It's an interesting feeling, boredom. With all the work I have to do, the studies I'm planning for, and my busy personal life, I can't seem to shake off boredom.
"I am bored." I've said it. I've heard it. What do you do when you have the means, the health, and nowhere to go?
Nevertheless, I have a sneaking suspicion this paralyzing boredom is not for lack of entertaining activities, be they duties or pleasures. I think it is because I am not doing what I had planned to be doing by now. So, to argue semantics, it is actually lack of interest, rather than boredom.
I had planned and worked to create a life somewhere else; in a place where I would be accepted as the misfit my circles seem to think I am. Years of my life have been spent planning, arguing, fighting, pleading, and trying one way after another has been blocked. Years later, and here I am, staring at the same white ceiling I have come to dread as I lie awake at night wailing and raking my brains for a way out. Hope has been replaced with a chilling fear: would I spend the next decade in this same place? Would I die in this room? Would my potential go unfulfilled, my goals unrealized? This is the reality I cannot bear to live with everyday, and thus subconsciously hide it under a mask of boredom and thrill seeking.
If you are here, voluntarily or not, then you might relate. If you do, as much as it breaks my heart that someone has to endure what I have to, it is comforting to know I am not alone.
About Me
- Saudi Woman
- Saudi born and raised. Living in this prosperous, changing country. Trying to find my place.
What a well-thought and precise articulation of what the vast majority of the residents of Saudi suffer from.
ReplyDeleteIt is in deed depressing to be stuck in a situation without being able to see a way out in the horizon.
On the other hand, knowing that your are not alone in this situation, does bestow power upon you to get through it, especially when it is someone close, be they friends, family members, or romantic partners.
Looking at the grander picture, history was filled with such eras of oppression around the globe, and each generation made freedom and equal rights a more attainable goal.
What we suffer from in the middle east these days is that our generation is trying to embrace a more logical and global set of morals; the definition of what's wrong and what's right that anyone between LA and Tokyo can agree on.
On the other end of the spectrum, there are those who oppose these ideologies, as they consider them to be most threatening to the pillars on which their society is established.
We are in an endless struggle as humans wherever we may be, but if we do not try to fight the system, and break out of the "ordinary", we are just delaying the change for the next generation.
So Saudi Woman, my advice to you is to keep fighting it, and know that although you will have to wait a while to see the results, by going to that length, you are contributing to a better future, where you have made it easier for next generations to ask and get their rights, biggest example being women education in Saudi.