my bike changed my life

Yesterday I went on an elating bike ride and made incredible discoveries to be elaborated upon later. Today I took off again because I desperately needed a break from typing at my computer all day. The ensuing 16-kilometer bike tour changed my life.

I moved to Belgium thoroughly warned by various people and sources to expect depression and a difficult and lonely transition, and even to be quite dissatisfied with Mechelen. The past few weeks haven't been easy. But I've spent the past year broken-hearted and (spiritually) dead, wondering if I would ever find the will to live again, or in fact a compelling reason to live. Coming alone to a different continent with only a few heavy suitcases and a gossamer-thin support network, I didn't expect my situation to help. And yet I am beginning to suspect that living in Belgium is finally healing my shattered heart and broken spirit. I feel alive again. Completely and utterly alive.

On the way back from Battel (the very outskirts of Mechelen and filled with wonders I'll just have to describe later), I experienced a small revelation, took another step on the path towards understanding myself and the man I still foolishly and fundamentally love. Part of what made me feel alive and elated when I was in Berkeley and/or with him was constant discovery, even of feelings I never knew existed. And it's constant discovery that has brought me to love Yale, New Haven, urban spelunking, and other unrelated and often unlikely places and activities. Now I'm in an environment where daily revelations are unavoidable for me. They're waiting for me outside my front door as well as at the end of 90-minute unintentionally profound twilight bike rides.

So discovery is part of what drives me. Perhaps it's even a fundamental need...a reason for living. Who have I been in love with? JR or the experience of discovering life with him? Having spent the past few days in intense reflection, I still don't know if this driving force is something I can or should try to explain as I struggle to define myself in my latest application essay. But it's far more important that I now understand it myself. Because discovery has always been important to me, and the need for it was essential to finding a way here. But who would have known it would be the one thing in the world that would finally make me rise from the ashes of this yearlong darkness?