Thursday 22 December 2016

On being judgmental: a note on understanding oneself

I started drafting this a while back. It started out being a list of observations that I made recently from the stories that I’ve been told, and this list has been growing. None of these concerns me other than the mere fact that the people who are closest and dearest to me are affected by these, in one way or another.

This list, summarised, would read: why people are so mean.

Like seriously.

This is the kind of mean-ness that spans beyond the type that's done borderlining sarcasms and jovial teasing, you know the kind that makes you wonder like, did you really just say that. but you don't really want to say it out loud because you wonder if it is you who's being overly sensitive. occasionally, you get to the point of saying 'why are you so mean' and call it a day because holy fuck, you just cannot stand to stay quiet any longer. not because the said person hurts you, but because the said person is coming across as one mean, nasty individual.

And then something that's truly nasty happens, or rather, you heard of a story of something real nasty, and you're reminded of what the true meaning of the word is. Some people are mean and nasty beyond words. I am talking about the people who derive feeling good out of making other feel shit. You know, the kind that engages in levelling - either they set themselves as persons of equal stature to a person in authority, and/or they try to equate their own character and values with someone else's who is more mature and/or superior in character.

I get that this life is hard and everyone is struggling one way or another. I get that everyone is trying their best. But does that really grant them the excuse to make other people feel like shit when they feel like shit? Does it really grant them the licence to manipulate others to get what they want? I mean really, that's an excuse at best, a childish emotional response in truth. Maybe I shouldn't have said that last bit because I am not a trained psychologist. (That said, I do have an issue with those who regularly diagnose people from a distance, and yes, that includes you people who are reading this blog and then making assertions about knowing me and psychological well being. thank you for your concern; I guess you are so concerned about me that you forget to be polite.)

So, why are people so mean?

There is no easy answer to this question. And I am not going to attempt to answer this. Because I think this answer carries different meanings to the person who tries to answer. Something along the lines of what's true from one's perspective does not make it the ultimate truth. We can only deduce base on our own experiences. I am guilty of a lot of inherent biases. I realise this. Often times, I know that I am being biased as it happens. I also don't think I will ever be bias free. And sometimes, I think I am way to opinionated for my own good. But that's another story altogether.

It is common to regard the judgments we make are actually a reflection of our own struggles. They are our battles that are hiding the lessons that we are yet to learn. And these hidden lessons are frightening because they are yet to be known, they are the lies that you told yourself, if you were to be completely honest with yourself. I am a major proponent for honesty, but being honest with myself is a completely different ball game altogether. Because it's fucking hard. I lost so many times. I started with the best of intentions and it almost always peaked into one of the harshest outbursts that are blown out of proportion. These moments used to make me feel human. These days, they make me feel small. Really small.

If there's anything I learn in the past two years, then that would be to speak my truth with more grace and kindness. And to keep it as simple as I possibly can. I learn that to successfully focus on the important things requires me to firstly work out what those important things are. And I realise that most of the things that I thought were important turn out to be not as important as they used to be. Either I imagined their importance in my life, or I perceived them to be more important than they actually are for all the wrong reasons. I learn to be more intimate with my thoughts, particularly my judgments, because I think these judgments are really directed towards aspects of myself that I have been unhappy about for the longest time (and deny this fact all throughout).

Like for example. I have loved and lost like a million times in this life (exaggeration). I still quite vividly remember what it felt like to have my heart shattered into pieces. Not because it's not resilient but because there were certain people who had the ability to do so at that point in time. In every relationship, we tried to do the best we can. We tried to love the best we can. We tried to be the best partner we can be, we try to do the right thing all the time. And truth is that we don't do the right things all the time. We are not the best partners all the time. We get tired. We get irritable. We get impatient. We get insecure. We get jealous. We get angry. We have all the best intentions in the world and we don't always get to execute them the way we'd like to. We are not perfect. We are still human after all.

A dear friend and I got to swap notes on relationships recently. It was a blunt discussion of what we thought about anything and everything and we were absolutely judgmental in that conversation. We discovered that we were more willing to be kind when it came to the struggles of our closest friends, but we might not exercise the same degree of kindness when someone else not close to us experienced similar issues. We were quick to judge. And we were quick to deny that we were quick to judge. We like to think that we exercise the same degree of kindness to everyone we encounter, yet truth is that most of the time, despite the best of intentions, things just haven't turned out the exact way we wanted. It took sometime for us to come to the realisation that all of our judgments are actually directed at ourselves, and that we are better off using these as our mirrors to understand what's truly bothering us on a subconscious level.

Another dear friend, who is stunningly gorgeous btw, discussed, amongst many things, why people are so quick to give 'advice' as to what we should do when faced with uncomfortable circumstances. I am all in for asking for advice and giving advice where appropriate. The key words are "where appropriate" because that's exactly the point: what is appropriate given the circumstances, given the particular point in time? And to add to the confusion, despite the similarities in circumstances, what I deem appropriate for me might not be appropriate for someone else. It is, after all, a point of view at best. A single fucking opinion. Yet why do we often regard this as the ultimate truth?

When it comes to other people's advice, we have no choice but to be discerning. Being responsible in decision-making means considering all viable options and considering the different point of views, in particular those that are entirely different from yours. This is crucially important if your decision is going to have implications for people who have no final say on the matter. The onus is on us, the ultimate decision maker, to ask this one vital question: what are the net, net consequences of my decision?

I take the ultimate responsibility for making the decision and implementing the said decision in my life. This is because i am the one who gets to live my life. I cannot (and will not) blindly follow everyone's advice, even when they are done in good faith. If I am not emotional comfortable with something, I bet this emotional vibration will somehow manifest within my behaviour and through my lens of judgment. So really, I am better off doing giving it its rightful space the first time. No pressure ;)

Most of the time though, people mean well. They are only concerned about you, and they often want the best for you. They want you to be the best version of yourself. They won't put you into awkward positions, or subject you to emotional manipulation because they are genuinely concerned about your well-being. Most of the time, people will empathise with you sans judgments. They will sit with you and offer a listening heart and as much time as they can possible afford to give. Because these people believe in preserving humanity.







Wednesday 7 December 2016

the art of being old: a note on a beautiful life

in a few days, i am going to be officially in my mid-thirties. and yep, i am officially mortified. they say that age is just a number, and that how old you are really is about how you feel inside. problem is that i feel old inside. and yes, i put it out to the universe every single day that i am glad to be alive. but age, as my friend put it, is the one inescapable thing that time gives to you for free.

we are all getting older every single minute, every single second of every single day.

(thank you Gary for that very insightful observation.)

i don't want to sound all depressed (or rather, depressing) because (a) i am not depressed and (b) this is not a depressing topic - there are a lot of good things about getting older (and this is a fact), and (c) yeah, okay, it is all a matter of perspective. and (d), no, this is not another bout of quarter life crisis (been there, done that), and this is way, waaaayyy too early to qualify as the onset of a midlife crisis. (but if i can like buy that audi-tt in black matte, then yeah, i will totally go for it. i am a total sucker for shit like that. and then my other friend was like, that's the car of a drug dealers, and i was like (silently), yeah ok, that's like the shit, bro.)

there is something about being in your mid-thirties though. you can no longer use the i am still young excuse because you really are not that young, and you have to invent new excuses for doing the silliest, most impulsive things in your life out of fomo. it's like once upon a time, you legitimately use the excuse of 'lack of liquidity' because you know, there really was no liquid. these days, your use of the same excuse denote something more purposeful: the liquid has been used up for other things, you konw, the things that actually matter to you. so, in short, you are expected to get your shit together. you are expected to know what you want to be, or at the very minimal, to know what you don't want to be. you are expected to know who you  are and who you want to be and somehow be actively pursuing that goal whenever you can.

and this expectation doesn't come from society anymore, it comes from you. it comes from deep within. it comes from this one little voice deep inside your veins who is persistently ever so patient when you deliberately ignore it day in day out. and then it pops up at the most unexpected moment as if to say, see, i told you so. and you're like, okay, alright, you're right. i stand corrected. i promise to listen to you a little bit more. just a tiny little bit more because i want to appear like i am learning, but i am still keen on experimenting. after all, isn't life about making mistakes while creating beautiful memories? if you were to plan everything down to the smallest details and make no room for serendipity, would that not make life sterile? i mean, can one even plan to have fun, or does fun just, you know, happen?

or is it just me, over-analysing everything again, as usual.

perhaps so. i don't know. i guess this side of me probably won't change that much, if at all. yes, i have been told that it's not a good habit to sustain for fear that my brain might actually overheat - literally. but i like thinking and i find it rather enjoyable even when most of the time i come up with way more questions than i do answers. and what's the fun in life if you don't take the time to examine it? to get up close and personal with yourself. to be intimate with yourself in the truest sense of the word that goes beyond doing a solo horizontal dance between the sheets.

truth is that i haven't thought much about being older other than lamenting to my closest and dearest that i think i am still too young to be in my mid thirties. or that really in my mind, i am like, you know, still twenty-eight. why i pick that age i have absolutely no idea, because it's not like that was the age of breakthrough or anything along those lines. i mean, i am a small moments person, so i like celebrating the little moments of everyday that makes up the big picture. so if you were to look back, you can see the little things weaved together to make this beautiful picture, but it was never as if anyone set out to draw it a particular way. in fact, part of the art is actually going with the flow, to move with the motion without really knowing what the end result is going to be, nor having any idea of what it was supposed to be, other than one thing: it's gonna be awesome. because i am going to make it so. watch me.

i want to say that i mindfully sorted my life and conscientiously change the things that i don't like about it. or that i have a running theme that spans over different areas that i need to tackle and that each action is targeted towards achieving a particular goal over a particular time period. like i organise it all into compartments, into folders, label them and draft indexes for them. these are like, you know, the aspiration. the reality is that i am mentally and physically too exhausted these days for anything other than life itself, such that all of my efforts have been concentrated on living itself; examining it becomes a luxury, an icing in the cake, the cake that you know you want to eat, but you try to abstain from because you are supposed to be on a high protein diet, and you literally cannot afford to put anything in your mouth that doesn't have some sort of protein packed in it.

i mean, really, struggling on the health front is surely something that is experienced by the living, right? as in, if you are not living (i.e. you are not alive) then you have no struggle left on this department. and you know when people say that you have to find the positives underneath all the negatives? i say to them, do some maths. two negatives multiplied together make a positive. go and try figuring that one out. and once you do, throw in some imaginative numbers into the mix, and spin everything into trigs and logs and see what you make out of the equation.

the most important person in my life recently told me that his favourite method of falling asleep is to devise some mathematical equation in his head until he exhausted his ability to do the mental calculations and falling asleep becomes easier by comparison. and just like any other conversation we had, he concluded with 'try it when you can't sleep' and i hate to admit that he is right because i tried that the other night and fell asleep so promptly because deep down i dislike maths very very much and i can't do calculations in my head to save my life. this is why i like spreadsheets.

when there is something that is there to make your life easier, the only logical thing to do is to adopt it and embrace it and make it a part of your life. i admit that it takes me quite a long time to stop apologising for simply being ... myself. yes, this sounds really self-absorbed and everything along those lines, and yet it is also very true. one of the most liberating thing in this world is to hear someone thanking you for simply being you. when you are not pretending to be something that you are not (let alone someone else) - when the things that come out of your mouth are the things that you actually mean, both literally and figuratively.  when you actually follow them up with actions. yes, people will always talk, criticise and comment - and no matter. because the person who says that she is going to do something and actually backs it up with action is the person making progress, moulding herself into something better, weaving the stories, learning by doing and gaining experience while deepening the quality of her life. because it is only you can accept that hard work is crucially necessary, planning is equally as important, as is settling goals and having visions and purpose, but it does not mean that life will go according to plan, and that is actually ok. because there are so many beautiful possibilities out there that we have not yet thought about nor imagined. and these things exist, waiting for us to open our minds and our hearts to bigger and better things than what we dare to dream about.

all the while all these are happening, you come to understand more about the world that we live in, and you come to realise that everyone is just doing the best that they can. and because of this, you learn to pick your battles, because you sincerely believe that not every battle is worth winning. this forms the basis of your value system that becomes a driving force in your life, and an understanding that the issues revolving around this value system gives you the courage to speak up and stand up for what you hold dear to your hearts. you probably would not use the word brave to describe yourself, but other people will. this becomes a great reward that you never anticipated but have learned to accept that such rewards involve great risks, the kind of projects that do not come with a safety hatch, but are promising in terms of personal growth, progress, and more importantly, development of character: it is imperative that you step forward when the path hasn't been laid out before you, let alone previously walked. there is no expectation that life will be fair, storms are meant to be weathered and courage to move forward comes from deep within. throughout this journey, you develop a deep understanding that not everything is meant to last forever, and that is okay, because letting go is about having the strength to move forward with grace and integrity.

and when you look back, you have a deeper respect for the power of self-discipline and control and the importance of avoiding your emotions dictating your actions. you actively take the time to strengthen your understanding of yourself in attempt to navigate your emotions and your mind and how to optimise the two to make your life better, easier, more fulfilling. then you realise that you have the power to live the life you have always dreamed of.

is there anything more beautiful than that?

a very happy birthday to me.

Monday 26 September 2016

Some topics are tough to talk about: a note on starting over

I haven't written in this space for over a year. I have missed pouring my thoughts in this corner of the world wide web. A lot has changed in the months that passed. It is really weird for me to write this, but I feel like I am a changed person. I think I am doing ok, but from time to time, I miss the person that I used to be: she, with the nonchalant confidence, cruised through life as if there was no tomorrow, but planned as if she was going to live forever.

Truth is that we are all going to die at some point in time; it is just a question of when. In my most recent conversation about this topic, I was met with a tired audience: I am tired of talking about death and dying, they said. I don't blame them. Personally, I know that I don't talk about this often enough. We all like to take life for granted. We like to believe that we are going to live for a long, long time. Only when we are faced with the impending possibility of death, be it ours personally, or that of someone we love, then we start talking about it. The tiredness, I imagine, is not from the discussion itself, but rather, the emotional burden. The imminent pain that rears its presence uninvited, crippling the strongest of us, while we are left clueless, unable to deal with this clump in our chest and the tendency to burst into tears for a very good reason that is difficult to articulate.

Whenever I think about death, I realise that I don't celebrate life often enough. Birthdays aside, life is something that we ought to be grateful for, something to cherish, something to look forward to, something to enjoy. Yet, isn't funny that we tend to wait to enjoy life, as if it is something that we can only enjoy after we've done certain things. Then again, blessed are those who can actually enjoy life after they've been working all of their lives. Blessed are those who are still strong enough to travel, and can afford to do so, and are still enthusiastic enough to explore the wonders of the world. Blessed are those who look forward to discovering new things, and establishing new connections, and perhaps, rekindling old flames. Blessed are those who are able to say that they are finally happy, not because they were previously unhappy, but because they now know that life can be this good.

Clearly, life is not about immediate gratification. In the past year, I am grateful for the connections that have been revived, the people that I vibed with once upon a time are making a comeback, reminding me that whilst they know the person that I was, they like the person that I am much much better. This has brought a lot of comfort, because love of this kind is rare, but possible. I don't know what I did to deserve the kindness of this tribe, and I am so very very grateful. Believe me when I say that this isn't about the length of time that you know each other, but about the quality of the connection that you had once upon a time.

Yes, there are certain things that we can do that are independent of time, and this does not negate the value of time itself. Especially when time is what we have, or perhaps more accurately, what we yearn for. Because there is no substitute for time. Because a deep connection built over time is much stronger than one that has not stood the test of time. Because at the end of the day, what we really want is someone to turn to and say, do you remember that time when we did so and so? Not because we are fixated on the past, rather because at that point in time, our connection was strengthened.

Being this 'new' person is like building a new identity while at the same time maintaining an enthusiastic dance in life. Deep inside you are incredibly confused and lost, and despite all these, you move on anyway, leading your path where you thought you wanted to travel. You notice things that you previously didn't, not so much because they were absent, but because you were, and you didn't know that previously. When you are changing, you actually have to look at yourself; you actually have to get sober. Only then you have the ability to turn some negative experience into a positive one.