Treasure Map

There is that very famous poem by Robert Frost, about choices you make in life: The Road Not Taken. It speaks of a path in the woods splitting two ways. Both ways are just as fair, and the passing there had worn them really about the same, both equally lay. The narrator finally chose a path; the one (he deemed) less traveled by, and that made all the difference.

Truth be told, I don't think that narrator really knew what he was doing. He just took a wild guess, a leap of faith and it took him where ever the road would. The thing with woods though, is that there aren't really roads, are they? There are spaces in between the trees and you can walk freely anywhere within that space. What tells us that he didn't do just that? Maybe he started on the path going north-east, but at some point decided to turn west and join the other path a little further down the road.

That's what I would do. It's what I did.

After spending four years in university I ended up with a degree that had little to no worth on the job market. I had to reevaluate my life, and what I wanted from it. The day after my 23rd birthday, I cried every tears I had in me: my life was over. I wasted four years and was facing two choices : either I keep going in that direction and try to make it work, or I turn west, find another path, go back to school. I did a lot of research, weighed the pros and the cons of each path, gathered facts. The ultimate factor that convinced me was that life is long, so long. If I stayed on the path I first chose, I would have time to regret it, if I decided to change, I had the time to start over.

So I turned. I went the other way and hoped for the best. I am still walking blindly through the trees, figuring out my stuff and drawing a map as I go. I am actively learning from my mistakes, documenting them, hoping that by sharing them I could help others walk a little less blindly into the woods.

I am not an expert. I am a lost kid, tripping on roots and branches, but every time I stumble and scrape a knee I can say ''Hey, look out for the branch!''

It's what I want from my platform. I want to help others through my own experiences, so that they can learn from my mistakes. Like tutoring, but for life. I would like to share my personal experiences, through direct and straight forward anecdotes as well as through poems and metaphors to let the readers reflect and add their own perspective and understanding to my experiences. It's what my most recent story Dear Past, is about.

Some maps I am still drawing, others I have in hand ready to offer. When I was in high school, struggling with my identity and labels. I wished I had someone to land me a map or to take my hand and walk me through this process of finding myself, even if it was just the stories of a stranger on the Internet. If someone could have said that self-hatred won't last forever, that labels matter until they don't, that heteronormativity and internalized homophobia are real but can be unlearned. If someone could have warned me about the darker, more closed minded side of the LGBTQ+ community, in which some minorities still marginalize other, it would have saved me a lot of heartache and hardship. That, I lived through on my own, by myself. I wished I didn't have to, but I did. Now I have this map on how to navigate a coming-out, things I learned along the way but that I personally don't have any use for.