#0 - How did we get here?

How would you spend your time if money was no object?

Age old icebreaker question. I remember being asked this question during a job interview in college. At the time my film nerddom was its peak and I said I wanted to spend my time watching movies and writing about them. Probably not the answer a software company wants to hear when they’re trying to hire you. I babbled on something about Fight Club being a movie that changed how I perceive the world (it did!). But even then, in my heart, the emphasis was on the act of consumption (watching), not creation (writing).

A few months earlier, I had become a Resident Advisor (RA) and started working at Scott Hall within the University of Illinois Housing Department. The staff already had some returning RAs, and if you’re going to spend the time working together, you might as well get to know each other. Faizan, or Fez, was one of them. Supremely talented, extremely smart. Fez was a pre-med student from Bahrain with very clear goals of wanting to become a doctor. Fez was also a talented musician, avid bike enthusiast and generally cool person to hang out with. One day, Fez was helping me decorate the pinboards to welcome new students. He asked me if I had any hobbies. I spouted the same generic things that everyone says - listening to music, watching movies, reading books. Fez said, “cool cool, those are all things you consume, but what do you like doing?”

When I graduated from college and had a newfound influx of unbeknownst cash and unexpected, unforeseen time, the new hobby became travel. That was the common wisdom thrown around to newly-turned-22-year-olds. “Don’t buy things, buy experiences” ✨

“I want to see the world, I want to understand other cultures,” I would say, spouting recycled wisdom passed as my own. Although there is truth in that advice. Travel is vitally important. I did travel as much as my means allowed and it has shaped me more than any other passive consumption hobby could - nothing gives you more empathy, or shows you more similarities in people, than the lived experience of being a fish out of water - but it is still an act of consumption. What do I give to this world?

Everything I did until the age of 24 was a set of things, a routine, that I inherited. Creation, or art, in the more traditional sense of capital-A Art was not a part of my household. I was encouraged as a child to try many different things - seven years of water color painting, 3 years of Indian classical music, elocution, speech - but none of them stuck in my adulthood. Quizzing, the one thing I was really good at, was again, associated with the ingestion and recall of knowledge.

Curiosity does take you pretty far but in my newfound free time, there’s only so much you can consume before your mind and body both give up. I’m not even talking about brain rot; with “quality” content too (I’m being a pretentious-wannabe-film-critic now), there’s a limit you reach with consumption which is not sustainable if not paired with creation. One of my favorite scenes in one of my favorite shows ever sums it up pretty well. On being inspired to create, it says:

You can spend all the time in the world in here (the kitchen), but if you don’t spend enough time out there (the world)…you know? It helps to have good people around you too.

This realization hit me hard during that first year out of college, which was tough. For many reasons. You can’t fathom at 22 the loneliness of moving to a new city where you know no one, trying to flit from one empty relationship to another in hopes that you’ll feel complete. The optimism with which I started my life in the “real world” turned to a dreary mess in a few months, exacerbated by a cold and dark Seattle winter. I didn’t know what to do and I kept finding myself going back to Fez’s question from a few years ago. I felt unmoored, detached, trying to find safe harbor from myself.

I also had the inability to sit still. I had The Need to feel productive but towards no particular end. I won’t deny it, I was ambitious going into college, while in college - although some of that ambition was tempered by impostor syndrome, and coming out of college. I had hopes of entrepreneurship but not the gumption to follow through with it. I had ideas or “side projects” I wanted to pursue, but didn’t have the skills, patience or wherewithal to see them through. Pair that with a steady media diet on YouTube where everyone is “side hustling” their way to financial freedom, then add 2 tablespoons of “I’m wasting my life away”, and finish with a drizzle of “none of this matters…but I wish it did.” Voila! You’ve now created an emotional meltdown!

One day, after days (maybe weeks) of finding myself spontaneously crying at movie scenes that had nothing to do with crying, I picked up the paintbrush again. I re-learned watercolor. Not because my parents wanted me to but because I wanted to. That hole of incompleteness was filled with a dog I adopted on a total whim, Oreo (he’s 11 now!); with my brother coincidentally moving to Seattle for school; and friends suddenly appearing in the area. Life was on the uptick. Then, at 26, I picked up storytelling (going back to my elocution roots) and found that creativity shared with others is the best way to find your people instead of simply hoping and wishing you have a Harry Potter moment that changes your life.

Eventually, because of Oreo, I got into running. Because of my brother, I re-discovered squash. Seattle’s dreary winters became more bearable with friends - my closest college friend moved to Seattle, I met one of my best friends because of Oreo, a mentor moved from Australia to Seattle. Storytelling, painting and eventually coffee(!) (thanks, Seattle) became acts of creation that really anchored me emotionally and spiritually. Travel, both for leisure and visiting my family, continued to be a salve when days got tough. It all, simultaneously, took years but also felt all of a sudden. Without these outlets, I found my thoughts spiraling me towards nihilism, which, as an eternal optimist I hated. I realized I'd maybe never had equilibrium before—not one I'd built myself, anyway. But now, it felt like life was finding balance again.

And then so much happened in the five years that followed! I found a job that I love, a global pandemic came and went away (not quietly), friends and family members passed away, I got married, we bought a house, I grew in that job I love, I ran two marathons(!!). I intentionally put ambition aside to give room for our marriage to grow. The shape of ambition changed from entirely professional to deeply personal. All the creative pursuits continued but in ebbs and flows as time felt more and more constrained. But that foundation laid in my early 20s allowed for all the good things that came to happen! I don’t think I’d have been as good a partner, coworker, friend, son, brother or anything else without those trials of self-awareness and self-acceptance.

And here we are now. Five years later, still in that job I love, in matrimony with a partner I adore more every day, missing friends and family we lost, enjoying a house we turned into a home, and taking a small break from running marathons. Five years into this job, I’m eligible for a six-week, paid sabbatical. So the question comes back, how would you spend your time if money was no object? I’ll answer this question and what I’m doing for my sabbatical in the next one.