Guilt. Immense guilt is at the forefront of my mind as I look at the Tower Bridge. I shouldn’t be here by myself. Tears, that I can’t seem to control, fall as my mind is raging a war inside. A war for being happy, for achieving my dreams, and feeling oh so guilty for doing so. Throughout my travels I learned that these two feelings can coexist, it takes time, and lots of crying to get to that point. But they can coexist. This guilt is so specific, it isn’t like any other feeling I’ve had before. I felt it brewing when I first got to college and hearing my father say, “If only I got to go to a school like this, imagine what I could have done with my life.” Here I am anxious, lost and don’t know what to do with this golden opportunity that has been handed to me, because for some reason I refuse to believe that I earned it. I definitely didn’t earn it, how did I earn it when the most hard working person I know wasn’t able to get their hands on this type of opportunity. That doesn’t seem fair. Compared to him I am nowhere near deserving of this but somehow, someway I tricked the universe into giving it to me, so here I am, standing at a world-renowned institution, feeling guilty, not because of imposter syndrome, but because there are people I know who deserve this more than I do, yet here I stand. It genuinely hurts my heart more than most things in life. Everywhere I would go I would think about my parents, and that instead of them seeing these beautiful sites, I am.
Walking around the leather markets in Florence set this guilt off yet again. Looking at these beautiful purses that my mom would do an amazing job haggling for, longing for her to be there just so I could buy her something. This is a special type of guilt a very select few are lucky, or unlucky, to encounter. I would like to think that I am blessed with this guilt, its two-fold, on one hand I have these amazing parents who have gone to the ends of the earth for me and I want to give back, and on the other I am getting to live out my wildest dreams without them, but only because of them.
I call them everyday, updating them on everything that I have been doing and send, one may argue, way too many photos. This feeling of guilt is always there but there are moments when it hits so much harder. Another one of these moments was when I was in Sarajevo, where Archduke Franz Ferdinand was shot. I remember talking to my dad about this incident and how it is one of the few history lessons he remembers vividly from school. The moment I get to that location I call him to show where I am. He is so excited, and asks me to show him from the other side of the street, and explain how it all went down, and the entire time I am holding down tears. How I wished that he were with me, and that we could have experienced this together. In a way, thanks to WhatsApp, we were able to - but I want him to have more than the view through a screen.
This guilt will be with me throughout my life, and looking back it always has been there. I have gotten the chance to live this privileged and fortunate life because of them, a life that they could only dream of, and never had the chance to live themselves, because they were too busy making sure we were able to live it. I don’t think I will ever shake away this guilt, but as stated earlier, I will be able to live with it. It will coexist throughout all my happy moments, because in the end this guilt is a reminder of how lucky I am.
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