Am I On the Right Track? (An introspection from 2017)

This is an article that I had written in July, 2017. It is about a dark period in my life when I felt lost, unfulfilled and empty. It was a period of soul-searching. That phase was what prompted me to leave my beautiful country, Bhutan. Looking back now, I feel so grateful for having gone through that phase. :)

When we are going through a dark phase, we are unable to see anything beyond the dark emptiness. But it is amazing that these phases, most often, are what nudges us in a better direction. These phases lead to a path of resilience, internal strength, gratitude, empathy & most importantly, self discovery.

July 2017

Often in life, we reach a point when we feel so stagnant and can see that we are going nowhere. It is the same job every day and same plain life. We realize that something is amiss in our lives. That’s when we start reevaluating our lives and question ourselves if we indeed do possess everything that we have wished for.

Freshly graduated out of college, we have so many career and life plans but few years into a job, we no longer have the same enthusiasm & start questioning our decisions.

We ask ourselves, “Am I on the Right Track? Is this my purpose?” (And other similar questions).

Some of us may avoid asking these questions because we know the answer but we are too afraid to confront it. We live with the answer every day, yet we refuse to accept it. What a way to live a life. :(

After I graduated with a B.Ed in my country Bhutan, I was employed as a science teacher in a government school. I had a steady income, I had my rights in place and I felt like I knew what I was doing. There were various challenges of course, being a young teacher teaching adolescents who were only couple of years younger than me.

Every time I overcame a hurdle, I felt accomplished and fulfilled, until after a year as a teacher. I looked around at my colleagues and at myself. They seemed perfectly fine with their lives in general but I wasn’t. I felt unfulfilled & miserable. To add fuel to the fire, I was in a toxic relationship.

I looked back at myself, many years ago when I was a kid, when I thought I could conquer the world. Ironically, there I was, barely able to conquer myself. I was not doing what I wanted and I was quickly losing interest in my job. I was not living my life & I was not growing as a person. I started to feel suffocated & helpless and my life looked bleaker by the day.

Most Bhutanese believe in fate, that our destiny is pre-written and then when the time is right, everything will change i.e. if it is meant to. So we wait! We wait for the big moment in our lives, doing nothing to change the present condition. I don’t speak for all Bhutanese but those that I know had this same conviction.

Thus, that is how our whole life passes by, right in front of our eyes.

I decided to take matters into my own hands. When I got a job here in Qatar, through a cousin, I decided to take a risk and leave everything behind to pursue something different.

I decided to give myself a fresh start at life.

And the rest, as they say, is a history. ;)

April 2020

I remember that year when my family expressed their concern over me leaving a stable job and heading to “supposedly politically unstable” country. Those days, Middle East countries had tainted reputations especially, in respect to how they were treating the expatriates. We heard horrendous accounts of stories and my folks were right to have those concerns. And to be honest, I was scared too.

I have been living here in Qatar for over 3 years now and I am so glad that I made that decision. I cannot express enough gratitude for the beautiful experience, the lessons that came along with it & an incredible opportunity to grow as a person. Through it all, I have discovered myself.

Coming back to the question, Am I on the Right Track? I couldn’t answer it then but now I can.

Yes, I am on the right track.

Thank you for taking time off to read this. :)