Your AGENCY Is Bigger Than Your FEAR.

On breaking the shackles of fear that had engulfed me in my journey abroad

When I decided to move abroad, one of the first things that got me excited about the idea was ‘to explore’. Explore, I was all about exploring, about finding something new to see, something new to experience, something new to understand, something new to absorb.

The more I dived into that, the more I found something that had not happened to me in a long time. I discovered FEAR. Lately, I have often wondered if that fear was my own if that fear was transferred from the surrounding, if the fear was something that I absorbed from my circumstances or if the fear was truly emerging as the reluctant redundant past that I had so desperately worked hard to get rid of.

My AGENCY is my brand, my individuality, my personality, my strength, my courage, my opinions, my decision, my flexibility, my adaptability, my ability to take strong bold decisions, and to face the challenges that come with those decisions head-on!

As I was flowing through my twenties I learned to rely on friends, family, relationships, and people around me. However, the more time I was spending the last three years trying to carve my path, working on diverging from the quiet, unsaid, accepted, and unchallenged normalcy of life’s natural evolution that is accepted in our society, I found truly different energy rising in me. FEAR. The kind that I had never experienced before.

I was scared, I was really scared of what was going on in and around me. The idea of doing something and the experience of doing it can be so different and I had only then recognized this difference when I did finally plunge into it, into this unknown.

Coming out of the comfort zone was not easy. And while I did come out of the comfort zone I had not the slightest idea about the comforts that I had been enjoying back home in India.

Three years ago, February was the first time I left home. I moved with a new job and a fancy title waiting for me, a fancy hotel room to check in pre-booked by my new employer, an accepted offer letter to one of the best business schools in Europe, even in the list of the best business schools in the world, I had a visa to apply for within 2 months of moving away from home.

I had arrived in a city I had so deeply fallen in love with the very first time I had ever visited. I had always wanted to live in Bangalore, to be able to live and walk and roam those streets and there I was this young girl embracing that dream as it had been handed to me on a silver platter, if you may say so.

While I was enjoying my Bangalore life, I was nervous about moving abroad, I was nervous about leaving my job, my career in India, I was nervous about applying for a visa, I was nervous about getting a rejection on my visa.

The rejection was my biggest fear and it had started to seep inside me, like a small seed that had been sown and unbeknownst to my young self, it was awaiting to burgeon from a seed to a sapling to a tree in the years that were to come. And indeed it did, violently!

The last three years of my life have been incredibly difficult, for I have been surviving these years alone. ALONE can be cruel when it arrives until it turns into solitude, then it is wonderful.

All the hardships I faced in life before I left home, before these past three years, were shared hardships. Hardships you share with your tribe, your family, your lovers, your best friends, heck even with the similar kind of people that you have been brought up around. We underestimate and undervalue our natural habitat, our natal surrounding so much while we are in it!

And I got pretty lucky when I landed in Ireland, when I found accommodation just so swiftly, unimaginably easy for the standards of Dublin househunting rule book. It was perfect, it was full of vigor, it was full of enthusiasm, I was full of energy and life.

Psychology describes, vaguely if I may suggest in the context of this article, two ways of an individual’s perspective/ way of thinking. Either you are an outwardly looking person or an inwardly looking person.

The people who know me personally might say I am a fun-loving person, very outgoing, very comfortable around new people, new places, new situations. Well, for the majority part of my life I believed that I was this person. Until I discovered I was not.

I was not an outward-looking person. I did not look at the world around me and think what is my best way to survive and adapt and kill it, bring my A-game on to this new challenge- ace my Darwin’s Survival Test! No, I did not look for these charades.

The moment I was hit with this curveball of a challenge of absorbing, imbibing, accepting, molding, and adapting to a whole new environment from what and where I come from I immediately went inward.

I discovered, through my vulnerable experiences of moving abroad, that I was an extremely inward-looking person.

Retrospectively that could be a drawback to the entire experience of moving abroad. Because when you move abroad you want to get the new experiences, the new experiences that I was chasing, to begin with, right?

But there I was, shaking, vulnerable, afraid, crying profusely, hit to the rock bottom of my core with overwhelming emotions that had taken over me and were making me doubt everything that I was doing.

And while I did have a fair idea when I made this decision that in the next few years to come, the three years that I am looking back at now in retrospect, a lot of life will change, a lot of life will move, and a lot of the pieces of my past will have progressed forward in their own lives. And so it did, a lot changed and literally, everyone’s life moved forward at an unbelievable speed.

And there, on the social media pages, in the wedding parties I missed, the birthdays I could not celebrate with people back home, the babies that my friends were having, the houses and cars that people around me were buying, I was experiencing life ALONE, and proudly so holding a Masters Degree Certificate in my hands which I earned at 30.

I have lost a lot of friendships in the past year, friendships that I once used to keep sacredly close to my heart, in my deepest chambers, friends with whom and for whom I have cried real honest tears of happiness and sadness in the journey of being with them.

That, I believe, was the peek of my fear.

The stable ground that I had built for myself all my twenties, the efforts I had put to continue to remain friends with people, whom I could have chosen to let go with my move abroad, chosen to adapt to my new environment, chosen to fit new people in old places, that has been the biggest weight on my back, the heaviest chip on my shoulder.

It is, I believe, quite unimaginable for people to truly gauge the amount of investment, courage and time it takes to keep deep strong emotional communication alive sitting hundreds and thousands of miles apart.

Technology facilitates a medium to connect, however, it does not give the fuel for authentic communication.

An investment, and if you are like me, multiple such investments can cost you so much around your precious little heart.

FEAR is not your agency.
FEAR is not your identity.
FEAR is not your image.
FEAR is not your definition.

No matter what triggers the FEAR for you, whatever it may be, it might be completely different from what I have shared here, nonetheless, whatever it is, it is not your AGENCY.

Your AGENCY is what you choose, not to project to the world, but to emanate into this endless expanse of the universe.

Your AGENCY is how many times you can start afresh after having hit rock bottom.

Your AGENCY is how many people you can inspire despite your FEAR.

Your AGENCY is the response you chose in the face of calamities- much like the one we have been insufferably dealing with for a year now.

Your AGENCY is the dreams you fed to the young you, to the teenage you, to the young adult you, and what you have shaped of yourself to get closer to those dreams.

Your FEAR is NOT your AGENCY.

Your FEAR is merely a disguise, a disguise to distract you, a disguise to make you feel rejected, a disguise to make you feel incompetent, a disguise to make you feel undeserving.

And your AGENCY is what you have built yourself to become.

These words flowing out of me onto this keyboard onto this platform onto this medium, this is my AGENCY. This is my individuality, my being, my brand. This fearlessness is what we must build as a solid foundation in our AGENCY.

Because it is only after you have faced fears, will you discover the fearlessness in you that always existed?

I am not the Rumana whose fear limits her.

I am the Rumana who faces her fear head-on and asks the questions she must be asking, and writes the words she must be writing, and takes the decisions she must be taking.

For when she was 14, she promised herself, when she grows up she will be ‘Her own person’.

And MY AGENCY is Owning Who I Am.

The people I thought would be walking with me in this journey as I get closer to Owing Who I Am, are the people who have quite literally through cheap or subtle humor made fun of my vocation, of my volition, of my power to Choose to Own Who I Am. And that is the cost you pay when you go inward and touch the fabric of your soul, where you accept the AGENCY that drives you, THAT IS YOU.

What is YOUR AGENCY? What drives your agency? What motivates the YOU that you can be fearlessly and unabashedly and fiercely and fully in sync with yourself?