07 September, 2024

I remembered this one night, when I was 19 years old, I was in India pursuing my bachelor's degree and it was vacation. Me and my roommates decided to go back to Bhutan to spend some time with our family. We did miss home terribly, more than that, we missed the home-made food. Anyway, I decided to take charge of the bus tickets that would take us from our uni in Punjab to Delhi International Airport. We usually would board the night bus and reach Delhi by morning. Like usual, I decided to buy the night tickets, only this time I bought it online. 

Coming from Bhutan, I had never bought travel tickets online except for flight tickets. Although this was a pretty new concept for me, I went ahead and bought the ticket for me and my two other friends. Now, when the time to leave came, we waited outside the uni gate where the bus would make its stop. There were maybe more than hundred students waiting outside the gate to get picked up by the bus. One by one, 7-10 students started getting picked up. Our bus was supposed to come at 12am. As time went by and more busses came and went by, the number of students started to decrease and there were only a handful of us left. 

Internally, I felt insecure, insecure at the lack of my knowledge and quickly self-blamed myself. "Maybe I did not buy the right tickets? Maybe somebody scammed me out of money? Did I lose my friends money and mine? What are my friends thinking about me right now? They must be regretting giving me their money to buy their tickets. They must be thinking, if only they had bought their own tickets. This is all my fault." I could not help but apologize to them, but they were quick to comfort me saying that it was not my fault, and nobody was blaming me and that I shouldn't think like that. The self-blame ate me away though. No longer had I apologized, our bus came at around 3am. It turns out the bus just had a mechanical issue and was delayed. 

The reason I just remembered this is, when I was showering today, I had these sudden thoughts that I haven't self-blamed myself in such a long time. Not saying that this is a bad thing. This is definitely a progress and character build-up for me. Maybe I just started realizing that everything happens for a reason and not everything is my fault. The bus getting delayed was out of my control, it was not my fault. My thought processes have definitely changed, for the better obviously. Maybe if people compared me with 19 year old me and 25 year old me now, they would definitely see most similarities but also vast changes. 

I believe "Life happened" to me and I'm not complaining. :)