Strength

Seeing most people's response towards my living here alone (usually a mix of incredulity and suspicion) is making me wonder: am I really living up to that image of strength I'm making myself, and others, think I possess?  How does one quantify, or define emotional strength? Does it lie in the difficult choices you make, the convictions you have to find the courage to keep, the ignoring of all the what-ifs, or is it reflected in simply keeping your head above the water? Is strength used to trigger a release of energy, an explosion, of sorts, or is it used to prevent yourself from imploding? 

I'd like very much for people to think I'm a strong, willful, independent young man who is gleefully capable of managing his own life. There's nothing I'd like more than to be seen as someone who's able to live though something that someone else would find impossible to handle. To be looked up to, or admired, even envied, to a degree. But once in a while, these self-doubting little monstrous thoughts would start surfacing, and I begin to wonder if I'm really doing the courageous thing, or did I choose the easier way out. To stay in Singapore would mean a mandatory two years of military servitude, which would be something i know I can't, and wouldn't in a million years, do. The easier path for me was to escape that restricting law, to migrate back to the home of the brave and the land of the free, where people who don't want to wear complexion-contrasting green for your country wouldn't be forced to. 

So the decision to move away from home was one of the easiest I've ever made. I'm gaining an education in such a vastly diverse environment, I get to live in the country of infinite possibilities, I get to live so freely, and to top it off, I'm skipping that two years of NS. That moment (if 20 hours counts as a moment) where I migrated was one of the easiest steps I've had to take, so I'd say strength doesn't come in the form of one momentary burst. The hard part was having to actually bear with the daily routine of solitude, to confront that ever present notion that there's really no one around that I can fully rely on. Is this what it feels like to be a grown up? Does growing up mean we have to face eternal worry? Gone are the days where laundry is always done, something is always ready to eat during meal times, and there's someone to physically talk to about anything. And most of all, gone are the days of living with people you actually know.

I do get what they say, about how sometimes you can feel most alone when you're surrounded by the most people. Is there someone on this side of the pacific that *doesn't* like football? By football, I mean rugby, but I don't like the regular English football anyways, so screw them both. I did try, but I must be weird, because I can't seem to get the significance behind a group of too-muscled guys tackling each other and falling down every few minutes, with no semblance of actual skills and structure being displayed, and the ultimate goal seems to be the hospital. There's only that much one can take before admitting you're not cut out for all that pretend enthusiasm directed at players who can't even hear you. So is strength displayed by sticking to it even though you're not entirely enjoying yourself, or is it knowing when to pull yourself out?

I'd really like to finish my thought, but I seem to have lost track of where I was going with this. Oh well...