On the last entry, my Uncle Joe posted this comment:

You’ve changed a lot. More mature, more sta­ble, more tol­er­ant. 5 years back, you paid more atten­tion to your appear­ance, now you care more about what you do, what you observe. Now you’re a bit sloppy :)…and I like that. Your spend­ing habit is so much different.

I don’t know what caused all that…work expe­ri­ence? Parents’ divorce? Love life? Tai Chi and Taoism?

The causes of my changes were too big to cover in the small box, so I said I’d cover them in their own entry. Here goes.

Therapy

One of the sig­nif­i­cant things my ther­a­pist helped me with was the abil­ity to not sweat the small stuff. It took a few thought records for me to real­ize that there are things out of my con­trol. I used to be really moody, where if a small detail didn’t go right, I’d get really grumpy. Now that doesn’t any­more, although I do occa­sion­ally have to remind myself of this idea, as it’s not a com­pletely nat­ural reac­tion (yet). This is prob­a­bly what Uncle Joe noticed as me being “sloppy”, as I’ve stopped wor­ry­ing about things going wrong, so a bit more care­free when it comes to details. Even Bronwen said she’s noticed the change.

I also had inti­macy issues, where I’d push my girl­friends away if they got too close. I’ve since learned to let some­one in, even if it means it may hurt me in the end, and there’s a great com­fort to be had in know­ing this. In fig­ur­ing out what went wrong, and being given the hope that my future rela­tion­ships won’t end due to my old inti­macy issues, which I’m sure was buried in my sub­con­scious before.

Taoism

Taoism has given me the same rough mind­set as ther­apy, in terms of let­ting go of the lit­tle things that don’t go my way. But it wasn’t just due to the fact that things are out of my con­trol, but also the idea that things don’t really mat­ter. I’m still work­ing on other tenets, like spon­tane­ity and wu wei, but what I’ve been able to under­stand and apply so far has helped a lot.

When I’m hav­ing a bad day, I can go to the Tao Te Ching, find a verse that’s appro­pri­ate to my sit­u­a­tion, and for some rea­son my heart finds such con­tent­ment in the words. Perhaps it’s even more than the indi­vid­ual tenets, and the fact that I now have some­thing to believe in that brings com­fort, sta­bil­ity, and hap­pi­ness. A non-religious opi­ate, if you will.

Relationships

Having been through two good rela­tion­ships with two good peo­ple, espe­cially with the mem­o­ries I have now, has given me a lot of sat­is­fac­tion. Sure, they may have ended, but I never thought I’d be in a good rela­tion­ship, prob­a­bly because of my child­hood with my par­ents, along with con­fi­dence issues. I think some peo­ple go their whole lives with­out ever hav­ing the sort of love that I did, or being able to expe­ri­ence the same won­der­fully inti­mate moments. This has given me a con­tent­ment I wouldn’t be able to find any­where else.