The holiday season gives a bitter-sweet feeling for me. As much as I love ‘escaping’ back to my parents’ house during break, I usually can’t wait to get back to school. Though I’m agenda free on my planner, my mind continues thinking about what else I can do when I get back to so cal. My mini-vacation, for the most part, leaves me pretty sad when I have to leave my family again. Sometimes I can’t help thinking whether my decision to leave the house was a selfish act. My initial motive for leaving the house was simply, to get out of the house. I wanted to leave as soon as possible because I wanted to taste life the way I wanted to, and not because someone else tells me what is. Maybe this answered my question.
Sometimes I feel the way that I left home was due to the need for an escape. It wasn’t a clean act. As if, I left because I couldn’t face it anymore. Though I knew eventually I will leave the house, sometimes coming back here makes me feel as if I left with an unfinished agenda –like, I gave up. I hate that feeling.
Anyway, after talking to my brother and giving him some older sister advice, I realized how much love I have for him and my family. Sometimes I see the struggles that my parents go through and how my brother is in the middle of things alone, I just feel, torn. This feeling makes me feel almost guilty of leaving in the first place. I tried to explain why things are the way things are, but I’m not sure how much he took in.
Commitment + community. How this relates to what I’m talking about? I don’t know. The entry would have to be extra long for me to build the connection. But after living in 8+ different cities, and gone to who knows how many churches, I’ve realized that that no matter what, building commitment to a community is a skill. To many times I’ve fallen for the, leaving-because-of-conflict. My conclusion is that growth is only measurable by how well one can face the past. (This theory will suffice for now).
