mekong red.

I've been planning this trip for a while now, probably since I started my final year of university, I wanted to take things slow. A gap year before I go out into the world at large, and sell myself to whatever company wants me, not that's what I really want but what I've begun to resign myself to. If I can find a different path I'll take it. Besides the point. I wanted, in my year postponing employment to visit Vietnam alone, and for more than 2-3 weeks.

But now that I'm going tomorrow I can't help but feel immense guilt for not only going on a trip for this long, but for going at all. I should be looking for a job, I should be working, instead I'll be doing anything but.

I'm going to help around my grandparents house for the first month, clean the house, domestic tasks, assist my grandfather in the rice fields but even then I still cannot help but feel like a leech.

I do not know WHY I thought unemployment would be fun. Not like unemployment was even the goal to begin with (that's another story), but I wanted respite after university, something of an extended summer break. I guess what made summer break fun was the break from responsibilities. With those now stripped away, a great rot has maligned through, and embedded itself deep.

Maybe if I were in another mind I could enjoy myself.

What I can only hope I suppose is that I come back better than when I left. I will have learnt more about myself and about the world. To even have the privilege to do this, I must recognise. I may never have as much free time in my life again, if I spend all this time wallowing then I will have wasted it all.

Damn, I think just writing this out and putting my feelings into words has given me some much needed clarity.

For a few fleeting moments I am excited for what's ahead of me. I know that in a few hours I will be scared again. Hopefully though, the sustained emotions of this would be memory carry me further than I will fall.

Relax for now, and prepare to focus when I get back.

I want to draw a lot while I'm there, and write a lot too, I do realise that many hours may be spent without any plan in mind, but that's fine. I like taking things slow, maybe too slow but that's my crux to bare I suppose.

I also want to get better at Vietnamese, a lot better, and just better at talking and conversation as well. I'm not saying I want to be fluent, but better than it is now, not even that now is all that horrible compared to other people I know, but the disparity in my skill is well felt not just at home, but speaking to relatives too.

Well, that's enough for now, I'm going tomorrow and I'll try to update as often as I can, probably while I'm at my grandparents I can find the time, but while travelling? Yeah... we'll see.

Things are bad.

Tears began welling up in my eyes for no damn reason, I'm in public what the hell is happening?! I said goodbye to a friend after we got some dinner together and while waiting for the train, I just felt it. That sudden rush of sadness. I should be happy, I had a good time!

If I didn't make a conceited effort to not do so I think I could've started crying in public. I think in my mind I wanted to cry and be seen. Perhaps it was the ambience, a dark winter's night, underground at the station, The bulk of humanity has passed by during rush hour, all that remains are the stragglers, silent and desperate to go home. The wrong playlist in my ears, the warm light in my eyes, who could blame me as my tear ducts began to open? I held it back, and I kept it moving until the train arrived. The me now looks at it as one of my worst nightmares. But I think if it happened it would be a catharsis I would never let myself afford.

I had no idea being an adult would be this hard. Later that night, nearly an hour after the hands passed 12 am on the clock, I took a look at the time and said,

"Holy shit. I'm 23."

I slept soon after, once again at 2 AM, and once again it took me a hour of twirling in bed to fall asleep.

Birthdays to me are much like New Year's day, less celebration, more introspection. Some birthdays were warm, this one was cold. Let us say what a horrible day of introspection it was.

I, after getting dinner with my family, a dinner that I didn't really want to go to, a dinner that really was quite delicious, started to lose my mind.

The problem?

I began thinking. Thinking about jobs, and their graduate schemes and programmes, about the future, about where I am, who I am, who I want to be, what I want to do, all these things in my mind began to spiral and as the Central Line tube blared across the tracks, I fell deeper in a descent towards Hell.

When you're in a bad mood everything beautiful about life becomes grating, and the small things that never used to annoy you become engorged in infuriation.

I am so tired of being young, but I want desperately to cling to that label, I want to be mature and thoughtful, and sometimes I am but too often I am not. I want to be reliable and dependable, but afforded the mistakes of the folly of youth and the inexperience of life.

I don't know what I want to do in life and I so badly wish I knew. All the graduate jobs seem so inaccessible, and the ones I could get, in my laziness I missed. I feel so unprepared for interviews, for life, I envision myself working these jobs and then I promptly envision myself ********. I feel so alien to human life.

The only thing that excites me are my creative pursuits, but I am much too afraid to both create and too much of a perfectionist to be comfortable with what things I create, nothing is ever up to an impossible standard I abide by for no reason, thus I never create and I don't get better.

Things out of my control and things I don't know how to control have sapped my motivation to maintain the things I do control and in comes a silent stagnation, slowly rotting while in paralysis.

In the year since I graduated my worst habits have unfurled and proliferated deep within every wrinkle of my being. A deep melancholy and laziness has set and hardened to stone and it feels impossible to break it down.

As much I cant believe I'm saying it but I miss university, as much as I began to hate it by the end, at least it gave me something to do, at least I had responsibilities, at least I got money every four months into my bank account, sure it was a student loan that I'd have to pay back but out of mind out of site, much rather that than nothing.

I know what the problem is, I can give myself motivational speech after motivational speech, work myself up into a frenzy in the shower, only to lose steam the moment I hit my chair and spend hours of my day doom scrolling on my phone. Fear is such an insipid thing, and how nastily has it evolved into such a malignant creature.

What a birthday I've had. I do it to myself.

I write a lot of blogs that I never post, but this image image randomly came upon my feed merely minutes after finishing up writing this blog post, I burst into laughter and thought why not keep it here?

In all honesty, seeing this made me feel a lot better about things.

I think what it is that I hate most is the entropy. Things are never consistent, and I never know the what or why of it, it just is, and I wish I knew

Life is a slow journey that I cannot rush. If I say it enough, eventually I will understand, but I say many things that I think I get but never really do.