The Journey | Part II: New Hope

A support meeting group saved him. They noticed that he was so abnormal and seemed like having deep troubles. They bombarded him a lot of questions. "Have you let go of your past failures?" "When was the last time you truly felt happy?" He realised he had never let go of his past. He grudged them so hard. His limbs and arms were all tied tightly with the past, that's why he hardly make a move. Even just one step forward was extremely difficult for him. He wanted to achieve, not because that he wanted it, but because of his past failures. He wanted to compensate, he wanted to redeem. He never wanted to strive for the future, the only motivation for him is to strive for the past. He never accepted his past failures and say "Yes they are failures and they are part of who I am today. So let's start the fresh chapter today.".

The meeting struck him hard. He realised the root cause now finally. But he only knew the root cause, not the strategies or solutions. In fact it was so hard to find a solution. Step by step, day by day, he tried to change his mindset and thought process. But it was hard, really hard, damn hard. They seemed like planted deeply into his subconscious mind. Often times he will fall into the old thought process and start thinking that he is worthless, he wanted to achieve huge success to prove himself, but he doubted himself at the same time. Because deep down in his heart he still craved for huge success, he still have doubt on his capability, even though he had let go of his past. The problems still weren't solved, because no one was there to teach him that huge success doesn't matter in life, or simply he needed more time to start believing himself again.

It took him months. At the end of May, good things finally came (like it has been a really long time). He submitted his thesis. He went through the last exams and got some pretty okay results. Things seemed going smoothly and it seemed like the recovery process had come to a final completion stage.

But don't know why, some bad moments came again. He felt huge stress during his travelling journey with parents in Hong Kong. After coming back, he worried even more on his soon-to-come Cambodia volunteering journey. Worries kicked in again, he started to doubt himself. Negative feelings just came in naturally and he can't control. He just felt bad when he thought about the fact that he need to go for this volunteering soon, somewhere full of uncertainty. His positive motivation and purpose can't withstand the huge negative and anxious mindset at all.

So he flew to Cambodia, kicking start his 6-week journey. Unfortunately the things that he encountered weren't that smooth, in fact there were series of bad things happened that required some courage, some skills, some confidence and most importantly positivity to solve them. He started to frustrate over those problems, and kept complaining, kept comparing with others who didn't encounter similar problem, kept thinking that his journey wasn't that "successful" compared to others.  That was a sign of huge low confidence. Because he wasn't confident on himself, he wanted to compare with others, he wanted to feel a little bit of good feeling when he found he is better than someone's experience in certain aspect. He had that kind of thought, he thought that if in this exchange journey he can't create wonders, it would define him to be a failure and not successful person. And when he overheard someone else is doing great in his/her exchange journey, he would feel inferior. 

Luckily he has a great friend who was able to enlighten him, giving him confidence, slapping him and made him to recall his purpose of coming to this volunteering project. He wasn't that crazy anymore to demand 200-300 percents of success in everything (This proved that he had recovered partially, especially after submitting thesis). But still, he was quite afraid of failures, and afraid of doing things because worrying that they might all turn into failures. But the only thing he can do that time was just to be patient, going through everything step by step, challenging his internal fear one time over another, slowly and patiently. At the end, he didn't solve many of the problems, in fact a lot of things remained unsolved, he just continued to do what he supposed to do, contributing his minimal impact in the midst of those problems. He knew it was not really a 'success', he had no choice but just to accept them.

Later, he left Cambodia and started his Indochina travelling journey, from Cambodia to Thailand, Myanmar and Laos. There were a lot of fun and amazing encounters and experiences. But still sometimes he kept thinking about what are the 'right ways' of travelling. He intended to do a 'thorough' research, a completely thorough one. He wanted to visit and read through almost every single travelling websites. It sounds quite insane and also stupid because travelling is not an exam, not a competition. And of course as usual he will fail what he expected himself to do, because what he expected were those abnormal 200-300% effort which seems so difficult for a person with low confidence and self-doubts like him. He will worry that his planned journey or itinerary were the wrong one, the low quality one, the one that he would miss out some important places and be called 'stupid' by his friends. Also everyday he was worried about the money that he is going to spend.