Living the Dream in Medellin
Impressions from my last month in Colombia
I’m sitting on the balcony of my little AirBnB apartment, listening to reggaeton on a busy Father’s Day Sunday in Colombia. On a three-day weekend like this one, local people don’t hold back – it’s a party for everyone. Whether you like it or not, you are participating: the moment you step outside, you are swept by the dancing, laughing, and cheering crowd. Families are celebrating together, all generations sharing meals, touching and smiling, drinking and cracking jokes. It feels like the old world that may be forever lost in some places.
A yellow cab with Mother Mary panted across the hood, wearing a canary yellow cape and holding an azure-shirted baby Jesus, surrounded by angels with wings the color of a scarlet-green macaws, pulls up to whisk me away from this movable feast into the quiet confines of a modern coworking space where I can focus on meeting the upcoming week’s virtual deadlines.
I’m living the dream here in Medellin. A life I envisioned for myself before 2020 crushed my travel dreams. At that time, I was not freelancing yet. My day job consisted of going to the lab every day and spending the whole day locked up inside, with an hour-long lunch break that I spent walking around the beautiful, wild edge of the University of South Florida campus. This undeveloped space, left there intentionally, showcased what this area looked like before humans paved it all over.
A drainage lake surrounded by wetlands that native Florida birds chose as their small refuge amongst the suffocating urban sprawl of the Tampa Bay Area. Birds of all kinds – eastern bluebirds, mourning doves, woodpeckers, Muscovy ducks, elegant egrets, albino ibises, sandhill cranes, and the majestic blue heron, an occasional Roseate spoonbill – would congregate there. The lake would fill up every summer and completely dry in the winter. And I would watch the passing of the seasons, praying that something in my life would change.
Among the toughest periods of my life, this one was the most perplexing: I had no reason to be unhappy. I had finally finished my drawn-out PhD. I was making twice the amount of money I had been the previous year. I had plenty of free time to pursue the hobbies I had put on hold while I was sweating over my dissertation. I was living in a beautiful, brand-new apartment by myself and my career prospects were looking good. I had finally “arrived” but the thought of spending the rest of my life like this made me want to kill myself.
I felt completely desperate. This is not where I thought I would end up. I wanted to travel. I wanted to be out there in the world instead of in a suburban condo. I wanted to feel free, creative, untethered. And that was the opposite of how I felt in the moment.
The vacuum that was left by leaving my Boulder life behind, complete with all my routines and hobbies, friends, and familiar places – all that constituted my identity – made me feel like I did not exist. It was the scariest sensation I had ever felt, and I would not wish it upon anyone. I guess you can call it an existential crisis. I did not know who I was anymore or what I wanted from my life. I had consciously guided my life towards this place and now I had huge regrets. I didn’t want a PhD. I didn’t want my life to be scripted. I wanted to feel something, but all I felt was that gaping hole of disappointment. I was hoping for a miracle.
My collection of art supplies that I was so eager to use lay untouched, and I spent my weekends hiding from the oppressive Florida summer heat inside and trying to distract myself from the screaming dissatisfaction with the life I had by watching stupid shows. The miracle started happening when I bought a collection of Bukowski’s poems. The cynical old man somehow made me want to live again. And I started putting my bottled-up emotions in words.
Not poetry. Prose. Prose without a purpose, prose that no one would ever see. But this writing gave me a way out – both by providing an alternative to the job and life I hated and helping me feel that I was a human being and not a cog in the wheel.
The system we live in is designed to make us feel that our only worth is in the value we provide for the system. It is measured in one’s productive output and rewarded with monetary compensation. The more you are worth in dollars, the more successful and important you are in the eyes of society. And we get wrapped up in that story – the myth of success. I did everything I was supposed to do to become successful, and arguably, I was – in the eyes of society. But inside I was profoundly unsatisfied.
Without creativity, without freedom, without the ability to go out and discover the world – not just by going on vacation once a year – I could not be fulfilled, nor successful. In this life we all have to trade one thing for another: our time for money, money for security, security for feeling like you can never quit your job, even if it makes you profoundly unhappy. But which of these things can you trade in for living a fulfilling life?
I’m riding in the little yellow Maria cab and thinking about how lucky I am. What I longed for in 2020 when I thought it was too late to go after my dreams, miraculously materialized. I may not have it all, but I have the things that make me truly happy: freedom, nature, and creativity. I can watch tropical birds bickering over space on the cellphone tower as I drink my coffee in the morning. I can decide where I work from and choose locations that I find inspiring and beautiful, like the City of Eternal Spring I’m at right now.
I’m a five-minute walk from the metro station, which is clean, reliable, and cheap. A couple of train changes and a 20-minute spectacular cable car ride (which is part of the city’s public transportation system) and you are above the clouds in a rainforest jungle of a national park sitting at 2,500 meters above Medellin. Having this beautiful nature refuge so accessible is a stark reminder of the suffocating feeling I had driving around the Florida west coast trying to find a place with just a little bit of nature only to discover endless rows of strip malls, strip clubs, and chain restaurants.
It’s probably not for everyone: the heat, the lack of infrastructure, foreign language and customs. Life here is not as streamlined as back in the U.S. But something about this place reminds me of home. Although Colombian culture could not be further away from the stoic demeanor of Belarusian folks, there is a certain kind of warmness that makes you feel safe even in supposedly high-crime rate areas. You intuitively know that the people surrounding you are real people, who can emphasize, love, care for others, and not just self-serving robots trying to make it to the top in this dog-eat-dog world. And I’m discovering that I’m falling in love with this special place and people.
Keep dreaming, and you may just wake up in your dream one day.
