me: “dating is overrated.”

As for romance-y stuff, that’s all I’ve got for you. No other dates on the horizon…but:

27 more days till social suicide!

And I still haven’t figured out if I want clear or regular braces.

Will it be a huge difference? Well you’ll all just have to wait and see. Once I get them, I will post a picture of me with braces on this blog, at which point, the terrifying image of me with braces will require me to label this blog as NSFW.

But wait! There’s more!

Something that did brighten me up lately was a message I got from a friend named Jason. I’ve been very apprehensive about this decision to go all metal mouth. I’ve spoken to a lot of friends about the issue and since most of them went through braces when they were younger, they were all for it. However, earlier on in my decision process I mentioned to my friend Mark that I was pretty close to getting braces. He first brought up the fact that the next few years of my life were going to be my “sexual peak” period. And so I asked myself: Would braces hinder the potential for romance and sex? Would this social symbol of “teenage”-ness have a greater affect on my life than I had initially anticipated? 

He sensed my uneasiness and went on to mention that he in fact never really noticed my teeth in the first place.

And of course, my reaction to that was: “Where the fuck have you been?” (in my head).

How could he have not? It was the first thing I noticed when I looked in the mirror every morning. I always smile with my mouth closed because I am so vividly aware of my teeth. And to be honest, I usually try not to smile at all. It’s been noted as a fact by many waiters, friends and strangers. In fact, on my 24th birthday, my 9-year-old cousin Richard, who so kindly brought me a strawberry-rhubarb pie to celebrate, asked me:

“Kai goh-goh (that means brother. loosely translated), why don’t you smile?”

I. Was. Stunned.

I had no idea how to answer that. I also had no idea how to answer his brother Ryan, when 4 years ago he asked said to me: “Kai goh-goh, you have a lot of pimples. You don’t drink enough water.”

And so, this 9-year-old boy and his keen observation skills ended up being the push that I needed to move forward with my decision. 

On the day I made the appointment, I spent a large amount of time staring at myself in the mirror trying to figure out how braces were going to affect the look of my face. Something I noticed while I was examining myself was the way in which my cheeks fall. I looked closely at my face in an attempt to figure out where the wrinkles would eventually fall and why. My cheeks, which are sort of pudgy, slope down to the sides of my mouth. The lines that form, I discovered, are directly related to the way I frown. The lines don’t bend to make a dimple; they veer in a straight lines past the sides of my mouth, following the direction of a frowning pair of lips. 

And this is what happens when you don’t smile. Your face molds into a permanent state of BITCH. 

Scary. 

Hopefully, this is all going to change. Or else I’ll do surgery. 

But back to my friend Jason. 

One morning he sent me a message, congratulating me on my decision to get braces and he also told me a bit about his experience with braces and how he felt afterwards. It was exactly what I needed to hear that morning. It was exactly how I wanted to start my day. 

My best friend Trish also mentioned how she was happy for me that I was getting braces, and that a good smile would really help to boost my confidence. I’ve also had a lot of well wishes from various people (including a special friend from Spain), and I realize now that the next few years are going to be all about me over coming my insecurities, head on. I’ve had such huge problems with my ego and my sense of self worth (maybe I’ll get into all that stuff one day), and I know for a fact that it’s going to be difficult and mentally exhausting. But if there’s anything that I’ve learned from watching my friends grow, is that at some point in your life, if you really want to succeed you’re going to have to challenge the way you usually see yourself and really try to break that self-effacing illusion you’re so used to and recognize the beautiful, intelligent and loving individual that you are.

Deep down. 

Unless you’re a racist, homophobic asshole. And then you’ll just never be pretty.