My Camel Trek in Rajasthan

Tomorrow is my birthday and I am at a really interesting point in my life.

First of all, I am turning 30, which seems unbelievable. I have spent half my twenties in China and half in Canada, so I feel like my Canadian age is only 25. I guess that would make my Chinese age 5? (Sounds about right for the reading level... actually, naw my reading is better than a 5-year-old's!) My Canadian age of 25 sounds pretty accurate. I just don't feel like I have the full amount of experience living in this society that other people my same age and younger already have. There's so much I just don't understand about how you're supposed to do things here. So many adult tasks, like getting jobs, finding apartments, talking to bosses, networking, and sucking up to landlords, are things that I learned how to do in China. And I am pretty good at them... over there. Here in my own country, on the other hand, I feel a bit out-of-the-loop. I've never even seen the show Survivor.

Secondly, I am suspended between realities that don't even exist. I know, we all are, since the past is gone and the future hasn't arrived yet... but I really really am! I finished paying off my student loans, finished a two-year contract working at an offshore BC school in northeastern China, and was living in a lovely little apartment up the hill from the park in Kunming biding my time before I could go to the Sivananda yoga teacher training course in Vrindavan, India last October. My plan was to travel after my course: on my birthday, I wanted to be on a camel trek in Rajasthan smoking hash under the stars. Beyond that, I was coming back to Canada for January to go to another three-and-a-half month yoga development and teacher training course in the Kootenays.

It didn't work out that way. When I was in Kunming, I got really sick with a nasty strain of e.coli that also infected my blood. Altogether, the process of being hospitalized for days on end, being released and finding myself unable to digest almost anything, relapsing, and being readmitted (three times) took over a month, and during one of the "released" times I went to India... against my doctor's orders. Well, I already had my ticket! My plan was great! I didn't want to give up my course. So I went anyway, couldn't digest anything except the couscous I had brought from China, and after a week I had relapsed again and was in the hospital in India, and couldn't finish the course I'd gone there for in the first place.

I realized I should just go "home" to get well. So in mid-October I came back to Victoria to stay at my mom's house. I couldn't even digest plain oat bran when I got here. I couldn't digest any oils at all for two months. This lack of oil affected my body a lot, but my mental state even more so. I have only been increasing my digestion of oils over the past two weeks, with the help of a master of ayurvedic medicine. Thankfully, I am having great results so far.

So I say that I am suspended between realities that don't exist because basically my old plans are gone and my new ones are not formed. This past year, my common-law relationship of 4 years has dissolved, which I experienced as part of what feels like a mysterious transformation. I'm not sure if I will be able to go to my course in the Kootenays - it depends how my digestion continues to improve over December. Since I might go there, there seems to be no point in getting a job and getting a new place, but it is weird not having my own place right now! After years of being a student and then being on contract, this life of drifting with no job and no place of my own feels pretty ungrounded. But as I said, it feels like part of a mysterious transformation. I just feel like a completely different person than I was before the upheaval of the whole finsihing my contract/going to Kunming/getting sick constellation. But I don't have any new "this is what I'm doing now" concepts to help me relate to myself... if that makes any sense. I almost feel like I don't fully exist at the moment, let alone the realities I am suspended between!

So tomorrow I won't be on a camel trek. But I will be wandering my hometown, which is like a foreign country to me now... and I'll be wandering with only myself, a person who is more of a mystery to me now than ever before.