Protected: so here we are

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coming up for air

I didn’t know I needed a week­end like this to feel again. To dance in those lit­tle moments between brush­ing your teeth and get­ting into bed. To pass on the right and speed away to a cho­rus that grows louder with every shadow cast by every street lamp.

I can’t say it’s been due to any one thing. There’s just so much that seems to be hap­pen­ing lately. The days pass faster than ever, and I’m left won­der­ing where life will take me next, cause I’m always sur­prised by every new friend and unex­pected experience.

Wild Boar pizza at Tennessy Willems

Wild boar pizza at Tennessy Willems, one of the few wood-burning pizze­rias in Ottawa. A com­bi­na­tion of boar sausage, caramelized apple, sage, roasted gar­lic, and sharp ched­dar. The sweet­ness of the apple and the savoury char­ac­ter of the sausage make for an inter­est­ing mélange, but the use of ched­dar is what really gives this pizza a unique taste.

When I’m drown­ing in emo­tion, it feels like I’m per­pet­u­ally com­ing out of the water, emp­ty­ing my stale lungs before tak­ing in as much air as I can again.

This is when every breath is beau­ti­ful. A rush of life com­ing at me.

frame of mine

I’ve made peace with this body. It hasn’t been an easy peace to come by, as I seem to get con­stant reminders about the diminu­tive size of my stature. Most recently, I met an older Chinese woman who admit­ted that she thought I looked sick and weak only after she dis­cov­ered I had col­i­tis. It was as if she thought col­i­tis caused some kind of mal­nu­tri­tion that stunted my growth, and she didn’t want to bring up the fact that I was this size because it would have been too embar­rass­ing unless it was caused by a med­ical condition.

Asian male self portrait

 

I’ve been deal­ing with all kinds of sim­i­lar com­ments since I was a kid, so when a girl­friend would say that she liked a par­tic­u­lar part or por­tion of my body, I always thought they were just blinded by love. Eventually I real­ized that if they could come to love this body, then I could too. It will never look right in any­thing but slim-fit extra smalls from Mexx. It will never be good enough for my par­ents. But it will always be who I am, and I’ve learned to accept that.

a short break in adolescence

I’ve been feel­ing like an adult.

This isn’t due to my fis­cal respon­si­bil­i­ties or my tidy home or any other things I used to use as a mea­sure for matu­rity, but from feel­ing like every­thing makes sense. Like I have all the answers the way adults seem to do, because I can see the big pic­ture, I under­stand what truly mat­ters, and I don’t sweat the small things anymore.

It’s only now that I’m at a point where I feel like a grown up. Like this is finally who I’ll be for the rest of my life.

That’s not to say I’ve fin­ished grow­ing, that I’m not human or infal­li­ble, but there aren’t the same strug­gles or changes that I used to have, so my emo­tions and atti­tudes have evened out.

For a while I won­dered if I’d just become another turning-30 cliché, but I real­ized it was never about age. Various things have brought me to this matu­rity, from con­ver­sa­tions to rela­tion­ships to trips far away. It all hap­pened to be around the begin­ning of a new decade in my life.

Maybe I’ve been feel­ing this way only because things are going so well. It’ll take some hard­ship to test how far I’ve truly come as an adult, but until then I’ll try to live like a child, cause too often youth is wasted on the young.

cause you're bored and you can doesn't mean you should

I always won­der if I’ll ever reach such a com­plete peace that I’d stop writ­ing com­pletely. One of the rea­sons I started this blog was to have a place where I could get things down and sort my thoughts out on a page, but I don’t need to do much of either nowadays.

I know so many peo­ple who’ve con­tin­ued writ­ing, even after find­ing that kind of hap­pi­ness in their lives. Unfortunately, hap­pi­ness has robbed them of lit­er­ary inspi­ra­tion, and now they have noth­ing inter­est­ing to say. It wouldn’t be so bad if they stopped writ­ing, but they post for the sake of post­ing instead of hav­ing some­thing to say or express or vent, and it reeks of des­per­a­tion and insecurity.

I used to worry that hap­pi­ness would make me a bor­ing per­son too, but now I wouldn’t mind as long as I real­ized it and gave up this blog. It’s so embar­rass­ing to write out of a belief that it’ll make you inter­est­ing. Or even worse, to be obliv­i­ous to the fact you’re writ­ing about the most inane things.

everybody's gotta learn sometime

It’s strange to feel like I’m ready for a rela­tion­ship at only this point in my life. It didn’t seem right that any­one should love me if I didn’t love myself, and that didn’t really start until recently.

It also took a good round of ther­apy to fig­ure out that I was sab­o­tag­ing my rela­tion­ships so no one could have the chance to hurt me. If I con­sider which ones would have worked out had that not been an issue that caused me to break up with my girl­friends in order to pro­tect myself, I can only think of one. But that was a long time ago, and while we may have worked then, it’s no guar­an­tee for the peo­ple we’ve become, as I’m sure there’s been a lot of growth on both our ends. It’s only now that I feel like my per­sonal evo­lu­tion has reached a peak, a place where I’m sat­is­fied with who I am, and there won’t likely be any more dras­tic changes that may affect the dynam­ics of a relationship.

I’ve been able to rec­og­nize that the risk of get­ting hurt is insep­a­ra­ble from the trust we place in the peo­ple we love, and that risk is always worth it. I’ve left behind my bag­gage, some­thing no one else should have to deal with, and I’ve had enough expe­ri­ence to know exactly what I’m look­ing for in a rela­tion­ship and what kind of peo­ple work with me.

Took me 30 years to fig­ure it all out, but everybody’s gotta learn sometime.

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friendship cycles

I haven’t talked to John since he got mar­ried, which was almost a month ago. This is an inor­di­nately long time, con­sid­er­ing the fact that he used to call me almost every other day. I don’t blame him cause I know he just got back from his hon­ey­moon, moved into a new house, and is catch­ing up on work. I’ve never been hap­pier for him, but that still leaves me long­ing for the com­fort of the only per­son I say so much to. He was my only con­sis­tent source of inter­ac­tion with the out­side world.

cutting the wedding cake

Head table, bitches.

Alayna just had her 20 week ultra­sound, and they’re going to have a boy. When the baby’s born, I’ll have even less of him.

It’s not like I’ve given up on John, but I have to face the fact that he’s in a very dif­fer­ent place now, and needs to focus on his fam­ily. That means I need to give him space; it’s exactly what he would do for me if our sit­u­a­tions were reversed1. Considering the fact that the rela­tion­ship, mar­riage, baby, and house weren’t on the hori­zon only half a year ago, it’s a very sud­den change for me.

I’ve learned that all rela­tion­ships — roman­tic or not — have unique begin­nings and end­ings. Some are short-term and run their course quickly, oth­ers are long-term and last until pass­ing, and they can all come and go at any point in our lives.

It makes me won­der when I’ll meet another friend I can spend time with the way I can with John. Someone I can call up and hang out with spon­ta­neously, with­out feel­ing like I need to keep them enter­tained. Someone I can have on the phone with­out say­ing any­thing, and for whom I can have an excuse to cook. Someone around whom I can let my guard down, which is prob­a­bly the most dif­fi­cult thing for me to do when it comes to being social. There have been a few peo­ple like that through the years, but things fall apart, and that’s why I’m left here, miss­ing the com­fort of a close friend.

  1. Although I’m sure it’d be eas­ier for him cause I’m more depen­dent, even though I tend to be the one in con­trol in our friend­ship. []

Protected: our journeys

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The Process (or why a tree is not a tree)

Take a leaf off a tree. Is it still a tree? Take a sin­gle twig off a tree. Is it still a tree? Remove an entire branch from a tree. Is it still a tree? Take off half of the branches. Is it still a tree? Cut down the whole tree, leav­ing only the stump. Is it still a tree? Many peo­ple would say no, it is no longer a tree, though the roots may still be in the ground. Well, where did the tree go? Removing a leaf, it remains a tree, but not by remov­ing all of the branches and the trunk?

In the real world, there aren’t any things as we com­monly think of them. A ‘thing’ as we refer to it is only a noun. A noun is merely an idea, a men­tal con­struct. These ‘things’ exist only in our minds. There is no tree, there is only the idea of a tree.

—Anonymous

I’ve been writ­ing here for almost a decade, pour­ing 10 years of my life into this blog. I recently con­sid­ered clean­ing up the con­tent by delet­ing a sig­nif­i­cant chunk of my old entries; I’m not the same per­son as when I wrote them, and I don’t even like who I was back then. Not to men­tion the fact that some are rather embar­rass­ing, like read­ing your old diary in high school when the biggest prob­lem was what peo­ple thought when you wore your uni­form cause you for­got it was a Civvies Day.

The prob­lem I was faced with was decid­ing what should be deleted. People aren’t sta­tic; they’re processes, events, evo­lu­tions, made up of cells that con­tin­u­ally renew them­selves on a daily basis. At what defin­able point can I say these entries are no longer me? It could be argued that even posts as recent as a few months ago aren’t an accu­rate rep­re­sen­ta­tion, though there may still rem­nants of the old me in the habits of my thoughts.

Then I came across this pas­sage in The Tao by Mark Forstater, on the sub­ject of how using human lan­guage to encom­pass and describe a con­cept such as the Tao is log­i­cally sus­pect: “Reality can’t be enclosed and described by words. Symbols aren’t real in the way that a tree is real, and how­ever much we may delude our­selves that they are, we’ll even­tu­ally find that the word ‘water’ won’t quench our thirst.”

I came to accept that the things I write here have never been and never will be a com­plete reflec­tion of who I am, so I’ve decided to keep all the entries. The ones writ­ten by my old self serve as a reminder of who I was, and at the very least, they tell me where I’ve been and how far I’ve come.

Protected: when the sunshine don't work, the good lord bring the rain in

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until tomorrow

The days go on con­tin­u­ously, mea­sured in beats-per-minute. Winter’s here in all it’s bright glory, but the sun sets a lit­tle later every day, mark­ing the change of sea­sons. It’s the only way for me to keep track of the pass­ing time.

So many days are spent alone, yet I don’t feel lonely. The only prob­lem with iso­la­tion is that it lets me spend too much time with my own thoughts. This, com­bined with my intro­verted ten­den­cies (which means my stim­u­la­tion comes from mem­o­ries), makes me feel like I’m trapped in the past. I sup­pose it’s not all bad, but it cer­tainly does make it harder for me to heal.

Bronwen puts on makeup

 

I don’t know what to write. There isn’t the same strug­gle or need to vent. I find myself sit­ting and star­ing at a blank screen for hours at a time. It’s not like I feel the need to say some­thing for the sake of it. There are still thoughts and ideas that linger, things to get off my chest, but they’re either too too sim­ple to men­tion, or too com­plex to put down.

It’s strange to see this path laid out before me. I could wan­der off and explore new things, but I’m still too comfortable.

Things don’t change, but I don’t think I mind so much anymore.

returns

The only thing I bought in Britain was this tea can­dle shade of the London sky­line, found in a shop filled with baubles and knick knacks where Mike and Emma took me. They had a feel­ing it was my kind of thing. Funny to think that they knew me so well already in those three days. I love watch­ing the shad­ows dance across the shade in warm colours.

I went through an entire spec­trum of emo­tions there. Through all the won­der and excite­ment were still moments of weak­ness, gid­di­ness, sad­ness, and inse­cu­rity, because there are things you can’t escape by fly­ing to the other side of the world.

I’ve since set­tled back into my old life. The trip didn’t change me, not in any epiphanic way at least. It was more of an affir­ma­tion of myself and the way I’ve been see­ing things.

There were so many times that I was far out of my com­fort zone, thrust into inde­pen­dence, push­ing my lim­its, and that forced me to be objec­tive to keep my wits about me. In those objec­tive moments were objec­tive views of myself, where I began to under­stand that I was respon­si­ble for every­thing that was hap­pen­ing. For all the mem­o­ries and expe­ri­ences and footage and friendships.

And sud­denly, I real­ized, I like me.

Protected: contentment or complacency

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Life is what you make it

But some­times, you go all in, you lose on the river, and you just don’t feel like play­ing anymore.