The Smallness of Being

When one leaves everything one has known for the past 26 years, in order to start a new life as a student in a foreign country, one feels a strong sense of purpose. One might be rather scared and lost at first, but one has all these places to go, assignments to complete, assistantships to apply for, tests to ace.

Yet when one is about to graduate in a country far away from home, and has hardly gotten any job interview yet, one feels oddly displaced, extremely insignificant, unfamiliarly empty, and very lost, because one does not know how to define oneself anymore.

How does one define oneself? By profession – I am an engineer/writer/assembler? By relationships to family and loved ones– I am brother/wife/husband of so and so, best friend of so and so? By ongoing projects – I am taking up pottery/ completing a project designing so and so? By a fixed role in society? By gender? By sexual orientation? By age? By nationality? Crowds one hangs out with? Car? House? Weight of coins in one’s pink piggy bank? Quality of life one has?

How, then, does one define oneself when one is far away from family and loved ones, and have no job, no earthly possessions besides a Toshiba laptop that is partial to blue screen errors, and a very loose, if at all existing, tie to the surrounding community?

Does one define oneself by what is inside oneself? Bravery, kindness, cheerfulness, a healthy disregard of the rules? What if one chooses an unexplored path and gets so...rubbed... by the subsequent happenings that one isn’t so sure anymore? What if what one thought was inside, no longer is?