The Life Changing Magic of Tidying Up the Heart

"So what are you thinking or feeling now?" she asked.

I sat there in the quiet boardroom, with my face in my hands. I could hear the muffled sounds of the rest of the office building going on with it's regular business things.

"I don't know," I said.

"I don't know?" she mimicked me gently.

I looked up and peeked at her, "I don't know. All I can think is the L word."

"Ooh boy," she shook her head.

"It scares me so much, how much this is affecting me. I don't know how to let go if that's what I have to do, because it is killing me right now even to consider not..." I flicked away a stray tear that found its way down my cheek.

"Do you think you should let go?" she asked.

I took a breath and considered how to phrase what I felt.

"It's like that Marie Kondo thing," I started.

"Huh? Marie Kondo?"

"You know how she has that system of purging things and keeping a minimalist, simple life..." I tried explaining. "Well it's like you consider what you have and how that thing makes you feel and if you can let it go."

She nodded at me.

"Well," I looked out the window lost in thought.

"Well that's the thing. It isn't what I may or may not have promised for tomorrow.

It's just that, when I think of him, when I am with him, when he's being whatever the hell he is even the most annoying version of himself, but when he is there with me....he sparks joy."

Circles

Sometimes the best gift you can give yourself is to take that gift you thought was everything you every wanted and carefully wrap it back up, typing a perfect ribbon on top of where the old ribbon lay--and give it away.

and even though hurts you, still smile.

Resilience

Perhaps it's okay to break, afterall. Maybe that is actually the true purpose of life, if ever there was one: that living isn't about finding a form or function that is impermeable, infallible, indestructible. Living is in breaking, in drowning, in falling—living is even in hurting.

Long time ago, when I was stuck deep in my med-sci studies, one of my university professors said something which, obviously after all these years, stuck to me. He said, "The Earth will become a huge snowball, we will all die. Sure. But who are we kidding? The Earth is more resilient than we give it credit for. It's going to perish, sure, but it will still be there, and it will thrive again, light years after we have wiped ourselves off the face of it."

Maybe it is OK, therefore, to let yourself trust and be broken. It is OK, to feel the fifty million thousand frequencies of loss and despair. It is OK to paint your world with shades of anger, sorrow, melancholy, and grief. It would almost be wrong not to. Like being able to paint as many colours onto a canvas and never touching all the colours of possibility.

In breaking then, despite the many ways that the cracks seem irreparable, the way they creak and hurt again and again, like a misaligned patella that you fell on when ice-skating that many years ago and whenever you stand up or try running down stairs the pain comes shooting up your leg in remembrance, all it takes is not avoiding the pain but embracing it, exercising it.

Even when you feel that you have lost out, when your trust has been brutalized again and again, maybe sometimes the pain is the best opportunity for you to look it over and realize that those moments had more worth than you ever even knew, even (especially) when you were actually living it. There are moments that make you remember exactly why that trust was so deeply ingrained in you, why that Jenga piece was so vital to your sense of self. Perhaps that person gave you a mirror to look at yourself in ways you never were able to before. Maybe they gave you a blanket, just for a while, sometimes, if you were a bit cold. Maybe they lent you an umbrella, not expecting that the relationship would develop further than that casual transaction. Maybe you spent hours and hours, learning to be yourself for once in your life, because this person gave you the space to be that, with them.

These were beautiful moments, and yet moments always have an inexorable place in the past. There are echoes of that laughter which permeate even into the very present now, telling you, reminding you, that you have never laughed as much in your life or smiled as much as you did then—and even if it is gone, it had at least existed.

Perspective is such a compelling narrative.  Even that moment you fell, where you hurt so much and thought that was it: that was the end, that was life, goodbye, time and perspective allows you to see that 5 year old little child that you were, falling on the playground and skimming your hands with gravel embedded under the skin. Adulthood is no different from that child, because we are always lost children seeking something more: a best friend, or companionship, a better snack, or a great exhilarating experience on the slide; and we are always growing in ways even we do not know—until we break.

Forgiveness is an act of the will, and the will can function regardless of the temperature of the heart. — Corrie ten Boom (quote that popped up in my inbox after I finished writing this post)

 There is a reason we can forgive, and maybe even as we cannot forget because we are still scared—maybe now more than ever—to trust again, we learn to forgive ourselves. We are all broken children, but in breaking, and breaking again and again, we have learnt to become a little more accountable to and for ourselves.

Sometimes you realize that the trust you thought was shattered is actually only a small dwarf planet compared to the huge expanse of a neverending universe of that patient, deep-abiding, resilient love within which it revolves.

Safekeeping

One of the hardest things is piecing yourself back together again after breaking into a million pieces. 

Trust.

You can trust someone with information, or trust them to get a job done. Trust someone to have your back, trust someone to be there, no matter what. Or trust someone to keep you safe. 

The worst part in misplaced trust in a person is that when you give that trust to another being, that trust is completely contingent in your very own personal trust of the self. You are trusting yourself, your sense of judgement, in being able to believe that this other person is worthy of keeping your trust.

So, when they decide they no longer want that burden, when they decide that hurting another person to relieve their own stress in life is OK, because they have already done the calculations and decided you will be OK even if your trust in them was wrong all along, they forget that the implications lie on a much grander scale. Because, even after the damage is done, and they have moved on, that huge earthquake is only the start of an avalanche of aftershocks: you are left stranded in a place where you cannot even trust yourself.

When you have moved from a space of casual acquaintance, slowly and systematically ingraining everything inside of you with this person's aura, their function in your life slowly becoming part of the very equation of who you are, so much that you would bet your life in that trust, nevermind your own sense of identity and trust, it goes without saying that once that little piece of trust is removed like a Jenga piece down there below the other million pieces which comprise you, of course everything, absolutely everything, collapses.

But it is all inside of you. And not any other person ever could imagine what it is like beyond that outer shell.  Inside, you are juggling the pieces that have not yet fallen, and yet you are trying to pick up, and catch, the other falling pieces which are sharp, fatal, piercing you with pain. Inside, you are slipping trying to escape falling completely and utterly to that bottomless pit where your sense of self can never be resuscitated, and yet you are slipping on the shards which make up the slopes you are trying to keep a grip on with the soles of your already-ripped and bleeding feet, and mutilated palms, slipping on the blood, bringing you to your knees, on which you continue to struggle up. Inside you are suffocating, as the atmosphere around you is a vacuum-sealed vessel of building pressure, toxic fumes of self-hatred, green gaseous canisters of laughter assaulting you with no remorse. Inside, you don't even know which part of you is really you, and inside, you don't even know who you are anymore, not really. 

Can you ever really—really—trust another person to keep you safe?

Voices from the Other Side

Sometimes at the end of the day, the most miserable thing to be is alone. Especially when it piles up: day in, day out, same grind, same routines, and a whole long collection of lonely evenings. Someone to share what your day was like with, to sit in companionable silence, even, watching television together, or not even doing the same thing together, but still being together. There is a safety and security like no other when you know that you can cast your heart to drone over the surface of the many thousand miles of the earth and it can find that other heart that beats in sync with yours.

Yet the claustrophobia of company takes away the glow. Expectations of and from other people weigh heavily on your shoulders. Even when you're focused on accomplishing one task, you feel as if there are a million eyes - even if belonging to just that one person - peering over your shoulder, not letting you be at peace. Even when you sit for a second to catch your breath, you still need to take a figurative look around, almost guiltily, because you know that this moment to yourself isn't really yours, everyone else expects it to be theirs.

And this, too, piles up. It is almost as if your own lungs cannot belong to you because every breath you take is chained to another person's demands. As if your own hands, your own feet, taking you to places and performing your tasks, can never really be your own. Even your tears, if you even allow yourself a moment to let them fall, they too are tainted; accusations abound and fingers point, prodding, taunting, persistently, irritatingly, to your apparent selfishness.

What is it worth, then, being caged in forever, if that is the cost of not being alone? Why set yourself "free" from loneliness if it only means you lose your own sense of self? Why bother to try, if when every time you moved mountains to show you care, you are left holding the mountain to perpetuity as the very action is questioned, disputed, and doubted? How many times can you be expected to jump over train tracks with the train a split second away; how many times can you lay yourself down and let others walk over your back to safety; how many times can you give away your umbrella to stand alone in the rain?

What is the point of not being lonely, if the other person doesn't know this is what you feel but can't say.

323

And again, it's a beautiful day. I just want to say that I have been opening each and every day (still) by observing that it's a beautiful day.  Despite the general existential sense of disintegration and epistemological dissonance, externally and quite personally, somehow through it all I can still come out and tell myself it's a beautiful day. Even in heartbreak, calamity, destruction, bereavement, maybe this is the ruler we actually use to measure our status of survival.

For Me

Sometimes I'm stuck in a rut, again suddenly confronted with this overwhelming sense of loneliness. And I end up thinking whether there is something lacking in me, that I keep feeling that I'm left behind, or lose the grip on a string that's just slipped out of my hands, or that maybe I just fall short. Sometimes I kind of feel maybe my problem is that I try too hard. I'm a people-pleaser, and of course that doesn't really work out too well when you're too much of one.

Then at the same time, I try to not be one, and I hold back. Or rather, I   hold back from stating things which are confrontational or overly sentimental, or way too personal. That's why I stopped writing the way I wish I could write. 

Today I got a huge, umm, not sure what to really call it - a wake up call? A shock it was certainly, because it hurt me immensely when I came across something that made me feel absolutely ridiculous. Not ridiculous only, because that sort of implies a self-consciousness grounded with ego. But further, a sense of betrayal. A sense of being taken for granted. Or of failure. 

I had a huge cry-out. And yeah I am actually admitting this here. I normally avoid opening up completely on this blog, and one of the things I had a good think about was this also; specifically, why I do this. Avoiding becoming too personal or vulnerable; opening up fully was something I had grown to avoid like the plague. Consequently, I ended up writing extremely vaguely, and furthermore, this resulted in loopy, wordy and vociferous posts that might have sounded profound and poignant, but must have definitely confused my reader.

But the point was that I wasn't supposed to be writing for anyone else, right? For myself? But that is something I lost in trying to balance the forces of expression and art. And I lost myself somewhere also.

So yeah, I had a huge cryfest. FYI: I have these often. I cry easily. I also laugh easily. I'm a softy, and this is something I try to guard like the crown jewels, because well, this was just another consequence of bad experiences. The more I opened up and showed how vulnerable I was, the quicker people were to lose interest and drop you like a hot potato - or, maybe worse: take you for granted.

Being taken for granted is something I have strugged with for...well pretty much my whole life. From being the eldest in a family with huge hardships, and having to take care of everyone - I lost the sense of being able to be me from a very young age. I couldn't be me, because I was busy being a mother/wife/sister/servant for everyone else. So I was molded into being a people-pleaser. This stuck with me in varying ways over the years. Trying to be this, or trying to be that. Working harder to do things to make someone else feel better or pleased. 

Anyways, all this is already making me cringe with how sentimental it all seems. I hate having to express myself or explain myself in the form of describing whatever experiences; as if in some way that's asking for pity. It isn't that I have ego or pride to not want people to pity me, I just don't want to use whatever experiences to gain it, when I feel that so many people out there have it way worse. I just gotta deal with it so I'm okay. 

But there was something else entirely that I had wanted to write about. Being taken for granted - I don't know. I already hesitate to label it as this, because I already know that the reaction of those who I would 'accuse' of doing this would be hurt. And there again, I don't want to hurt someone else, so I hold back from doing so. But isn't that already a symptom of the problem? I don't know.

Sometimes I wish I weren't the person I was really. I wish I wasn't so kid-at-heart ish. Because maybe my thoughts and words would be more meaningful. Or that I was more aloof and restrained with giving myself to others - maybe other people would want to try harder to please me. Maybe there is something afterall that rings true with this concept of playing hard to get. 

Much of this might be eye-opening to some of you - because I don't talk about most of this. My personal life story, the idea that I am a real kid (at heart), or how sensitive a person I am. Which is ironic in comparison to the previous paragraph, isn't it. 

Anyways. So post-cryfest, I decided to go slave in the kitchen (doing something I love, and also keeping me busy and productive) but of course, I had to think through everything. Who says I think too much? 

I had to first gauge if my reaction was overdone. It might have been, nevertheless, even if I cut away the extra-sensitivity, there were things which remained that still hurt. Then I considered, why must I keep trying to mould myself to meet another person's standards? And why was I putting everything of myself and my world centered around this one person? Was it reciprocated, equally? No. 

Then I figured, why was I doing all this, then? Just because love said that I shouldn't expect anything back? (And oh yes, this gets heavier, gee whiz, love.) I don't know. Something I considered long time back was that I put more into the pot so that it felt that there was enough in it to provide for the amount given by two people. Maybe I shouldn't have. Maybe I should stop.

Ah, I know - there is someone who's thinking I told you so. That's okay. You told because you cared. And I reciprocate your care by listening to you. So yup. I think I'm pretty much vented out.

 Today is (was?) International Women's Day, and the theme for me is loving myself. And I'm going to stop caring about whoever gives a damn about the things I give a damn about. It hurts but what can you do. Yesterday I was looking at this website for lyrics, looking at the lyrics of "Let It Go" from Disney's Frozen (because 1. I'm totally a Disney child and 2. I love the song, dammit)...and other than the aptness of the lyrics for my own state of mind, when I scrolled down to the meaning of the lyrics as interpreted by the commenters, I stumbled across a flame war by a bunch of 9 year olds. It was hilarious, in a way. In a sad, pathetic way, I grant you, but funny, because you just imagine these little imps tapping away into their keyboards with their tiny faces all scrunched up, and almost half of them can't spell, nevermind grammar, so they're arguing in between asking "wat dose unighted meen". But the gist of their argument was whether the song had anything to do with love at all or not, and one side was declaring that it was love for the self. So yeah. Let it go!

A kingdom of isolation and it looks like I'm the queen.
The wind is howling like this swirling storm inside.
Couldn't keep it in, Heaven knows I tried.
Don't let them in, don't let them see.
Be the good girl you always have to be.
Conceal, don't feel, don't let them know.
Well, now they know!
Let it go, let it go!

Happy International Women's Day

What would it be like to have your appreciation? To have you look at me the way you look at others, and not be blinded by the fact I already belong to you, that I am already yours. To feel that what I do is something that you are intrigued by, that what is important to me is something you feel gives you momentum to take the time to understand and appreciate. To have your attention and your interest the way you give it to others. Instead of feeling like a duty, that I must understand that you have no time for me or rather  my unimportant things, because other things are more pressing - I understand - but others get your admiration instead. I wonder what it would be like to see you there as my number one supporter, without me having to ask you to be. To have you going on your own inclinations because you want to. To not have to ask you, again and again, to make what I rendered with love a chore. Maybe I just suck at whatever I thought I was good at. Maybe this is too much but the contrast was a stab in the back and right now I just cannot write anymore.

Intense

I know I am seemingly always overconfident and righteous, and that I act all "miss-know-it-all"-- and no, I am not saying these things about how I am in any sort of mockery either for anyone who might feel so: I know that I am this most often of the time.

Yet often, I find it difficult to figure out if it is who I really am, or who I am because it is my "armour", as in my defense mechanism... I know it is definitely partly because of a defense mechanism...and one that I have cultivated so much over the years that it has become a second skin that seems to be who I really am. And that is something which I have let happen self-consciously, so that everyone just figures that is who I am. That's not to say this is any excuse for being this way...it being a second skin is no excuse to say it isn't who I am. It's still who I am. But it is somehow an armour for that side of who I am which I refuse to let others see; if they are not able to see it, they cannot reach it, and if they cannot reach it, they cannot use it, abuse it, nor destroy it. 'It' of course, being me.

Vulnerability is that state we guard most closely. We do not want to become attached because it opens up our portal for vulnerability. And we learn to guard this vulnerability through experience. Experiences which for the most part we would categorize as unpleasant, because they have taught us pain, and it is through this pain that we have witnessed our vulnerabilities as never before, and therefore we, within ourselves, have seen it for what it is and how to shut it up tight.

 This was meant to be a personal anecdote, and as usual when I write, it ends up going general, and vague, and the one(s) I intend to have this said to would likely be the one to tune out and get lost and distracted. I think, also, that me writing vaguely is another form of defense mechanism, because I am writing about my vulnerabilities for all and sundry to see, though I really had intended it for one. I could have certainly written to the person directly, but for some strange reason I felt that this was a topic I could possible learn the lesson I mean to teach myself more emphatically if I put my failings out on the laundry line.

My lesson is of humility. (And interestingly, two of my soul-siblings have expressed similar thoughts via their blogs (i.e. vulnerability, attachment, self-weaknesses, and humility); as often I am not certain if it is that we simply feed off one another's thoughts or that we truly experience the same at once..)

I have hidden my humility through my pompousness. In being a in-your-face hyper and confident girl, the girl who always has an answer and who always refuses to back down from her arguments, I seem to have done too well a job of hiding my vulnerability, so much that it has somewhat backfired on me; the ones who really need to know me, and who I really am, I am not certain if they believe that me exists. Because I myself haven't been able to figure out who this "me" is.

But (again like those others) I have acknowledged that it is a perpetual journey of self-discovery. And much of my established idealism that I have grown with love like it were my own secret garden of roses, has been one that also comes with its thorns: in letting my feet off the solid earth, in dreaming of the "ideal" I had cultivated so many expectations, so many that they could never possibly be truly practical.

Perhaps that is why it is amazing that I have found sanity in the fruition of the main dream. And that I am learning to be practical through this one dream; to let go of many others which were frivolous in many ways...and yet....

And yet, what? I don't know really.. I am writing all this without forethought, you see. I don't even know where I really am going with this. I guess, I am learning that we cannot hope to establish who we are at any given time. It is impossible. And yet, we are constantly evolving and learning. And it is through our responsibilities and relationships that we most learn to gauge ourselves. We cannot hope to hide in a cave in order to survive, simply because the person we are is too volatile to indulge in interaction. It is through interaction, and through both bad and good experience that we best learn who we are. It is through the struggle where we learn what needs to go, and through the good that we learn what we should keep.

I am addressing this discourse to a number of people, certainly. But again, this is a reminder to myself. I was in fact the one who many years ago (I seem to have been such a wise person when I was so idealistic, and yet I was naive? What a paradox)... I think it was best noted (by myself) when I observed that for a rose to grow stronger and more beautiful, it needs to be clipped and (I am stretching for the right description right now; I know I summed it up beautifully in a line that I posted on Golden Moments, let me look)...Ok found it:

Pruning the rosebush and cutting out what isn't needed makes the rose stronger!

So in summary: ... (and this is specifically for the one I had originally intended this message for)

I don't mean sarcasm, or mockery, by learning to be a better person, nor is it a slight to say that I am learning to become a better person through what I am discovering because of our interactions. It isn't a bad thing necessarily that the bad is brought out through them, but that more of who I am is starting to come out in the open, lots of traits that had been long-dormant because they had always been hidden behind the armour., and lots of new responses that never had reason to exist before that are now alive and new in the world like a newborn baby, yet to learn how to be clothed.  I mean it in the best possible way, to be a better person for all in question.

Silence

What makes something worth fighting for? What makes us get up and make the effort to even say we don't like something, so we'll try to voice it? Sometimes we say 'nay' just because we can. Or because we have a hope for something else. A right to something. A right to feel a certain way? Or to be able to say something. Or that hope that someone cares to listen. I don't know. It's probably one of those things that shouldn't be said, but sometimes I wish I didn't have a voice. Or that I could simply keep silent in all ways, forever. Words go wasted, arguments go unheeded, wishes uncared for, prayers go unheard.
Wanting anything for myself? No. It's time to simply let go.