BIG THINGS, SMALL SHIFTS

You could have created the best party on earth, honed the meanest skills, charmed that new girl on Skout. But that Girl-Of-Your-Life that you have loved so dearly? You will love her now and lose her the next. Because, maybe, you have the inability to love.

You don't know what love is.

After losing her you will think that your life is over. But the next day will inevitably arrive, you'll sleep over it, and the moment to treasure will have passed. She would have moved out of town. You'll move on. So will she. And you'll realize that till then you will never learn what love is. Because love has already brushed you by.

The end.

10 TIMES OVER

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When you think you can't survive the ordeal, wait till you get hit by the same thing 10 times over... and you'll realize that you are strong. And anything else falters against it.

ROOM FOR FAILURE

I gave myself a month to settle into the new year and... Nope, I'm still very much in the holiday spirit. The thought of work and all its incessant nonsense is too draining. As much as I'm conflicted about my job, I've decided not to quit.

Ugh.

We tend to not leave room for failures and leave when things don't go the way we imagine them to be. But we need to understand that life isn't all about satisfying our desires and our wants and finding things that fit our mould of what defines happiness. 

You don't just quit when your expectations are not met. I'm not encouraging people to continue sucking up and sticking around an unhappy relationship or a bad working environment. But I'm saying that we should pick out what makes it awful and at least try fixing it before calling it quits.

Many times we don't simply get into a "good" job or get into a "good" relationship. Once reality sets in and things go a little beyond that "nice working environment" and "nice boyfriend" phase, we have to make a conscious effort to maintain them and make them, in your definition, "good".

I'm not exactly in a perfect job right now. I don't have a decent pay increment, my working hours are usually crappy, I don't get offs even when I work weekends during a long-term project, I don't get any OT pay, my bonuses depend on my bosses' moods... I'm unhappy. But my friends are far off worse than me and yet they're still trying to make their jobs work. So will I. Not quitting unless it's abusive.

Meanwhile I'm just gonna be a regular worker who is dying to get off work and dreams of holidays and flying sushi.

Secret

This was how it could be done. This was how you lived with a terrible secret. You just did it. You pretended everything was fine. You ignored the deep, cramp-like pain in your stomach. You somehow anesthetized yourself so that nothing felt that bad, but nothing felt that good either.

^$*&$%&@

This is something a Type A girl hates to admit: MY LIFE IS A MESS.

I hated January, as much as, if not more, than 2013, which sucked. So many commas. 

Everything seems to be snowballing into a giant ball of dirty laundry. There's this disgusting trend that I've been creating and I just can't help it -- The desire to be in control of my life till the very decision of what I'm putting into my mouth, yet allowing everything else that swims around my life to spin out of control. 

It's like, my calendar is yummy but my room looks as if a tornado ran through it.

My clothes have been mysteriously disappearing and thus I keep buying more to make up for that. I need to put a shopping ban on myself. The issue here isn't that there's a perv stealing all my underwear and garments - this treasure hunt is self created. Both my tabletop and my floor, has now turned into my wardrobe. Epiphany: I've created two tiny hills in my room. I'm not even exaggerating.

And my dog sleeps on it.

The bedroom reflects the life. Whenever my life is a mess, it shows up in my room. My relationship with The Boyfriend is as screwed up as my makeshift hill of clothes. And we're regretful and frustrated. Lots of tears and self inflicted pain and broken hearts. But we're praying and crying out loud to God to take control of our relationship. We can't do it alone.

And my relationship with work is… obviously sore. It's as stale as a slice of rotten cheese. I wish I could go on talking about it, which sometimes makes me feel better. But then again, I really can't put myself through talking about my failure anymore so I decided against it.

In all, my unorganized life is disgusting. I need to reorganize. 

WE'LL ALL BE OKAY

But we all end up, one way or another, okay. We’re all on different rides, but they all end the same way. You do not need somebody else’s love to be whole. You do not need their permission to go on with your life. What you do need is your own love. You need to let yourself go on. Their love isn’t stopping you, because that love doesn’t exist. It is only you who is holding onto what you believe should be. And what you will realize, sooner or later, is that most of your life is defined and chosen by what you compel yourself to believe should or shouldn’t be. Release yourself from the cage you built. You hold the key to your own freedom.

FILLING THE VOID

"They say you don’t get over someone until you find someone or something better. As humans, we don’t deal well with emptiness. Any empty space must be filled. Immediately. The pain of emptiness is too strong. It compels the victim to fill that place. A single moment with that empty spot causes excruciating pain. That’s why we run from distraction to distraction—and from attachment to attachment." -- Yasmin Mogahed

IF I GOT RID OF MY DEMONS, I'D LOSE MY ANGELS

"It’s a strange thing, how you can love somebody, how you can be all eaten up inside with needing them—and they simply don’t need you. That’s all there is to it, and neither of you can do anything about it. And they’ll be the same way with someone else, and someone else will be the same way about you and it goes on and on—this desperate need—and only once in a rare million do the same two people need each other." -- Madeleine L’Engle

LESSON ON ENVY

I'm learning to deal with negative feelings, like envy and jealousy.

Envious of normal stuff. Women with more successful careers, things like that. I'm finding that if you try to resist your envy, it sticks around. But if you accept it as natural, don't judge yourself, and leave it as part of God's big plan for you, it will pass, like a cloud.

SHOES

Once, I bought a pair of shoes that were a size too small, figuring that somehow, one day, I will fit into them. But they will never fit because there are some things in life you can never change. As much as you try and convince yourself you can, all you end up doing is lying to yourself.

Perhaps when you wear those shoes enough, they get easier to wear with time. But is it worth it, to put yourself through excruciating pain?

It really depends if you really, really like those shoes, I guess.

THE WORST THING YOU CAN SAY TO SOMEONE WHO LOVES YOU

“I don’t know what she wants me to say to her. I know that she has a lot of feelings for me, and I really like her, but I just don’t want anything serious like that. And I can’t just tell her no.” 

A friend of mine wondered to me how to deal with his long-term kind-of girlfriend who had clearly fallen in love with him while he had remained quite content in benign indifference. He asked me what I thought he should do — she was talking about things like moving in, going on vacations together, and planning for the future. He hadn’t looked past the end of this week, especially not with her. I told him that he had to be honest with her, to rip off the band-aid while he still had the chance, and break her heart acutely to save it rotting over the next several months. 

He told her that he loved her one night, cornered at a house party when she’d had just enough to drink to push her into a kind of honesty which she had been dancing around for the past four months. She had pushed him against a wall and, liquor on her breath, told him that she loved him. How could he not respond in kind? What kind of immediate risk would that provide for him? Not going home with a warm body who cared for him that night? 

Months later, when he left her for a girl for whom he actually felt something serious and engaging, she barely recovered. 

I remember being told “I love you” out of pity. I remember making my feelings so apparent, even in the face of lukewarm response, that the only reasonable thing to say was “I feel the same way.” It’s the most strange feeling — like taking a big drink of what you thought was full-sugar soda, only to find it full of aspartame. It’s metallic and bitter in your mouth, and only makes you feel more isolated, even as your head is against someone’s chest. 

Because it’s only a temporary respite. Whether someone says “I love you, too” out of a cruel desire to extract more physical affection from you, or simply because you have become a comfortable familiarity for which they have no better options at the moment, it only offers something momentary. It only offers the feeling of running off the cliff in the cartoon and hovering just a few seconds above the drop, holding up that sign that says “Yikes!” as you look down at all of the falling you have to do. 

And when you realize that they were insincere, that they never felt the same way as you did, that the kinds of futures you were allowing yourself to grow and tend to like a garden were completely unreciprocated, the pain is so much greater. It is humiliation, self-loathing, and endless questioning over why, exactly, you weren’t good enough. To have someone in your hands for a few precious months, only to feel them slip through your fingers the second it becomes inconvenient, makes you want to cut them off at the wrists. Whatever they were, they weren’t good enough to hold on. 

After having her heart broken the way she did, my friend took a long, long time before getting into another relationship. And from that time on, she became one of the many women who is convinced that saying “I love you” first is a risk that is simply too great to take in any relationship that you actually care about. She had become hardened, a bit deadened to the words that used to mean so much to her. And when I asked her, over several glasses of wine one night, if she still missed him, she told me that she didn’t. 

“I thought that I missed him for a really, really long time. But then I realized that, to miss something, you had to actually have it. And I never had him. Not like I thought I did.” 

- Thought Catalog

OBSTINATE, ADJ.

Sometimes it becomes a contest: 
Which is more stubborn, the love or the two arguing people caught within it? 

 ― David Levithan, The Lover's Dictionary

KINTSUGI 金継ぎ (KIN-ZU-GEE)

In Japanese: “To repair broken pottery with gold”

It is more beautiful after having been broken. It turns obstacles into opportunities. And it builds character; for what was broken is now whole.

Beauty is fragmented.

HEART AND MIND

Drink water from your own cistern, flowing water from your own well.

Our heart should be kept pure and sacred; that is when it is most beautiful. And sentiments should run free in emotional circumstances and our spirit should be kept on fire and fervency; that it still burns even when the mind says stop.

But the dichotomy between the heart and the mind is a fallacy and we are often incapable of being equivocal about making the two co-exist.

How, then?

FEAR

Yes, I do love LOVE. My parents have a very successful marriage, and I wonder if that is part of the reason I am always trying to find the right person and why I feel like such a failure when a relationship doesn't work out.

I like seeking relationships that are clearly defined with clear boundaries and lines. Once they're blurred or slurred I start panicking and crawl back into my hole of vulnerability.

I become extremely invested in people and things that I care about, which can cause me to fall for someone quickly. So sometimes I sort of build this wall around me to guard my heart preventing myself to love anyone too much. As most guys these days have relationship patterns that are a total reverse of mine, a part of me fears that if we were to get really serious, one of us might wind up getting hurt.

I wonder what's going to happen to me next.

RUNNING

I've been running. For so many reasons.

Running when I feel fat. Running when I need the energy. Running when I'm going crazy. Running when I need time alone. Running when I want to stop crying. Running when I need to run away from my sadness.

And I'm exhausted from all that running. Running away from my notes of depression is what knocks me out, not the sadness itself. Sorrows enter and leave your life like a rush of wave. We have to learn to ride it, let it wash over us and recess. It is the constant motion of things, its the reality you live in, and its what you have to accept to live a happy life.

Where we trip up is in letting it consume us. Seeing the wave and assuming it will take us down and letting it do just that. But if we’ve learned anything from life its that nothing lasts, not even our sadness, and pushing it away somehow makes it stronger.

What doesn't kill you makes you stronger.

FORGIVENESS

Unforgivingness is the elixir of the wounded heart; a bewitching balm that only appears to soothe our pain. But in truth—it is a deadly poison that corrodes the vessel containing it from the inside out.

As long as this unforgiving chain exists, there will always be something or someone to give it a tug that will pull you back to revisit once again every horrible thing that has happened to you; to help you reclaim over and over your victim status and be swallowed up in anger or bitterness or self-pity. This is the power of unforgiveness.

It is the highest form of slavery holding you under the power of your offender and causing you to relive over and over again the abuse, the words, the pain, the rejection. It causes us to withdraw from others and build a wall around us in an effort to protect ourselves from further hurt and disappointment.

It's an evil cycle --

First we start to bury our feelings. Things that are buried are forgotten. And things that are forgotten are never dealt with. People will go to great lengths to suppress their hurt or cover it up. It is sometimes easier to deny feelings than to face or deal with the pain. The thought of confrontation may be terrifying because it usually means experiencing more conflict, more rejection, and more disappointment. Keeping silent, and withholding forgiveness can be an agonizing experiencing.

King David expressed it this way, “When I kept silent, my bones wasted away through my groaning all day long. For day and night your hand was heavy upon me; my strength was sapped as in the heat of summer.” (Psalm 32:3-4)

Then silently by ourselves we start to plot our revenge, either outrightly or in stealth. We start to act on our bad feelings. The instinct for revenge can be so powerful that we make the wrong choice to return evil for evil.

But we will never get satisfied out of our little acts of revenge. Soon we start to build walls around us. We begin to withdraw from others in an effort to protect ourselves from further hurt and disappointment. Walls of hardness go up to prevent anyone from getting close enough to see our vulnerability. These walls can become so thick there is no opening in our heart to allow us to give or receive love.

And then behind our thick walls, we start to identify ourselves as victims. And this spawns feelings of fragility and an inability to cope. Our emotions become like an “eggshell” so that the very least offence will crush us and cause us to retreat into ourselves, or to react explosively.

We can never get out of it. We start to revisit the offense again and again. When offences are buried or hidden in the closet of our heart, it is much easier to revisit that hurtful event; to go back and rehearse over and over again what happened to you. Rehearsing an offence feeds and strengthens bitterness and self-pity and perpetuates the “victim” mentality.

Ultimately, we become offensive ourselves. This bitterness keeps our pain alive to the point that we may find ourselves wanting to inflict that same hurt on others.

But Jesus is clearly telling us that withholding forgiveness cuts off that relational flow of God’s mercy that we all so desperately need. We become like a ship cut loose from its anchor—drifting aimlessly and without hope on a sea of bitterness and anger.

Forgiveness and love are like Siamese twins. They can never be separated. Loving someone you have forgiven may be difficult, but true forgiveness will make such a sacrifice. True forgiveness breaks down walls and ushers love into our hearts; it builds bridges, not walls.

“But this one thing I do, forgetting those things which are behind, and reaching forth unto those things which are before.” Philippians 3:13

SELF LOVE

But as it stood, I disliked myself deeply and could only find faults in the person I was becoming. I had no respect for myself and, because he chose to love me anyway, I lost respect for him.

You cannot come to someone else as a puzzle with a few crucial pieces missing and expect that they will fill it over with whatever spares they happen to have around. Because we are not mechanics. We are not here to fix someone’s own view of themselves, and convince them that what we see is what is real. Self-love is a complex journey requiring of just as much time and effort and attention as the love we give to someone else, and it isn’t something that we will magically find when someone tells us that we should feel it.

I had run to him because I wanted to believe that I was lovable, that I could find something, that a relationship could be my one “thing” in life that I was good at. But he was in that relationship, too, and deserved just as much back from me as he was offering. When I realized that I couldn’t give it, and likely never would be able to until I proved to myself that I was good and capable on my own, I had to leave. But that’s never easy to explain.

Sometimes we say that we met people at the wrong time. But maybe we meet them when we are the wrong person, when we have not yet met and fallen in love with ourselves. We are only half of a thing — even if we can imagine that there is a better version of us out there — and we are hoping that someone else will fill in the missing parts so that we don’t have to.

DATING IS FOR MARRIAGE, NOT EVANGELISM.

Word.

Some guys think it’s unkind, or unfair to break up with a girl just because she’s not a Christian. The reality from God’s perspective is that it was unkind and unfair to start the wrong relationship with her in the first place. So are you going to falsely “be nice”, or are you going to be true to her by being obedient to your God? - WVD, The Christian Pundit 

Find someone who will be happy to understand and support any long hours or commitments at Church, encourage your family to walk in the word of God and help organize family worships and bible study... In short, someone who will support you in your spiritual life instead of impeding it.

We need to pray for wisdom in choosing a life partner.

SOMEDAY

Someday you will realize all that is merely a dream. That girl was fictional. She never existed.  She was a monster, a beast, a white witch turned evil. She has killed the king. But that doesn't mean she has destroyed yours. You are strong and you will battle through. You will win the fight.

Today I wondered about you.

How are you? Is this a new lease of life? Freedom? Have you met your new found happiness?

Will I also, like the other wastes in your mind, disappear from your memory too?