Personal Growth

I have been in Bolivia for exactly one month. I feel like right now I am at a volatile point in this journey; the make-it or break-it point. I turned in my grant proposal, my project is solidified, and I'm knee deep in the production phase of my documentary.

When I am not working on my project, things are pretty slow at work, though, and I have an awful lot of time to think. Being alone with myself has never been a strong point for me. In San Francisco, I surround myself with people and projects and busyness constantly– and not by accident. I have never been the type of person who does well spending too much time in his own head. But being here in Cochabamba has kind of forced me to confront the side of myself that doesn't want to get too friendly with my sub conscious. Because my work here is essentially a solo project, I am alone pretty often. I hesitate to use the term "lonely" because being without other people does not mean one has to be lonely. What I am learning is that company can be found in a great variety of things, both internal and external. It doesn't have to be in the shape of close friends and family. It could be the person sitting next to you on the bus, or the kids playing at the playground you walk past on your way to work.

This sense of perspective is slowly inching its way into my mindset and it feels very liberating. When I interviewed a Trans activist yesterday, I heard detailed accounts of the lives of transsexual sex workers in Cochabamba. The lives of these people are packed full with violence, discrimination, and exploitation. I feel like throughout the interview I was battling with myself. When things got too real, too hard to handle, I would start to disassociate in a sense. I would think about my life in San Francisco and that my time here in Cochabamba is really just a short trip and I am not related to these people and don't have relationships with the person looking back at me through a camera lens. But then another part of me, the part of me I was trying to embrace, was letting myself feel that my experience in that exact moment was fully real and my relationship and connection to this woman was as real as my relationships with the people closest to me back in states. This sense of immersion was cropping up, even though my immediate mental reaction was to suppress it.

What I am learning here in Cochabamba has little to do with grant writing or NGO operation. Instead, I am learning a lot about patience, self-acceptance, and uncertainty. And more than that, being OK with being patient, being OK with myself, and being OK with daily uncertainty.

Unrelated, I went to a documentary screening at an arts center this evening of a film about the Sex Pistols. How strange to experience that in Cochabamba!