Like any other kid, I used to think that I was special.

  It wasn’t a particularly unique or strong delusion. It wasn’t like I thought I had superpowers or I was some kind of God-given gift to the world.

  But I did in some ways just think that I was… better?

  It was mostly just small things, really.

  You know, like, people were usually at least somewhat subconsciously competitive and self-conscious, kids especially. People are always trying to compare how they did to someone else to feel a bit better about how they did. I wasn’t an exception.

  I was one of the smarter kids in class; people liked to swarm my desk during math especially.

  I wasn’t the fastest when it came to running, but I was still up there. When it came time to play sports, I was usually third or fourth pick; just high enough on the list of priorities to feel good about myself, doubly so considering I didn’t really consider myself a ‘sporty’ kid like I thought everyone picked before me was.

  Small things like that. Everyone went through it at some point.

  Maybe sometimes I got a bit strange, but I think it was still well within reason. Well, for a kid at least. We were all at least a little bit stupid and embarrassing back then.

  Whenever we were given something to finish reading, I would always try to push myself. I knew roughly how fast the actual smartest kids in class could read, so I would sometimes just lazily skim over the body of text in front of me just so I could claim I was done first, even if I didn’t really understand what I was reading.

  I mellowed out fairly quickly. I realised I was being kind of stupid and it was better to just focus on myself.

  Still though, some part of it stuck, unfortunately.

  Well… it felt wrong to say unfortunately, given what caused that was undoubtedly nothing but good fortune.

  I never suffered through much hardship.

  Sometimes one of my classmates would fracture their leg or something and come into class with crutches and a cast. I’d sort of go ‘oh, okay’, not really care and just go about my day, but there was something at the back of my mind that just didn’t really process what had happened to them.

  Or what could have happened to them.

  After all, if it was me, I just… wouldn’t break my leg. I would just be tougher than them. Surely that was enough.

  My parents weren’t rich or anything. They were just first-generation immigrants that were kind of just scraping by okay enough to be able to buy an only child whatever they wanted.

  I was just lucky, that was all there was to it.

  I was nourished by their love to a point of almost becoming sheltered, and I didn’t really know it.

  I didn’t really think about their role in making sure I grew up well; the fact they had to painstakingly cook for me every single day three times a day, seven days a week, the fact they had to deal with how annoyingly loud and impulsive an infant was, and also how generally moody and ignorant toddlers were.

  It must have drained them a lot to get me to sleep on time; sleep that I never really fully grew to appreciate. At the time, I was just annoyed like any other kid was that I didn’t get to watch more television or whatever.

  I thought I grew up well because it was just, well… me. I thought I was strong not because my parents fed me well or made sure to send me to get exercise with out-of-school sports and activities, but just because I was naturally strong.

  In the end, I kind of did end up thinking I had superpowers.

  Again, not really anything that delusional. I didn’t jump off a building thinking I could fly or try to lift a car. That was stupid.

  I was just ignorant.

  Things that could have been attributed to the environment and circumstances I was raised in became things I attributed to myself.

  Did I really need to eat three meals a day?

  I felt like I could get by fine with just two, maybe one sometimes.

  I’d look around at the people who surrounded me every day, give them a bit of an odd look and think it was weird that they all needed three meals to have enough energy to go through the day.

  I only needed one and a half, after all. Were they just weak? That felt a bit mean, maybe I was just stronger than them?

  I’d hear the adults around me complain about how one careless posture change in their sleep would lead to them finding themselves halfway into transforming into a shrimp when the morning came, constantly moaning and going on about how much their backs would hurt.

  Really? Was that all it took for them to have a bad night of sleep?

  I could sleep for just half an hour and be fine for a day of school if I wanted to.

  I didn’t even really need to sleep in a bed, or even a couch. I could sleep on the floor or sleep standing up and be fine.

  Well…

  I did end up becoming a bit of a freak when it came to how comically bad of a position I could sleep in and still end up being fine, eventually. But there was no reason for me to actually have that conceit about myself when I was a teenager who had never stepped outside the comfort of his home ever.

  This all culminated when I decided to make my first solo trip across the world.

  I wanted to go to Cambodia.

  I had heard many things about it, both the country and its people.

  I had heard it was a place filled with natural beauty; filled with everything from luscious jungles to bright blue, idyllic beaches. I had heard the people there had a tragic history, yet still, persevered. Despite everything, they had powered through, brimming with hope and joy, doing their best to build a better future and reclaim what they once had.

  I didn’t prepare lightly, at least not for what I was originally going to go there for. I only really planned at the time to stay in cities as a tourist for a couple weeks. If I was really feeling it, maybe I’d take a few guided tours out into nature, but I was always planning to sleep somewhere where a few dollar bills or a credit card was still useful.

  I asked my parents to help me with all of my luggage, and make sure I had everything I needed. We had flown several times throughout my life, so it wasn’t a new experience or anything too surprising. But still, I was grateful for their help, and they instilled me with much-needed confidence for my first time travelling by myself.

  Confidence, in hindsight, that might have taken an ugly transformation into arrogance.

  When I landed in Cambodia, I-...

  …

  It was better if I did not describe what it was I saw there.

  Make no mistake, it was not that I regretted my decision. Far from it, the sights and memories there emboldened my decision, convincing me that I was right to visit that country.

  But…

  Those memories, and the stories of the people who lived there…

  They were not mine to recount. They were not something to just be spoken of in simple idle conversation or to be recollected on a whim.

  They were heavy. Heavy enough to crush any view of the world.

  The most I could say is that I saw what it meant to live. What it looked like to have to live through struggle and tragedy, to suffer through cruelty and horror beyond what you thought to be possible. What it meant to try to go on with your life when it was all over and done with.

  What I saw there, the people I talked to, the history I learned, the museums and tours I experienced…

  They were memories that were important to me beyond belief. I held them sacred, close to my heart.

  I could not share them with anyone. The stories of those people was not mine to tell. Their tragedy did not belong to a stranger, it belonged to them. It was an honor, beyond what I deserved, to be graced with the tales of their lives, and I would not besmirch that honor by talking of them lightly.

  After it was all over, I was left with an emotion I had not planned to deal with; restlessness.

  I could not look at the world, the people around me, or myself the same way anymore.

  I was privileged beyond belief to have simply grown up safely, and look at how I spent that God-given grace.

  This text was taken from Royal Road. Help the author by reading the original version there.

  Look at what all the people around me were doing with that gift.

  We just hopped on planes and went wherever we pleased, turning this historic city into a simple commodity.

  It was a place to just visit. A tourist trap. You came to take pictures and enjoy yourselves. To spend a bit of money on overpriced goods and unneeded luxuries. Then you would go back on a plane and return to your life in the city, and return to your mundane routine of getting a car or train or bus and going to work, then eating, then sleeping.

  I was one of them.

  I was not different. Just as ungrateful and privileged.

  That thought terrified me.

  It felt wrong to stay in the cities after that. It felt wrong to just leave and go back home to my parents like nothing had ever happened.

  I couldn’t stand being among the people anymore, listening every day to the maddening drone of footfall, to happy cheers and simple gasps of excitement and wonder, to the clicks of phones and the fake shutter sounds of their cameras.

  I needed to get out. I needed to travel further, see more people, and hear more stories.

  So I took a few of my bags, stored the unessentials away for when I wanted to return, and just rode out on a bus, beyond the limits of the cities.

  That was where I made my first mistake.

  I had not prepared myself for travelling as anything but a tourist. Just taking a bus out to God-knows-where had never been in my plans. The original plan would have seen me already catching a flight back to my home country.

  But I didn’t think much of it; after all, this was the luggage I had prepared along with my parents, and we had all travelled overseas before. I was confident they wouldn’t do wrong by me.

  Even if things did get a bit wonky, it was fine. I was a bit tougher than other people anyways; I could eat less and sleep less and still be fine.

  And it was fine, for a while.

  I did notice myself getting a bit more tired as I continued to sleep in worse and worse places, and I did notice my stamina getting drained faster as the amount of food I had access to became smaller and smaller, but it was all within reason. I just figured it was because it was my first time out and I was straining myself just because I hadn’t trekked that kind of terrain before.

  And then the overseas credit card I was using stopped being useful.

  That was fine though, I told myself.

  I could just swap it out for cash and still be fine.

  I still hadn’t felt that I had seen enough to be comfortable going home just yet.

  Then buses stopped being able to take me further out.

  Sure, I shrugged. It would be good to take my time, anyways. It would be nice to rely on maps again, to have to talk to locals for directions and hike through empty roads and trails.

  A little bit of hunger was fine. I was still loaded on snacks and pre-prepared meals. Even if I got lost, it wouldn’t be much trouble.

  Worst case scenario, I had brushed up on several months worth of lessons on Khmer, and I was more than capable of communicating with basic single words and phrases, and it was amazing how much kindness the people would show to you when you demonstrated to them you were willing to speak to them in their language to respect their culture at risk of embarrassing yourself.

  And slowly, I went from two meals a day to just one.

  And still, I travelled further out.

  The hunger started to get bad. Still though, even if cash started to be useless at that point too, my good faith and optimism with the strangers I met had yet to betray me by then, and they were more than willing to feed me as I travelled through in return for a small bit of labour for their communities.

  And then the distances between the rural villages grew longer and longer.

  One meal a day became simply having to survive on snacks, canned foods and portions of pre-prepared meals in the middle of the wilderness.

  I started to live with a perpetual stomach ache.

  I grit my teeth and dealt with it.

  It was one of my ‘superpowers’, after all. I could survive on much less food than other people did. And strictly speaking, biologically, it wasn’t even that necessary to live. Water was much more important, and I still had that in spades.

  I had dealt with plenty of starvation before. During high school, I would pull multiple all-nighters in a row when my parents were out of town and I really needed to get something I procrastinated on done, not eating for upwards of 48 hours at a time and sleeping for less than six hours across Friday, Saturday and Sunday.

  It was nothing new. I could push through it.

  Then inevitably, I made a mistake.

  I tripped on a trail through a forest, and I tumbled.

  And I didn’t stop.

  I kept on tumbling, further and further down.

  I was lucky I didn’t break any bones.

  But I was totally lost. I had no idea how to find the trail again.

  My stomach started to burn and bubble. A perpetual sinking ache started to make itself at home.

  It felt like I was sick. Like I had a constant fever or migraine. It made it hard to think or walk.

  I was still fine though…

  I had three days worth of food still. If I stretched it out like I knew I could, it would last me a whole week.

  And then every hour, against my will, my eyes would start to drift towards my bag. My thoughts would stray and my mouth would start to hang low, drool dribbling onto the floor.

  Something started to creep up at the back of my mind. A voice of hunger, whispering for me to just indulge.

  I tried to fight through it.

  Then the gurgling grew worse and worse.

  Whenever I eventually stopped to finally eat, I found myself not thinking at all. I no longer needed to vaguely muse to myself to pass the time as I ate. I would just… eat, and when I was done, my thoughts would return to me, as if I had just blacked out in the middle of it.

  Then the migraine, or fever, or whatever it was I was feeling, stopped being hot.

  The gurgling ceased entirely, and then I found myself feeling frozen.

  I ran out of food.

  I stopped being able to think coherently at all. I would stumble through the jungle in a haze, clutching my stomach as I moaned and panted, shivering to fend off the phantom cold.

  There were some wild berries around. I forced them down my gullet. They did not satiate the freezing void inside of me.

  And that freezing thing continued to spread, lighting the frenzy that grew stronger and stronger in my mind with a burning hysteria.

  Inevitably, I ate something wrong – I didn’t even remember what it was – and I found myself too sick to move.

  I laid on the dirt, letting the pain and coldness overtake me.

  All that remained was that all-devouring madness that had taken over every inch of my body, burning away at every nerve and muscle until I was completely numb, leaving behind a shambling corpse.

  I wanted to cry, but I couldn’t.

  I wanted to feel sad, but I couldn’t.

  My thoughts were too frozen to even manage the sadness to cry.

  The void inside of me continued to eat away at everything that I was, until there was nothing left of me to consume.

  I closed my eyes, and surrendered myself to the nothingness.

  I would die.

  I was a fool, idiotic beyond measure, to think I could handle starvation.

  Really, what did I know about starvation?

  I had never wanted for anything in my life.

  Did I think that petty hunger counted as starving?

  It didn’t, not when I could have fixed it at any time.

  I might have been able to not eat for days, but I was only able to live like that because of my surroundings.

  I could stomach that hunger because it something that could have been fixed at any time.

  Whenever I wanted to, I could’ve just cooked up a meal. If I was too lazy to cook, I could have ordered some delivery or walked a few minutes for takeaway. If I really didn’t want to bother, then my parents would knock on my door and give me food anyways.

  Food was always right there, within reach.

  I never had to think about needing food to live. It was something that was always just laying around me, there was too much of it for me to even bother with eating at times.

  Somehow, I managed to piece together a couple of coherent thoughts right before I thought I would die.

  I was alone and dying.

  A cold, pathetic, pitiful death.

  I had only lived because of my parent’s love. Because they had worked so hard to provide me comfort, to make sure I knew nothing of the same struggles they might have gone through when they were younger, to make sure I was always in good health because of them.

  Without their nourishment, without their shelter, I was nothing.

  I was no one.

  I was stupid and ignorant.

  I was not special.

  I was not unique.

  The only thing I had was privilege.

  Privilege. That was the difference between hunger and starvation.

  Hunger was what you would feel when you decided what you wanted to eat later, what pleasure you wanted to indulge yourself in. It was what you felt when survival was not of concern to you, only luxury and satiety.

  Hunger was the only thing I had ever known, yet foolishly, I believed I was almost superhumanly capable of dealing with ‘starvation’.

  What I went through could not be compared to this, let alone what it was that the people I had met earlier in my trip had gone though, that I swore to seal deep inside my heart.

  Starvation was something else entirely.

  It was the cold, frightful truth that there was nothing you could do to fix your situation. The lurking chill of death ready to claim you the moment you let yourself drift off and fall into a sleep you could not wake from.

  It was a desperation that could never be fulfilled, leaving you endlessly clawing for something, only for it to all be futile.

  Futility.

  That was what it was, futility.

  It was the madness that whispered to you, the only thought left behind at the back of your brain when you slowly lost the ability to function, the burning tide in your stomach that formed a vicious stormy whirlpool that ate away at all of your guts, until slowly, you were left with nothing but the truth.

  You are not special.

  You are not gifted.

  You are just like anyone else.

  You are powerless.

  Your life was not important.

  You squandered everything you had.

  You were a mindless gnat, buzzing around, never accomplishing anything relevant, only thinking of yourself.

  You were not better than even a simple short-lived insect.

  You meant nothing.

  You would never be anything.

  You would not die in a blaze of heroism or glory, you would not matter to anyone. You would not be remembered fondly by anyone.

  The world was a cold, cruel and lonely place.

  And it would swallow you whole. And you were helpless against it.

  I didn’t die there, however.

  By some miracle, my dying body was found by some locals, and I was brought back to life.

  But I never forgot the lesson I learned that day.

  I was just as vulnerable as anyone else, and I only got through life because I was able to run back into my parent’s arms whenever I wanted.

  I never spoke the words ‘I’m starving’ a single time after that.

  I could never hope to call that simple, feeble want for food ‘starvation’ ever again.

  I wondered if my parents had felt it in the past, when they were young and before they migrated, and that was why they were so desperate to give me food, why they were so worried whenever I mentioned I didn’t eat, and why they always pushed me to eat and sleep more.

  Sorry, Mother. Sorry, Father. Sorry for wasting your care so haphazardly.

  This is what you were feeling when you saw me like that, wasn’t it?

  Sorry, I get it now. I’ll do better, I swear.

  For my little sister. For the daughter you never had.

  Just like you did for me, I’ll make sure the only word she ever knows in her life is ‘hunger’.