Blue moon

Once in a blue moon I feel a huge need to pen down my thoughts (too! many! too! overwhelming!), and I realise this blog still exists. I feel like I only ever come here when I'm desperately sad, or when I want to remind myself that I can write something other than comms material for a company that pays me. 

I have a stressful but well-paying job, a condo apt I'm paying off, family I love but frustrate the hell out of me, solid friends, a partner I'm trying to figure out if/how to move forward with. Seeming to have everything but always feeling strangely sad and discontent.

If that doesn't sound like a Sophie Kinsella protagonist I don't know what does. And in typical novella fashion I wish something *BIG* would happen that would help me figure out what's next. 

I want,

- a job I'm passionate about, that doesn't sap my energy

- an apt I can live in on my own sans family obligations

- to stay far away from my family, ideally separated by oceans (save for gran and gramps)

- a partner who understands me  

Let's see where things are in a year. Maybe I just gotta make the big thing happen on my own, before 30 or not.

Unencumbered

I don't know why the word suddenly popped into my mind: unencumbered.

I was thinking of a word that could capture what I wished to feel. But I guess it feels right. Some days I wish I could go to therapy any time I wanted to. To remember daily to let go of the things that are not on me to decide, and that I have the power to change the things that are. I forget too often.

To feel unencumbered from human hurt, narcissism, money, lust, lies and jealousy. So many years and yet it feels like nothing has changed.

I want to be a better person that my parents were, to build a healthier and more loving and less toxic relationship than they did, to love my children wholeheartedly more than they ever did and not hurt them. The desire is so much that I fear I can't achieve it. 

And yet the idea of marriage scares me. I'd always wanted to (to prove the parents wrong?) and I thought B was the one, and then he was not. I don't know if I will ever want it again, or if I'm incapacitated because of what happened and the parents' continued feud. 

Friends and acquaintances around me keep talking about marriage. Some are pressuring their other halves into it, some tiptoeing towards it cautiously but optimistically. Others are backing away from a commitment they're not ready to make, and a few have divorced after being together barely some years.

All this fucking societal pressure. 

2021: Lost Children Archive

Had high hopes for this book as my first read of 2021 but left feeling a little underwhelmed and scattered. It was so powerful and evocative, but discontinuous with many interweaving, alternative narratives. 

Perhaps it was the best way Luiselli thought to depict (and honour) her missing subject. Fragments of text forms narrated by different characters - about the lost children she hoped to find, her struggle to keep both her children close, the elegies of lost children retold through her novel-within-a-novel. I wish she switched voices more convincingly though (it's impossible to imagine a 10 year old child thinking such mature, sophisticated thoughts that sound similar to what his mother had narrated a few pages back!) and that it wasn't such a predictable buildup to both her children eventually wandering off. 

All this aside, Luiselli's prose is undeniably, achingly beautiful. She writes about how the mother for a long time has worried about what to tell her children about the world. But now - and this is my favourite paragraph in the book - she realises that little by little, "his own mind has arranged all the chaos around us into a world... The only thing that parents can really give their children are little knowledges: this is how you cut your own nails... this is how I love you. And what children give their parents, in return, is something less tangible but at the same time larger and more lasting, something like a drive to embrace life fully and understand it, on their behalf, so they can try to explain it to them. Children force parents to go out looking for a specific pulse, a gaze, a rhythm, the right way of telling the story, knowing that stories don't fix anything or save anyone but perhaps make the world both more complex and more tolerable. And sometimes, just sometimes, more beautiful."

Dear sugar

"Love is the feeling we have for those we care deeply about and hold in high regard. It can be light as the hug we give a friend or heavy as the sacrifices we make for our children. It can be romantic, platonic, familial, fleeting, everlasting, conditional, unconditional, imbued with sorrow, stoked by sex, sullied by abuse, amplified by kindness, twisted by betrayal, deepened by time, darkened by difficulty, leavened by generosity, nourished by humor and “loaded with promises and commitments” that we may or may not want or keep.

You aren’t afraid of love, sweet pea. You’re afraid of all the junk you’ve yoked to love. We are obligated to the people we care about and who we allow to care about us, whether we say we love them or not. Our main obligation is to be forthright—to elucidate the nature of our affection when such elucidation would be meaningful or clarifying.

Withholding distorts reality. It makes the people who do the withholding ugly and small-hearted. It makes the people from whom things are withheld crazy and desperate and incapable of knowing what they actually feel.

So release yourself from that. Don’t be strategic or coy. Strategic and coy are for jackasses. Be brave. Be authentic. Practice saying the word love to the people you love so when it matters the most to say it, you will.

We’re all going to die, Johnny. Hit the iron bell like it’s dinnertime."

Grateful

I was going to write about this brewing roiling maelstrom of anxiety that's twisted my gut into a hard knot the past week - and as I type this I'm willing it away - but I thought it would be more positive to think about the best parts of this week, and things to be grateful for.

I'm grateful that one of my favorite people persevered through four years of following her heart and found love and commitment in a world that doesn't appreciate either much.

I'm grateful for the work bff finally coming home after two weeks away, long talks tonight about love and life, and our taiwan trip coming up really soon.

I'm grateful for lene flying back and us slowly muddling our way into long overdue conversation and laughter over pina coladas with bruleed meringue.

I'm grateful for the nourishing comfort of a bowl of noodle soup when all seems bleak and exhausting - warm liquid broth, soft bite of noodle, twirl of spring onion.

I'm grateful tonight because I have loved ones who tell me I am enough and not to listen to the doubts in my head, who call me and say let's meet tomorrow. I'm grateful because I know I have the strength to keep on going and I will.

Bright thoughts and hopefully beautiful dreams tonight

“Vulnerability is hard and it’s scary and it feels dangerous. But it’s not as hard, or scary or dangerous as getting to the end of our lives and having to ask ourselves: What if I would’ve shown up? What if I would’ve said ‘I love you?’ What if I would’ve come off the blocks? Show up, be seen, answer the call to courage and come off the blocks. Because you’re worth it—you’re worth being brave.”

Does mustering up the requisite courage to do something justify an equivocal surge in expectations of  said outcome?