The Wandering Settler

Drawing blanks, that's what I usually feel when I am faced with something I am definitely unsure how to react to. I have been searching for answers, but certain questions aren't meant to be answered.

Contentment is a word that I often encounter. My own mother is the main component in the familiarity of such word and thus cultivating the ideologies behind it. Years before I even came in to the picture and made her life worst (as she would often joke), she was never given the chance to pursue the stuff that she believed would make her life better. Eldest of 8, with a plain housewife for a mom and a jeepney driver for a dad, she had to give up school to give way for her younger siblings.

I wondered if I was given her position, would I be as idealistic as I am now or would I succumb and choose my family over my own fate. Of course, I highly doubt I would just give up without fighting tooth and nail with it, but I just don't know the weight of the expectations to a young mind, it might have made me indifferent.

She thought she got out of that scenario with her family when she married my dad but she was given a harder load to carry out and I was not involved in making it easy for her.

My mother was a settler.

She settled on things given to her by other people, chose from what's available and had to suck it all up without trying to find if there's something better out there. She said it was her fate. I believed it to be otherwise. But if she had throdden a different path, I might not be here telling her uneventful life.

I would like to believe I am unlike her.

It's just such an irony when things present themselves and try to cage you in a whole unfamiliar area of life where you are only presented with two seemingly losing choices.

To further stress out the irony, I am the wandering settler.

I am still trying to figure out what will I settle for and if I have the ability to do so because there still lies that possibility that I won't or would refuse to and just go on wandering the rest of my life.

I am not presented with much choices, but I can choose not to choose right?

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