Falling into Place

I was positive the nervousness would go away when I bought the ticket. After much deliberation, nail-biting, and pacing up and down the floors of the apartment I was crashing in I finally sat down in front of my laptop. The Southwest airlines page was still open on the ticket options page, the cursor hovering ominously over a large button that read "Proceed >>." Still biting my nails and performing the mental equivalent of pacing, I did as the button told me. I gave over my credit card information to the internet gods, submitted my personal info, and let the powers that be process my order.

Did I feel relief? A sudden wave of emotional well-being; a voice from deep inside that calmly soothed me, saying "you did it, now everything is going to be all right"? Hell, no. In fact as the e-mail receipt dropped nonchalantly into my inbox I was overcome with a nervousness and angst of the most profound order. It finally hit me, as the digits of my confirmation number suddenly made it terrifyingly clear: I was going to Mexico City.

It all started out innocently enough as an idea, as so many big plans do. Life after college was getting slowly and tenaciously more lackadaisical. While I hardly ever heard the words "what are you going to do with your life?" from any authority figure of important note, the question seemed to be gaining more importance in my own head. Since the beginning of this year, I had been finding ways to get out of my comfortable surroundings. In February of 2011, I embarked on a month-and-a-half-long road trip to the grand city of New Orleans and back. In May, I traveled to Europe with my mother and sister. At the end of the summer, I went to the Nevada desert for Burning Man. All this time, I had been considering a drastic change from the easy-going Northern California life I had grown too accustomed to and comforted by.

I never kicked myself (metaphorically or literally) for not studying abroad in college. At the time, I was wrapped up in my goal of becoming a film-maker at the University of California, Santa Barbara. I was dead-set on going to Spain, which I had fallen in love with on my first trip to Europe and was the only place I was stubbornly willing to consider. No university in Spain had a good film program, though. The best place to be for film was of course Southern California, where I already was. I set aside my passion for travel under the auspices of dedicating myself to my film studies and film making, but the truth was I was worried about leaving one place and becoming immersed in a new one, with all the troubles of loneliness, finding new friends, and learning a whole new language. I had already had enough of a problem with that going off to college in the first place.

I suppose I've always been a solitary kind of person. I remember very often being a solitary kind of kid. My sister and I were both home-schooled until 8th grade. Growing up, I had friends, but no consistent playmates besides my sister. By the time I graduated college, I had played a thorough amount of catch-up in terms of learning to be a social person with my peers. But somehow, at the beginning of 2011, something told me it was time to remind myself of who I was, something I have always done best on my own. I considered teaching English in Asia for a long time. Many of my friends had taken off to some completely foreign country right after college, in able to work and have some time to themselves. I considered South Korea for a long time, where supposedly one can make a lot of money after a year of teaching English. But I wasn't crazy about locking myself into a whole year worth of anything. I also knew that, while I would make a dynamite teacher, my true passion was in furthering my skills as a storyteller. Writing, drawing, music... these are the things I find challenging, the activities that I relish with great enthusiasm. Travel always made me need to express myself. The excitement of new places, new people and things helps me break down my thought process. The best way I have found for this is art.

Mexico was right next door, and it was a totally different culture. It was cheap. And I had always loved Mexican people. My friend Alexander had mentioned back in the summer that he was moving to Mexico City where his father lived. Somehow, his words about it caught my interest.

It was at Burning Man that I finally came to my choice. I could keep putting off living in a foreign country forever or I could accept that the one life I get to live goes by pretty fast, and being young is the best time to go on a crazy adventure. I remember telling my friend Kyle I would have to put my participation in our band on hold. I had to go spend some time on myself and really get serious about my storytelling.

Which is not to say that after I made The Decision it was easy. An idea, no matter how seemingly simple, still requires execution. It was in the execution that the gravity of leaving my comfort zone finally got to me. Suddenly I realized this was a large step in my life. Moving off to a completely new place and being responsible for my own money and well-being meant I was finally moving into the realm of adulthood. I have always needed to do something drastic when I feel it is time for a change, its like I need definite "endings" to the chapters of my life story. I'm glad to see I haven't let myself down yet.

The experience has been a lot like the first (and only) time I went skydiving. It's a funny sensation. You are nervous all the way up. You leave the ground and aren't too freaked out. Then you start thinking "Well, we're really high up now, aren't we?" You keep thinking "Oh, we must be leveling off now," while the plane simply continues on its chillingly steep ascent. All possible scenarios run through your mind of what could possibly go wrong, mostly about at what part of the incredibly fast vertical drop you discover the parachute is not actually going to open. You start sweating, thinking "please, just level off now, now would be fine, just don't go any higher," as if 1,000 feet less would make much of a difference to the intactness of your body once it hit the cold, hard earth at 100 miles per hour. So your trained skydiver takes you to the hatch as they open it, and a cold rush of air flies in your face, and you look a very, very, VERY long way down and think to yourself you are surely looking at the site of your impending doom. But then a funny thing happens. As you jump out of the plane, you feel light as a feather, free falling into a kind of euphoria as you gaze at the majestic sky through which you are plummeting. Perhaps it is the extremely thin atmosphere at 15,000 feet, but you reason that if indeed the parachute fails to open, there's really not much you can do about it, so you might as well enjoy the ride down. And guess what? The parachute does open, you get a magnificent view and a lovely high of simply having done something so incredibly fun and beautiful to behold, and you don't even hit so much as a bird on the way down.

And so it seems to be with this particular endeavor as well. I am here now, and everything seems all right, even quite pleasant and elating. To the credit of myself and the universe, so far everything has fallen into place. I found a painting studio apartment on the Mexico City craigslist. I sold my truck and have enough money to survive in a sedentary lifestyle for at least three months. I wasn't robbed, stabbed or killed the moment I stepped out of the airport.

My father, a man I often find myself comparing myself to, said to me that Mexico tends to be a serendipitous place, that things tend to fall into place once you think of them. It's time for me to let things happen to me, to follow my passions, to not try so hard to follow in the footsteps of those before me, and to let it all just fall into place.

As a way to remain interested in getting out of the house and making sure I force myself to discover plenty about this great city and country, I will be using this travel blog to write about the various sights I visit, the cultural differences I observe, and the occasional stray nagging and nervous thought that happens to get caught on these pages.

Here's a good "bueno suerte" to myself, and a very real hope that you will keep coming to read this blog as I post about the museums, historical sights, cultural observances, and personal changes I will have the truly great pleasure and luck of experiencing.