Meet Adrian, Nomad

The last four or five years have my life have been a complete and utter mess.  Those who know me well may have some idea what I’m referring to but for those who don’t, well, where do I even start?  From sabotaging my 4 year relationship to wasting a ridiculous amount of money on weed to burning the bridges with virtually every friend I have ever had, I have made nothing but terrible decisions since I graduated high school. My whole life everything had been handed to me on a silver platter and people did nothing but sing my praises during the first 18 or so years of my life. “Oh Adrian you’re so smart!” “Oh you’re so witty and clever!” “You’re so outgoing! Everybody loves you Adrian!”  I’ve lived the vast majority of my life deluded into thinking that, to someone as clearly awesome as me, the right choices were just going to present themselves in front of me, like everything would be as easy as high school.  Well, like most young twenty-somethings, I’m starting to realize how wrong I was, that life will not be a cake-walk, that I actually have to put some effort into living a good life (imagine that!).  The past four years of my life have seen me reject any notions of hard work or personal responsibility, opting instead to make the easy, selfish decisions.  I blocked out the voices of reason either with my headphones on full volume or by getting too stoned to be able to tell logical from fucking pathetic.  I floundered around in school, wasting my (pretty substantial) entry-level scholarships at UBC with two and a half years of mediocre grades and an overall complete lack of effort or dedication. Call it cliché but nonetheless, it’s true: I’ve been desperately searching for my place in life in this fucked up world.  My first and truest passion, Mathematics, didn’t really pan out for me in university. The same goes for my brief stint in the field of Political Science and International Relations. I can’t even be bothered to put any effort into my most recent and strongest passion: music.  Nearly every day I would tell myself “okay, enough of this bull shit, I’m writing a song today.”  It’s not that the ability was necessarily absent, I just couldn’t be bothered to put any effort into anything at all.  Not my relationship with my girlfriend, not my family, not my joys or interests, not even my morals (that I used to cling to so tightly), nothing.

Maybe it was the endless carousel of counsellors/psychologists/psychiatrists, maybe it was my parents screaming at the top of their lungs for me to do something, anything, maybe it was the dust of my failed relationship finally beginning to clear in my head, or maybe I got sick of sitting around in my bedroom, lonelier than I could possibly do justice with words and completely dissatisfied with all aspects of my life, but I finally decided it was time to do something and stop bitching about the world around me.  But, I know myself well enough to realize that I needed something more than a little change, I needed a complete change of direction, of scenery.  I needed to put myself in a situation where falling into my devastating self-destructive patterns was simply not possible.  It wasn’t just that I needed out of my parents’ house or off of Vancouver Island, I needed a complete change in all aspects of my life. 

So, with minimal planning or preparation (classic Adrian style), I got off my ass and flew down to Kenya, not to return from Africa for at least a year, but not before I’ve fundamentally changed my attitude towards the world and what “happiness” really means. There’s no room for laziness or complacency while you’re travelling alone in a dangerous place, as I had learned on my trip down to South America in 2009 (the best, most formative two months of my life), and I knew that leaving on an extended stint of globetrotting was the only thing that could possibly straighten me out and turn me into a halfway decent human being.

So here I am in Nairobi, one of the most dangerous places in the world, about to start a 3-month volunteer program teaching music at an orphanage, unimaginably far away from the comfort and safety of my privileged life at home.  There’s no room for me to fall back into my terribly unsatisfying lifestyle that had become my routine in Canada. For the next year or so I’ll be puttering around Africa, attempting to find myself, to define what it is that I really care about in life.  I’m not coming home until I fundamentally change who I am, until I start to believe those voices of logic inside my head that I’ve dismissed for so long.  This will be my journal, an account of my thoughts, experiences, and revelations in a strange and foreign land, 8900 miles from home.