lines in the sand

I hate myself, at the worst of times. At the best, I live with myself, the way, in my head, that one might live with a despicable housemate you wouldn’t mind gone.

It’s sort of terrifying–the way that I’ve found myself suddenly crying and blowing up at people, overreacting and trying to fix it post situation. Now that I’m back at my parents’ with access to a car, it’s far harder to justify not wanting to go out to meet people, or finding ways to not go to that meeting with club members, or, once I’m out, to go back home and face the pressing expectations.

I can feel myself caring less. It’s hard to care when you don’t really see a future beyond perhaps the next few months. Tbh, I think I’ve been spiraling down this rabbit hole for a long time now, but it’s just that recently there’s been less in my life to make up for the pit in my stomach. It got worse after I started adjudicating in debates, honestly, that the thoughts of how I’m ruining other people really started popping up. Plus, not running for elections for the new committee in the club I was in, where I had extensive responsibilities for running tournaments and affecting processes and dialogues to a large extent made me feel like I was losing control.

So I’ve been systematically cutting away things. Avenues that make me feel like I was losing my grip– group chats for the club exec I was no longer part of where the new committee continued to discuss, I exited with well wishes. Friends that never really saw me I cut down my exposure to. My parents I can’t do anything about, even though they’re more than half the reason why I’ve grown up plagued by low self-esteem and anxiety, and a continuous source of exacerbation to the devaluation of my self in relation to other people. Their hearts are in the right place, but somehow… I’m glad that I have this respite. Maybe someday when I die, this can be a marker for someone as to how I lived.

Things that are amazing

The best and possibly the worst thing about text communication is that all you need are the right punctuation and the right words, and you can convince anyone of anything.

sporadic update!

I’m a 20 year old Asian, and I am like my peers. I am melodramatic and hyperbolic. I am quick to please, because that’s what I’ve been taught. I exaggerate, and I am the center of my own universe.

I write that out, because sometimes I really need the reminder that my problems mean a lot less than I think they do. If your problems aren’t important, it doesn’t really matter whether the get solved– isn’t that how it works? I just happen to be one of the multitude, with weight on their shoulder, and money in their wallets; we are the rich generation that doesn’t know rich, because we’ve never known poor.

I feel like I don’t belong– just like everybody else.

I feel like I can’t breathe– just like someone else.

I never feel good about myself– but there’s someone else with the same problem too.

— it doesn’t make me feel better? It makes me sad and resigned but also pushes me to another day, because maybe everyone feels this way, and maybe one day I’ll be able to find myself because no one else will, and maybe one day I’ll be okay with being alone.

(Also, I drank alcohol(legal here, tqvm), and learnt that sometimes when your friends are drunk and exhausted, that’s the best time to confess, because they won’t remember come morning.)

-on a unrelated, twanging note

I grew up in a particularly mixed-culture family. Not because of multiple ethnicities; because we were had too-liberal ideals to be conservative. and too-traditional values to be Westernised. The former meant that my parents allowed a large measure of freedom when it came to things like academics, as long as we fell between the lines that my parents drew, somewhere in the sand.

So whilst we were chill and laidback, we, whether consciously or unconsciously, taught to seek the approval of my parents. When we were younger, when we went to book fair, we would pass our books to my mother before we bought the books. Any books she didn’t approve of was discarded. When we wanted to go the toilet, we would ask my mother first.

I’ve been struggling with my words, the way I’ve been struggling with myself. My finals are coming up next week, and some part of me decides that maybe now’s a good time to be infected with a dose of wanderlust, and the want to be loved.

I’ve always wanted to travel, to see– quietly, organically, the places easily forgotten. I am the person that squeezes through the half-opened gate to see what lies beyond. I am the person who climbs over locked fences to get to the empty roof, and thrill in the height. I am the person that wants to call to the sky, but remembers the fear of falling. I am the person that goes places alone. Always alone.

Maybe this is growing up, as I gradually go from a teen to a part time adult. Maybe being an adult is this feeling of yourself not being enough, the way compliments turn greasy and complicated. Maybe being an adult is forever wishing that someone will be there to catch you like your parents did once ago. Maybe growing up is learning the fear of losing, and realizing no one can catch another when they’re both falling.

whoosh

I feel like I’ve come unstuck from the railings of life.

I’m sitting in a overpriced coffee shop– an “espresso bar” with overcooked lamb shoulder and watery carrot soup, laptop open and book besides, a picture of a acrylic bicycles in the wall opposite me. It’s done up in sky blues and blacks, with accents of yellow and orange and red.

Today I just feel like rambling on and on about what things look like, because days like these– when the sky is a smoke grey and everything smells of the city, when people in these shops come searching for companionship over coffee and cake and too wide tables–I feel an itch under my skin, over it too, while my skin seems impermeable to any words I would like to really say.

I’m sitting here with lukewarm ice lemon tea (sour and slightly bitter), trying to get the ramblings out, so that I can start again to move in a straightforward line towards something, anything, a future that I’m afraid of getting to.

The whir of the espresso machine is humming in the background, the humdrum of daily city life.

The vague-confession post

So… sometimes, I think about things I probably shouldn’t? Maybe it’s the media, maybe it’s the games; who knows, but the point of the matter is the fact that sometimes your’s truly has somewhat appallingly possessive thoughts like woah bro slow down (despite the fact that I am neither a bro or someone who needs slowing down).

These thoughts usually come around the time that I ironically get to that part of my emotional cycle (not monthly tqvm stereotypes) where I become so faux-punk and so incredibly pretentious and self-absorbed that I become a grade-S asshole. And while this affects next to no one externally, seeing as how I am a loner with no non-acquaintance friends to speak of, this means that the Me brought up by Good Values and Kind Thoughts thanks to my parents ends up with guilt the approx. weight of a blue whale.

On one hand, I have the satisfaction of being an asshole; on the other, guilt trip.

The selection is much harder than you might think.