Final Fantasy VII

“Unite them”

- Brandon Sanderson, The Stormlight Archive

A long time ago now, I was scared to talk to strangers. Today, I yearn and miss it. That is a change I have experienced in my life. Another change is happening in the world right now. Every conversation has become iterative and situational. We are living among history and history, I hate to say it, has become cumbersome.

Once I read a book called: “We crossed a bridge and it trembled: Voices from Syria”. This book is an important book and it made me think of what it meant to live through history. How every day things like doing laundry, washing dishes, cooking, reading, watching Netflix, working and everything else we deem “normal” would need to happen among history making events. I no longer wonder.

For the longest time since this historical event began, I have denied it. I tried to deny first its existence and then its effects. Today however, as it is the first day after consecutive outings that I didn’t leave home at all, the one day I haven’t walked, the day when I ate peanut butter out of jar after being full, I have accepted my fate. I am living through a pandemic and life will no longer be the same.

Weird thing about the current situation is that I am probably the least affected but yet, in my heart it feel like I am the most. I haven’t hugged a person I love for almost 8 months now. Having spent 6+ months away from friends and family, the thought that kept me going was all the hugs waiting. Someone would hug me in welcome and someone in goodbye. I miss hugs.

Something is truly lost. Gone forever, and it isn’t hugs. It is the uncertainty of whether I’ll be able to dream or feel hope again. It constantly gnaws at my insides: this entrapment. I had only one thought when I made the plan to return from Portland: I will go home and meet my friends and family. My life will never be the same again. It is not because I will never be hugged but, for the first time I have to accept that I am on the outsides.

I am a classic outsider. Always felt that way, even if that wasn’t true. My siblings all acted their age and I would sit around being grumpy or mean or adult. As a kid, I got along with adults better than people my own age and the older I got, I took to kids more than adults. Even when I am an insider, I am an outsider. I can observe but I cannot touch or experience. Being an anthropologist or an archaeologist must feel this way.

Now, let me get to final fantasy and why I am able to write again.

Today, I watched a video about Final Fantasy VII and it described the impact the game had on a then 13 year old. A boy who felt like an outsider. A person who felt like he wasn’t enough for the world. Even though, the narrator in the video only mentioned these world in the final 10 mins, it is an epic 48 min youtube video. An excellent use of my human consciousness and I spend mine whiling into nothing.

Now, this YouTuber does have half a million subscriber and so, is no longer the same person. However, his realisation that he is enough was enlightening from a video game made me question what is so wrong with my consciousness. After the video finished, I got restless and couldn’t work.

Could I before? Maybe. I do not know.

The reason I couldn’t work is because I had to face facts. Facts that are plain unpleasant. Not unpleasant like carrots sometimes can be or kombucha always is, but rather.. the gnawing ache I had been avoiding. I got up and cleaned, put up laundry, sanitised my laptops and still the feeling would not go away. So, I decided to put my hopelessness on paper. I decided to make my feelings real.

Once you’ve had your fantasies come true, you start believing you cannot be defeated. Almost like, if all your dreams come true you believe all dreams should. That is what happened to me. I became so comfortable in the last 6 months away from Hong Kong, the pressure, the loneliness and especially the feeling of not-being-good-enough that I totally forgot about it. I became comfortable being happy.

All our heroes are great. Books aren’t written about average joes. For an ordinary human, all glory boils down to wish fulfilment: be it money, fame, love or freedom. We idolise the heroes and we work hard to mimic them. We want to quest through lives and slay our monsters and stand upon their caucuses to prevail victorious. We want to matter.

The truth is: we do not always.

Before today, in the last 4 weeks of being back I have tried to write 3 other blog posts titled: What is broken, Words and Failure. All of them were attempts to describe what I felt without accepting what I feel. Acceptance is allowing yourself to feel the unpleasant. That is why it is the last stage of grief. It is not that things become easier, it is that you learn to live with it.

So, coronavirus has beaten me. Broken my plans and the world. It has taken away my ability to even plan tomorrow’s meal, forget about weekend plans or next year’s vacation. [Side tangent, meal because I cannot find low-carb pasta or flour (of ANY KIND) in the supermarket.]

It has left me incapable of putting words together that do not include the world health, the economic effects of the virus or quarantine or COVID 19 synonyms. It has come to the point that I have made my own word: indooring.

Indooring (v): hiding indoors because outdoors and outsiders are contagious.

Lastly, I have failed.

The question would be what have I failed at. The real easy answer is that I have failed to fail properly. One should fail well and often but I have failed at that. My life should have move forward but fast forward 8 months: I do not have an apartment or the assurance of a steady income or friends or family. Finding an apartment in Hong Kong feels like failure when I know this is not the life I want. Paying my bills here and going about my day-to-day life is a failure in being able to innovate or change.

In my heart and my travels, I found the spirit that outsiders thrive on and I can no longer channel it. I can no longer observe and interact; and as there are no insides so I am hollow. A mere shell, like the rings of Saturns. I do not want to use this time to learn a new language or a musical instrument, I do not want to make the best of things, I want to whine and hate it and so, I even fail at acceptance.

“But still, my ‘freedom’ is that of a leaf. Dropped from the tree, I just blow on the wind and pretend I’m in charge of my destiny.”

- Oathbringer, Brandon Sanderson, Stormlight Archive

So, what next?

Strength before weakness.