So, I've been in a bunker.
Since March.
Though, the frequency of my excursions from my stronghold have increased lately due to birthdays, graduations, and the rare extroversion of some of my very closest friends. I've been exceptionally introverted for the last two months because I went from being on a path of significantly predictable financial security and stability to some higher variety of Bumhood over a very spiritually-taxing, and confusing weekend. Since then, many hours have been allocated between catching up on leisure reading (trudging through a book titled The Creative Life by Bob Ostertag, with In The Fed We Trust queued up, and its pages itching for a rub), regaining momentum in my creative endeavors (getting my sketching and rendering skills up, familiarizing myself further with Adobe PS, and beginning to orient myself to Logic and Reason, and singing more often), increasing my fitness level (started that P90 even though I was by no means chub), staying up on current events (in the fashion of NPR, as well as through blogs), self-evaluating and re-evaluating (fine-tuning "the machine" and its processes), job searching (though, I ain't no Aloe Blacc), researching academic pathways (as if I were confident that any of these pathways would bring me closer to self-actualization), contemplating my stance in this discussion, adjusting the family mission statement and dynamic, and contemplating the valuation of a successful life--need it really be said? A lot's been a brotha's mind. Alcohol occasionally helps to take the load off, though my endorphins from being active have been real good at warding off the big demons. But, to bring it back to the straw that broke the camel's back and led me to construct a psychological stabilizer in the form of excommunication by my own decree, it wasn't until recently (maybe two or three weeks ago) that I finished cycling through my grieving process, and am ready to jump back into the rivers of the world, once again--but, in a considerably different psychological and spiritual context.
Let's bring it back. Let's bring it back. (If this were an episode of Lost, then this would be a flashback.)
It's the end of August 2008. After two years of waiting to get into a nursing program, I finally started the beginning of what I hoped would not be the rest of my life. I was starting a nursing program at a junior college in Fairfield, CA--my ego in full bloom, and inconspicuously ashamed for two reasons:
1. I had always considered myself of higher than average ability to achieve due to my achievements in high school despite my often reckless study habits. And, despite my ability, here I was at a JC. Now, let's not braid it all up too quickly. I recognize that transferring to a 4-year from a JC is a legitimate alternative pathway to academic success--but, being young and having been raised in a society that primarily assesses the value of a person by the achievements they can list on a resumé got me feeling rather embarrassed that I was starting a nursing program at 22 y/o with no degree, when I felt there was a significant probability that I could have graduated that same year from some place more prestigious.
2. At this point in my life, I did not know what I wanted to do. But, then again I never really had the opportunity to genuinely explore just what it was I wanted to do for the rest of eternity. For one thing (and, possibly the only thing), I've always had a mother who had mastered psychological dominipulation (domination and manipulation in the same act). How had she achieved this? A lifetime of repetition coupled with one of the most effective non-response poses you've ever seen, and then somehow strengthened by a "You must be crazy" look that even the Romans couldn't have learned to sculpt to precision. The guidance started young (possibly even when I was still in the womb):
Stranger X: So, are you going to be raising a little doctor, or lawyer?
Dear Mother: Oh, no, no. He's going to be a nurse first. Then, he can do whatever he wants after. But, he'll be a nurse first.
Take this sample of a conversation, and multiply it by every social gathering throughout the year (the Hallmark holidays, family gatherings for birthdays, weddings, funerals, promotion parties, housewarmings, graduation parties, fiestas...any place there could be a conversation about the future of children), multiplied by every year I've been alive. And, you have a Southern, Affluent, Catholic-Raised, Traditional, Conservative Filipino brainwashing at its finest. My mind was dominated by my mother's repeated message. Ask me what I wanted to do at any age until I was 20, and I would simply repeat what my Mom would say pretty close to verbatim:
Stranger X: So, what are you going to do?
Me: I'm going to be a nurse first. It's not exactly what I wanted to do. But, I'll do what I really want to do after. But, I'll finish nursing first.
Stranger X: Oh! Why nursing?
Me: Oh.... uhhhhh (FUCK. WHY?)... Hmm, I never really thought about it. (Well, ain't thatta bitch.)
I had never really thought about it, and never really gave the future much serious thought beyond nursing because ... I mean ... shit was laid out. When you pop out of the womb and just start walking on the path laid out in front of you, questioning whether the path should be made of concrete, tile, or marble doesn't really come to mind when nobody had asked why the material was chosen. I just walked, ate, slept, shat, showered, loved, stretched, sweated, and everything else on that shit. No one asked me why I was doing everything on a road of scrubs and stethoscopes until senior year in high school. And, by that point, I really didn't know anything else. People had their dreams all dressed up real nice, and I didn't even exercise the idea that I could have a dream.
....I just earned grades.
The summer before my first year in college was one of the most creative of my life: I taught myself to play the guitar, taught myself to play the drums, was learning how to the bass, and wrote poems regularly that explored emotional depths so personal and dark that I probably made it to another universe through a black hole in the earth's core through them. I didn't realize it then, but creativity would become the coping mechanism with which I would protect my ego and mask the suffering that I could not communicate to a parent who was unwilling, and possibly incapable of listening.
At 18, I was at a point where I was given pretty much anything I ever really needed. Clothes on my back, food to eat, my own bed in my own room, a car, a cell phone, internet to browse Asian Avenue on ... shit man, I was living the life. My dad was working 16 hour days on the regular to keep everyone comfortable and then some, and my mom would average 4 hours of sleep during tax season to get it in for the family. I knew they cared about my brother and me. I didn't know what my dreams were, but I was constantly reminded that money was the key to security in everything from relationships to health. Nursing had one of the highest probability points on the graph in regards to job availability and security, and one of the highest incomes compared to its cost of education.
"Fuck dreams. We gotta make money, out here! .... and, reliably."
I'm pretty sure when I reflect on my thoughts at that point in my life, that definitely was not what I was thinking. But, if you glanced at what I did in the years that led up to my ultimate initiation in nursing school, it sure looked like it was.
End of Tape 1, Side 1.
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