Journey of a Braid Logotype

Journey through change

By Danié Gómez-Ortigoza

January 16, 2022

What is there to loose? What is there to gain? Yet there is so much more to the change you face. You leave your friends behind, but you get to live in another place; you leave the only city that has ever felt like home, but you get to experience a new side of yourself. Growth is a given. Resilience a must. But the polarity of those statements is too intense. They are missing balance. The perception of loss remains.

After playing this ‘move-your-life-and-start-all-over-again’ game 7 times across the world, I finally realized the transitions need to be lived as transformations. And it takes time to scar, and you carry the feeling as a perceptible open wound for sometime. You’re you are vulnerable, easily confused by emotions, and you try to hold on to a stability, and a way of life that has vanished. You couldn’t imagine yourself going back, but you are not yet comfortable where you stand.

It has taken me six months to be able to write about this.

The last time I wrote in this journal  was in April 2021, when I learned about this upcoming transition. I recorded audios that I never published on my podcast, I wrote lots of abstract things, but couldn’t make sense of it in one piece of paper, and I absolutely lost my will to create, even when I had all the emotional material.

But there is a message to be shared.If you were going through a similar experience, I want you to know that whatever is happening to you right now will only be understood in the future; when you are in the midst of it, you just can’t see the big picture. You can’t find yourself in the cosmic map. The visual of who you are is distorted expanding all over the place. All that’s left to do is surrender, go within  and see where life takes you. Nothing is ever missing at the level of the soul, as someone I know always says.

My friends keep asking me, are you happy?

I don’t believe in happiness, I believe in joy, and joy is an sporadic feeling that lights up for a brief instant and then recedes. All the rest it just a constant search for balance. Yes I have joyful moments, and I’m finally finding occasional balance; I’m getting used to new visuals and to a new cultural reality. Memories of the other cities I’ve lived in, come to my mind very often. I’m still transitioning.

This time I’m also paying special attention to the shedding of skin that is taking place. I get to see all the actions that didn’t fulfill me and yet had become embedded in my way of life almost by default, like going out all the time, which kept taking me away from doing meaningful work. This time is also allowing me to appreciate and give special attention to the friends and loved ones who have remained present. And to slowly let go of the ones that, it seems, weren’t meant to stay. I see them drift away.

What has changed is that I used to see that separation with despair  But now I just see it with gratefulness for the fragments of life I was able to share, and I hold on tight to all the bits of them that will always remain. I see my personal growth and appreciation for what it is.

So here we go again.

Join the newsletter and follow the journey.