Searching for Adventure

I wanted to do one thing after completing my school.

Leave, and never look back.

I was tired of Bangalore, tired of my friends and tired of my home.

I wanted adventure and for me the only possibility of finding that adventure lay outside this city, this country if possible.

~

Well... things did not go as I had planned. I found myself going to the one place I had promised myself I would never step into. That first year of college was the hardest. I felt stuck, trapped and resigned myself to spending the next three years in the same old city, with none of that adventure in my agenda. I mean, it’s Bangalore and the same college I had passed by a hundred times during my years living here. What new could possibly be here?

And, with those thoughts, well, I pushed myself into this place filled with negativity, self-pity and darkness. Thing is, I was so convinced that I could not find “adventure” here that I stopped looking for it. I was not even trying. For me, this college was the end of the road. A symbol of my failure to fight for things that I wanted.

It took me a long time to stop blaming my parents, who I saw as only holding me back because of their selfish desire for me to stay with them. It took even longer for me to stop blaming myself. Maybe if I had studied harder before my exams instead of secretly reading books I would have done better and gotten into other universities.

~

And I slowly realized that I had forgotten one important thing in this entire ordeal – that everything depended on me and was, at the end of the day, my choice. I could decide what I wanted to do next, be it sit around and mope or actually get up and do something, and I slowly started choosing the latter.

I had just assumed that there would be nothing for me here and I hadn’t even tried to find that adventure that I had longed for, that I had forgotten, stuck in a gloomy bubble of despondency.

~

I could find that adventure and happiness in Bangalore, inside my house even, if I wanted to and searched for it.

~

In resigning myself to my future, I forgot that cheerful and positive girl that I was and become so very jaded and cynical, someone who I’d never been. And it was up to me to change that.

~~