Emerging back into the world

It feels strange, reconciling the present with what your past self thought the future would entail.

I couldn't have predicted any of it, so why do I sometimes feel like such a disappointment to myself?

I remember in high school, thinking about the future. At that point, I knew I wanted to study abroad and travel, but I don't think I intended yet to live permanently overseas. But I did have this idea, this "fantasy", of a person who goes off the grid for several years, then emerges back into society. This person reemerges with confidence and fashion-sense, fluent in whatever language, a successful career, probably living in a major European city. Cool.

Drawing of a person walking away through a birch forest

It's been ten years since I first had that "dream". A lot has changed, in my life, in the world.

Now I live overseas from where I started. And, at least for the last couple of years, I feel like I have gradually disappeared from society. I was never a consistent user of social media, and most every long-distance friendship experiences lulls in conversation. And except for my semester of US Government in high school, I generally avoid the news to spare my already fragile happiness. I jumped between countries, between the end of one engineering degree and the start of another. But in 2023, I ran out of courses for my masters degree, out of distractions and scattered obligations. I was forced to only think about the masters thesis. I had been probably dealing with varying levels of burnout and poor mental health for years before, but the masters thesis was its own ordeal.

Here I am in 2025, years living abroad, no masters degree, not fluently multilingual, not as confident as I'd like, watching my savings dry out. I don't fit my younger self's version of success. Even as I redefine "success" for myself, even understanding that my younger self could have no concept of the struggles I'd face fledging into adulthood, it's hard not to feel like a disappointment. Even if I am generally happier, even if I see the progress I am making, I don't have tangible results yet.

Drawing of person taking a picture of a giant mushroom.

It's unfortunate that, especially after years of quiet, I feel the need to reemerge with some "success" to show for the time I was away. If I go off-grid for years, should I not return with a new skill, an amazing creation, newfound self-worth? How could I leave my chrysalis without something to show for it?

But I'm not breaking out of a chrysalis. As isolated as I feel, I am not completely cut off from the world. I don't have an interlude purely dedicated to melting down and remolding myself into a new person. I am human, and I have to do it the slow way, one day at a time. If I want to change, I have to do so while thinking everyday about what to eat, about being a good partner, about that message I have ignored for three months, about how I'm going to sustain myself in the future.

Drawing of top-down view of a person walking along a forest path.

During the year and a half that I intended to write my masters thesis, I was paralyzed by guilt. "If I am doing anything, it should be working on the thesis." Art was quick to go away. It's hard to draw a character named "Thesis" when you should be working on writing your thesis. The cloudy, cold summer of 2023 was spent crocheting. Maybe because it was a new hobby, I could justify the repetitive physical movement as a coping mechanism, releasing stress rather than delaying it.

Eventually, I started another side activity. If I wasn't going to write my thesis, why not write a book? I'd had an idea brewing, and one day I gave in and let myself work on it. I was still writing. It felt productive. I was happy when I was writing the novel. While battling the stress of the master thesis, I wrote a book about a character fighting towards their dream of painting.

Maybe I should pursue the activities that give me purpose, that fill me with joy.

Drawing of person sitting with their knees tucked up, looking out from a mountaintop towards a riverside town.

I am still reconciling reality with my past expectations. I will not have this masters degree, but I am currently much happier. I might not find a job remotely adjacent to my engineering studies, and that's okay. I'm not sure exactly where my future will lead, but what I can do is continue learning and keep moving forward. I am not the cool, confident, fashionable world-traveler that my high school self imagined. I know that time is not a magic box that will solve my problems for me. I have to do that on my own.

I know I am extremely fortunate to be able to live far away from where I grew up. I know that these days are not so great in some places--to put it extremely mildly.

But I have decided, it is time for me to step out of my cardboard fortress, and in my own way, emerge back into the world.

Close up of drawing of a distant town on a river with ferries.

P.S. This last drawing was inspired by hiking along the Elbsandsteingebirge in Germany. There weren't many bridges over the river, but there were ferries.