My life plan has been mapped out clearer than the Marauder's Map. I know where my footsteps will end up, and I pretty much have it down pat. I knew my life plan since I was in middle school. I would finish high school in Jakarta, move to Melbourne to study for university, go back to Jakarta to work, have a family, shoot out kids from my then-cavernous vagina, and raise my children in a well-adjusted, upper-middle class society. It's not really the American Dream, but it's something I never thought twice of. It's what's expected of me. No one expects me to make it big in New York, or become a salsa dancer in Colombia. It's merely a default setting in my life. It was, until I told my boyfriend this plan. He responded with a, "You'll go back to Jakarta?" I shrugged. "Why not?" And he said the 6 words that will haunt me for the rest of my life: "Because you can move to Paris!"
Let's get to it:
I have been brought up in such a privileged way that I am ensured relative success in the city I was bred in. So to me, going somewhere else doesn't mean financial security or 'making it big'. Moving to New York or London is antithetical to my idea of success. Why? Because us Generation Z kids were brought up expecting greatness. We got a trophy for participating, for heaven's sake! We were taught that we could be anything we wanted to be. Our parents, mostly from the Baby Boomer's, worked so hard in life to get where they are now, that they think their children will get the same opportunities. We won't. In a world where so many people have university degrees, our competitions have become lethal threats to our survival. We've heard sob stories of CEOs that started from the bottom, mopping floors or cleaning windows for $7 an hour.
Us Gen Z kids just thought that that would never happen to us.
So we expect that once we graduate from university, job offers will come flying in like letters from Hogwarts. But that's rarely the case. Most of the time, we'll end up taking whatever job pays the bill.
The idea that we direct our lives scares us. The notion that we can drop everything and fly to Helsinki or Barcelona to start from scratch scares us. It scares me because I realize I can do so much more than what I am doing now, but I don't, because that means working twice as hard to achieve a fraction of what I could achieve if I were to stay in my bubble of financial security in my hometown.
There are some people who were born and raised in a desolate part of a city. They have posters of Los Angeles or Shanghai on their worn-out wall. Their dream is to leave this shantytown they call home, because nothing good can come if they stay in that dump. So they tread the rough waters of said cities to succeed, or at least live in a better environment than their past situation.
But that's the complete opposite of me.
Do I want to leave Jakarta? Absolutely. I'd love to live in Europe. Barcelona, preferably. Just because. Then maybe move around a bit. But it's the finance part of it that scares me. I'm not a risk-taker, even if it says so on my god-awful resume. I am someone who was raised to be dependent on my family's wealth and the overindulgent personality of Jakarta.
I have promised myself to move to Spain (it's on my bucket list), but I have no idea when. I'm too afraid of suffering and instability that I refuse to leave home. I suck.
But who knows? Maybe I'll be updating my blog in a newly-furbished studio apartment in Rome in a few years time. But I still have no idea what I want to do with my life, so moving halfway across the world would be a moot point right now.
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