My family has a saying: sometimes in life you have to be a palm tree and sometimes you need to be the oak.  To be the oak means to be firmly rooted in your convictions. To be the palm means to be fluid with the hurricane.  I take this analogy to mean that life is never what you’d expect it to be. You’ll make plans. You can analyze everything.  You may think you have control. But the Hurricane can hit at any point. The Hurricane can hit when you get an unsettling text message from your boss.  It can hit when you realize you have next to nothing in your bank account or when the career you thought you wanted doesn’t seem that bright anymore. A little over a year ago, a massive hurricane hit and now I’m riding that wave all the way to Indonesia.

My journey began, as many often do, with self-discovery.

I’m an actor from Chicago.  Acting is my life and my passion.  I live for the chance to connect to an audience I will never know and affect their perspective, even for the briefest moment.  I live to be apart of a space where strangers can commune and escape into a world we’ve created together. This is what draws me to the theatre.  But it is important to separate the artform from the career. As an actor you’re an entrepreneur and the product is yourself. You face constant rejection and do your best not to take it personally.  The more you present yourself, the more you are hurt. You must dance the dance and sometimes you don’t really feel like dancing. As a young adult I focused all of my attention on my passion. I never looked left or right, because I knew what I wanted.

I was stuck between two walls.  On one side the career I always wanted, on the other my whole self-worth.  It didn’t seem like I could have one without sacrificing the other and the weight of that realization crushed me.  I became anxious and depressed. It got to the point where I couldn’t eat, and walking outside was so scary that all I could do was stay in bed.

I still remember the day that everything fell apart.  I woke up to news about my car being towed and I spiraled down, down, down and met my old friend worthlessness.  This day however, was different. I’m still not sure what sparked the break down. But I spent the day in a fear so inescapable that I was not in control of my own body.  There was someone else there, someone else controlling my thoughts, someone else talking to my coworkers and friends. I was terrified. I decided to look for professional help.

I was always hesitant to start therapy but I started anyways and met Mike.  I had felt like therapy was admitting I was weak, and if I was weak, I would lose everyone forever.  Mike, told me that this was a huge pinpoint to my anxieties and partly to blame for my breakdown. We found constructive ways to lessen that pressure and better ways to become more compassionate with myself.  It took a lot of time and energy.

Mental illness is a scary, squirmy thing.  It’s uncomfortable to walk in, sit down, and address issues like self-worth and ungrounded fears.  Despite my anxieties, I started attending sessions once a week and things began to shift. With the help of Mike, I began building foothold after foothold and scaled a mountain of self-awareness.  At the top, I looked out and saw how connected and beautiful we all are. I realized that I need people and they need me. It is vital that I am able to give and receive love, not just for others but for myself.  I was waging a war in my heart, and I had let it go. It didn’t happen overnight, but slowly I got there.

I fell in love with who I am again.  I started dreaming about the future and all the possibilities.  I remembered what a good friend I am. I started treating myself with respect and compassion.  I started to discover my love of excitement and found useful ways to hone it as a skill.

Enter Bree.  The moment I met her, something started happening fast and all I could do was hang on for dear life.  The moment I opened up to loving myself again was the moment someone walked into my heart. She was the stage manager for a production I was working on.  Before each performance she would sit out in the audience and get work done. The dressing rooms were overcrowded so I preferred the open calm space of the theatre, plus Bree was there.  When I finally decided to ask her out, I first had to pump myself up in the bathroom mirror. I walked up to her and asked if she wanted to go with me to some lightshow. She said yes and then I ran away.  Before our first date, I was so nervous that I stress cleaned my whole house. And then we went out on the coldest day of the year. It was around -50 C, but she still showed up. I guess she liked me.

We talked about a lot of things over the next couple of months, but one of them was traveling and experiencing different cultures.  I had always wanted to break away and travel but I never thought it was possible. Suddenly it was. I was ready to take a step in another direction and see what would be the result.  We had so much fun that It’s impossible to put into words. I don’t think it’ll ever be possible. She was my biggest fan and cheered me on as I took a TEFL class to teach English. We talked about traveling together and while I was looking at different positions I could be qualified for, she mentioned, rather flippantly, that if I moved to Bali she would come.  The next day I bought a travel guide to Indonesia.

I leave tomorrow.

I’m going to teach English to children in the city of Surabaya.  A place I never expected I would be. I’m about to embark on a journey where I will learn more about myself and discover so many different ideologies.  I’m excited. I’m scared. I feel alive. I will live here for a year and soak in as much as I can. There are so many places that I want to visit. I want to see volcanoes, see a komodo dragon in the flesh, and lounge on the beaches of Lombok.  I want to visit temples, discover eastern religions, and sit with myself and ponder what makes me tick. I wonder what sort of things will impact and change me. I wonder what I’ll find tough. I wonder what I’ll find easy. I’m about to start, really start the rest of my life.

Mike and I liked to talk about the time I felt broken and I’ve come to a place where I can be grateful that it happened that way.  The way I see it, if it wasn’t for that time, I wouldn’t be here. When the walls crumbled, when I left the war in my heart, when I embraced compassion in my life and started living vulnerably, I started seeing all the colors to life.  Nothing was holding me back from living authentically. I found a new foundation for a whole new narrative to life: my whole-hearted journey.

I like to think of life as the oak tree and the palm tree.  Sometimes you need to be the oak tree, and sometimes you need to be the palm.  But I have new insight to my old motto. I now see that the palm tree and the oak tree live inside each other.  Whenever the hurricane blows and I bend, I know that deep down inside, I am the oak. When I have to stay strong and fight for my values,  I know that deep down inside, I am the palm.

Terima Kasih.