| 1730hr
Mood: confused Fact of the day: Just a little trick: Choose your favourite number from 1-9, multiply it with 37037, then multiply with 3 again, and you will get your number back again! event of the week start of school...sigh...
Even Angel says that I've come back a changed person. I hope I've become a better person, more open minded, more sensible, more mature. I don't know, I'm hoping. But all I know is I've definitely changed.
There're so many levels to my experience in Minneapolis. Of course, there're the fellow group members I managed to bond with, who I really grew to love so much. But that's not the main thing I've gained from this trip. I'm quite surprised by the whole range of emotions and inspirations that sprung from this one week.
On one hand, I feel sadness. I feel sadness for the people who have to struggle with their sexuality. It's not an easy decision to come out as a GLBT, to go against social conventions, to be prepared to lose friends, be ostracised, attacked, ridiculed....I also met up with so many Aids patients. It's not the sight of them being sick that makes me sad. In fact, it's because most of them look so healthy that I feel even worse. When they talk about the many treatments they have to take, the certainty of death and the uncertainty of life, I just feel so depressed. They're all smiling and all when they say all that, like life doesn't matter. But I know it does, and it hurts me to see how they have to brace themselves to be ready to die anytime. The sadness just hits me. Every single time I talk to them.
On the other hand, I also learnt so much about these GLBT issues, I'm so full of ideas of how we should accept them into society and grant them the basic human rights they deserve, how they are just like heterosexuals - just as imperfect and definitely human, not freaks. But I don't want to preach, I don't want to emotionally blackmail people into making concessions, to the extent it's yet another form of passive discrimination. I don't know what I'm trying to say anymore. I just wish my friends could have met these GLBT people I've met. Then they'll know what I'm raving about.
When I spent such a long time away from the singaporean community, away from campus, away from my heterosexual life, it just seems like I'm just going through a dream. Or that I've entered another world altogether. When I came back to Urbana, and have to immediately deal with mundane things like doing my laundry and homework. I feel so mal-adjusted. I'm totally not used to it. What happened to all those hip and funny GLBT friends I've made? What happened to the cosy hang-out place for the Aids people? They're so far away, yet I feel like I can see them right before my eyes, right now. It's surreal...to be dumped into my meaningless life in this campus, after that enriching experience in minneapolis. Somehow, after stepping out of campus for that one week, I realise that in leaving singapore and coming here, I've only stepped into yet another claustrophobially enclosed environment.
I know it's impossible to constantly be emotionally and mentally challenged the way that week has been, all the time, since human beings are generally not good with changes, and any established community will always tend to be quite static in nature. Any new environment would be stimulating for a while, but would soon come to a plateau again anyway. So I'm not really complaining. Afterall, coming to Urbana, was initially really quite a new experience. It's just not so now.
Anyway, I'm just babbling. There's no conclusion to this trip, my mind is still expanding everyday, everytime I think back to every single detail of the trip. And I think that's the thing that's most important. I think I've finally really opened my eyes.
| |