Disturbing things
Some things will forever disturb me living in Southeast Asia. I am not close to or friends with many expats. There are a few that I keep track of mostly by meeting them every so often or watching their YouTube vlogs. I wanted to discuss this one person that shall remain anonymous because watching his video lately made me realize that YouTube will exert a negative influence on people by the comments and interactions people have when a person speaks a little of themselves. I don't think it's a particularly good platform for this honesty and discussion of health or personal issues that all contributed to a decision about life or where to spend life.
We all have these dragons behind us or before us or with us. They can make our lives hell or show us some heaven by being conspicuously absent. Or perhaps they give us moments of purgatory where we live between things. This person has put up with both for almost 20 years. Long before he decided to move to Cambodia. He had his health issues, compounded with personality disorders that made him an easy mark for destructive habits. When does a person pay up for all that though? When is he allowed to just get on with life and how he wishes to live it here in Cambodia? So why choose here? Good question. He lived in other southeast asian countries before here and spent his earlier life in Australia. He realized even with some money for disability support he could never live there. So before, he lived in a tent.
I will ask again when do any of us pay up that debt? When do we reach the stage or state where we can live in some kind of grace somewhere? He moved here because he felt he could live a life easier with less stress in a country like Cambodia. I think it's true. People are not sentenced here or given any negative feelings because they act or look or feel different. Hell, we all do that here. My little life history with its relationship faux pax and family issues made me see all this. I felt like damaged goods but I never went through and lived through what some people do that still want a life for themselves here.
I know a person here with plenty of money and more and their life is miserable. He focuses not on living but on the final roll of his death dice. I feel badly for him but I know no amount of cajoling or talking will make him relax. I've felt like telling him to take his Khmer wife and go. Take the money and the time and do like what this other expat from Manila told me once,
play my final acts and make them my best ones
I think we should all probably do that. The person that moved here did this not out of a "last change and chance" thing but to create a new life for himself. We cannot walk in another's shoes. Especially his. Every one of our life choices and successes and failures are ours. I never felt I judged the person to harshly besides some hope he would not continue to drink the way he did. The drinking mentality fits into a expat choice which I think leads to oblivion and disaster. It is just too easy here though in the land of $0.50 beers and cheap food.
I realized today that I had been critical sometimes of this life choice. My daughter in America called it a bad life choice. Who is she to judge me? She has not walked in my shoes. Just like I have not walked in the person's shoes that went through his hell on earth and came out the other side in Siem Reap.
So here's the message short and sweet. People move here for all kinds of reasons. Many of us come here because the life we had elsewhere just didi not work for us. We felt strangled and in prison in a country that could give a shit less about us. The money we spent our lives on could only serve to give us this baseline existence. Of course we should have done more. It is easy to judge anyone but like I said. That judgement should be tempered with trying to understand what a person has gone through and how they exited that past. I realized that today folks. I came here with no desire to make what my daughter called "bad life choices". Hell, I had made no choices at all besides a desire to just be left to live a life here that would let me have some happiness and joy. A monk here told me once that was the primary goal of life.
Life here is a choice and an act. I happen to think it's a good one. My wife here has given me these wonderful and sometimes strange times. Never let it all be judged by a person who only reads the chapters of the book left open or ripped out of the source. We should not have to explain our life choices or have another person pronounce sentence on YouTube comments of the choices being good or bad. You did not make the choices for the person. They decided they wanted a life that would matter. To them. Who is to say what matters to anyone but yourself.
Henry Ford once said,
Whether you think you can, or you think you can't--you're right.
So when you look at someone else that thought they could and then acted on it, give the person a break. We all came here for vastly different reasons. We all wanted some life that the place we were from was incapable of giving us.
The whole video was disturbing to me so I won't share it. I felt it reached to a point in a person's life where they should not have to do such a thing. Their words were good enough. Instead he decided it was not. Perhaps he was bothered people would leave derogatory and insulting comments. Or he wanted to set the record straight on his life and choices.
No matter. And it doesn't matter. I'm glad he's here and he has this choice to have. I will likely never see him in person since we travel different circles in the city. His life and mine are different. I would like to shake his hand though and tell him he did the right things before making the video. My daughter in California was wrong. No one can judge another like that and pronounce some sentence or libel on another. We should not do that folks.
It also made me think of some of the things in my life and how I have done what I've done. Perhaps that's the final purpose of his statement. It's not just for him. It is for anyone that decides that other life in that other place was just not enough. For whatever reason.
Even the bible says,
Judge not, that ye be not judged"
Source: (Matthew 7:1)
That's all of it. I doubt he will ever have another word to say on the thing. His life is what he wants.