Trying To Be

The search for answers

Sometimes, when we have time to reflect on ourselves, questions arise that make us reflect on life itself. Questions like: What is my purpose in this world? What is my mission here in the land of my birth? If my country is my home, what do I want to be? Countless, endless questions become a labyrinth in our minds, struggling to find a way to discover answers to things we don’t know, but that we hope to find throughout life.

I’ve had countless nightmares throughout my life. I’m not kidding… Being 31 doesn’t mean my life is already figured out. In fact, nightmares have visited me every night to remind me that I haven’t yet found where I want to be. The truth is, I don’t know where I deserve to be. 

In Colombia, for example, our culture is so rigid and planned that if you don’t follow social norms, you’ve wasted your life. These invisible rules actually reflect the discontent, frustration, and insecurity that prevent us from getting what we invest in our lives. 

Colombian culture impresses upon the youth that the only possible lifestyle consists of ​​”being born, growing up, choosing a career that will make me rich in the future, buying a house, and starting a family,” only to then be told — sincerely or hypocritically — “How lucky you are!” or “You deserve it.”

What do we deserve? And, what kind of luck should we hope for?

In my case, when it all comes down to money, choosing a career in art without a good salary hasn’t allowed me to fully become the independent woman I want to be. Is happiness found in money? I know it isn’t, but social norms make you think so. 

I am a woman who, given my sexual orientation and unmarried status, does not fit in with the Colombian status quo. Because of this, I have taken refuge, like others from minoritized groups before me, in art as a profession, gaining approval of my skills in universities by way of a diploma. I’ve received, in return, a qualitative gain that can be characterized as: “Pao, you write very well!” And I hope that I do. 

So what can we say about artists? We celebrate our wisdom in the worlds we create for ourselves, because in the real world, we are in the lion’s den that darkens our existence.

A place to belong in

Canada, on the other hand, being my first English-speaking destination, was my first home away from home, allowing me to open my mind and understand that life is more than the place you occupy. Europe, being a quick tourist trip, showed me, between its history and avant-garde style, that the possibility of an existence of a body in a space doesn’t require rules to exist. Now, the United States, the unexpected destination I chose next, is the country where I’ve been learning how to unlearn the supposed truths that I grew up with.

Those countries were just a window to see that we have another way of life, a window to reflect and say that it’s not too late to find yourself and be who you want to be. Do I regret not having the courage to decide what I want to be earlier in life? Of course I do!

But, at that time, I wasn’t mature enough to decide what I really wanted. I was simply a girl exploring the world and reaffirming that there is a life beyond the one you have in your native country. 

Why the United States?

I’m not quite sure myself. As of now, I’m writing to you from Alabama. Yes, the quiet state of Alabama! My first impression here was of a calming routine of a busy life, where you see more countryside than industry and more landscape than cement. It is welcome after feeling like I was on fire from the constant search to exist in the same land that saw my birth. 

How ironic, right? If decades ago there were Martin Luther King, Rosa Parks, and other leaders who left their trace today in every street, museum, and sculpture – so as not to lose the battle against oblivion and be forgotten – today, a Latina woman from a developing country has found herself in this land to silence any voice that stirs the weeds of her mind, preventing her from seeing the peace she seeks within to flourish.

Through my eyes

One day, for example, while driving aimlessly down an unfamiliar street, I found myself surrounded by abandoned, but not defeated, houses. The old framework still stands, refusing to disappear, leaving – in the eyes of tourists – the sense of a silenced but resilient history that refuses to be left in the past. When the rubble of the house still stands intact in its soil and foundation, it is unhindered by the thick layer of roots that tries to undermine it.

This is a description that may seem boring to many, but it has been the motivation and inspiration for my resilience in trying to discover who I want to be. I am still in the process of making sense of what I have discovered. I have found confidence in the knowledge that the calm hidden in the foundations of things will show me how the steady rhythm of the present can work.

The unknown path

Despite writing so harmoniously about what I see of Alabama, my mind is restless because I am experiencing the unknown in my country: peace. A peace that is forgotten when I am dominated by emptiness, the uncertainty of tomorrow, fear, anxiety, frustration in the face of the unknown, the passivity of time, the absence of answers, regret over decisions, the pressure of not having yet raised the diploma of “I am who I want to be,” and other emotions that I carry like a burden. These feelings don’t hinder anyone’s path except my own.

I don’t know how long I’ll be here. I only know that we are seeds seeking soil to flourish, bodies occupying a borrowed space to exist, and minds trying to understand the paths we build to travel on. As I write to you and you read my words, even without knowing each other, we are building bilateral relationships. Here, I am trying to find myself through my own writing while you are possibly reading these words to silence your nightmares or to reach out for a moment of connection. It is ultimately the same immense path we try to travel in this encompassing world, in the time and space that each of us has managed to be.

But who do I want to be?

This is the question that my eternal and inaudible voice asks, as it will accompany me until the day I stop searching for a path, stop fighting my nightmares, and cease to exist. For now, I know it is my compass in time to never forget that, on Earth, our existence is labeled with a first and last name and that our life impacts those around us.