6 more months

My cousin Gavan posted the following in response to one of my earlier entries:

“I can only IMAGINE how you feel, being in a new country, immersing yourself in the culture, trying to adapt and fit in, while learning the language, the customs and the dynamics of your new family...you must be mentally exhausted! Give yourself a big pat on the back for sticking it out as long as you have! I think a lot of people would have bailed home a long time ago. It must be love ;^)...(or you must be crazy!!) lol...Seriously, think of this as a major cleansing of the soul...you are slowly peeling back layers upon layers of beliefs, perceptions of past experiences, expectations and ideologies, and replacing them with a new, stronger you. You don't see it now...but the fact you are still down there, and not running home to the creature comforts of American Life...already says so much about you.”

I appreciate hearing this. There have been so many times when I’ve wanted to run home, even gone so far as to plan how I would get myself and all my shit back up here. But I have stayed in Mexico, for reasons that I’m not always sure of. I don’t even know if I’m making the right choice by staying down there. Things could get better, or they could get worse. But I have just signed new renters to a 6 month lease on my house in Portland, so I am choosing to commit to another 6 months in Mexico at least.

Gavan was right, at the time she wrote this to me, I didn’t see what was happening with me, what was changing in me. Now I realize I am going through some huge changes, realizing things about myself, learning what is important to me and what I can do without. Unfortunately I’m deep in the thick of it right now. I’d rather be on the far side of it, or at least on the downward slope. But I feel like I’m still climbing up the hill.

I realize that I have a choice. I can leave Mexico, come home to “the creature comforts of American Life”, and resume life as I knew it before I headed south. But I know that the issues I’m dealing with by being down there will still remain unfinished, unresolved. I will have to face them again sometime in the future.

My other choice is to stay down in Mexico, knowing that I’m having a hard time adjusting, knowing that I feel lonely every day, knowing that it’s not going to be easy, knowing that it is the harder of the two choices. Thinking of this as being the choice I have already made, scares me. What am I doing to myself? It would be so much easier to stay here. Tear up the lease, move back into my house, find a job, get a roommate, find my comfort zone again. It seems so much more… easy.

But there is the spectre of the future, of having to deal with these same issues all over again. I don’t want to have to go back through all this shit just to return to the spot I’m in right now. So I have committed to 6 more months. I don’t know if it will tear me up or cure me of some life-long pain I’ve carried with me for years. I’m hoping for the latter, but there’s no way to know.

Only time will tell.

‘What does it take to change the essence of a man? Time.”