Procrastinator no longer, or taking a break from extended impasse, I have just signed up for a eight-week writing course.
People often ask me what I spend my money on. Seldom on things and trinkets as I view them to be wasteful collections stemming from mindless consumerism and intentional distractions.
I decided to invest in myself and embark on an intentional journey towards my overdue goal of chronicling my own narrative.
Because I invest my money and time on people, not things.
Unleash the beast from within.
Reveal the best that has yet to see the light.
You tiptoe and bend your shoulders forward to hunch and fit through frames made for those much smaller than you.
You find this life bland and unappetizing because you thirst for more. You are meant to drink from fire hydrants, not a garden hose.
Your one step is their thousand little shuffles. And so you’ve slowed down to let them catch up to you. You had to stop altogether because your going slow is still too fast for them. Afraid of crushing them with your giant steps, you hesitate.
You breathe small breaths for the fear of blowing them away. You can barely stretch, for the fear of hitting the fluttering pygmies all around you.
Always, you are afraid of causing harm.
Until you come across a herd of larger than life creatures.
They look like you. They bellow. They create wind as they run through the forests blooming with imagination.
They beckon you to join them.
You bring your shoulders back. Take a big breath before gulping down the green and blue liquid. You take one massive step to leap across the ocean to join your family of giants.
Because we are only in charge of ourselves and no one else.
How difficult is it to change ourselves, our habits and our beliefs? How many times have you broken a promise to yourself? I will lose weight. I will go to the gym. I will be on time. I will always tell the truth.
We try with best of intentions and fail despite being “in control” of ourselves.
Now imagine trying to fix another imperfect human.
She is my antidote. Cure against chaos. Voice of reason. Guardian of sanity.
The spout tips and tears pour out.
I come out of drunken stupor. I see for the very first time. I am surrounded by halves, another childhood habit of appeasing the timid. To bridge the gap between the pedestal from which I am perched and those admiring me from afar. A friend recounted a similar childhood experience. He called himself the “reluctant golden child”. I was the same: reluctant and recalcitrant.
She reminds me of who I used to be and where I am. She asks me tough questions. She calls me out on my bullshit.
I empty myself. Truth pours out. I am lighter and stronger than I was before we spoke.
She is my star.
Another entry from 2016:
What you nurture
What you practice
Are the things that grow.
What you ignore
Items parked for procrastination
Are the things we never become.
Why are we so stingy with receiving kindness when we are too happy to give it to others?
Journal entry from 2016. When asked for feedback, my cohort from the altMBA program said the following:
“You are warm, energetic, intelligent, observant, joyful, very likable and driven. You are also compassionate and kind.
Possibly also generous but I don’t know you well enough to determine.
You are highly capable, in fact, much more than you choose to do. I think you are very careful about the commitments you choose for yourself be it work, people or activities.
You like control and reliability is important to you. So you commit to things you know you can deliver on.
You do go for stretch but you limit the extent of stretch so that you can learn and achieve, but not fail.
You hold back your thoughts, contributions, reactions, emotions.
You share just enough to fit with the group you are in. You hold back your intelligence so that people don’t pay attention to it and aren’t threatened by it.
You practice patience but I don’t think you are that patient internally. Bottom line, I think you are much more powerful and capable than you choose to show and pursue.”
I am grateful for her insightful and kind feedback. I agree.
Instead of waiting idly, I throw things away. I declutter. I scavenge artifacts of inked pasts to reveal parts demanding to be filed away.
The helpless child has been freed. But she leaves behind her old habits.
Her crying, biting, and running away. Never secure and always afraid. Every man is a threat. She is powerless. She is mute.
Not wanting to be abandoned, she is stubborn yet agreeable at all the wrong times. She is adventurous yet timid because she knows a secret. She develops a scowl as if she were a beast to keep predators at bay. To be undesirable. To not be approachable. To be left alone. She hides herself. She hides her beauty to stay in tact. To be kept safe. She imagine a bubble to keep everything out. This also means nothing can enter.
She makes connections where there is none. She attributes her scowl or her beastly ability for escaping the thorny nightmare. She thinks what she had engineered as a child is what kept her alive.
Simple truth remained unseen. Bad things happen with no reason. The end had nothing to do with the child’s efforts or her fighting spirit.
The child remains.
I thought I had set her free. But she lingers and I must get rid of all her hiding places. So that she can be free to go into the light. She is still used to the darkness.
Tears fall as I file and shred.
I wish I could tear these memories into strips of paper, pack them into trash bags and leave them out on the curb to be picked up and thrown away. Leave me and my house. I wish it were easy.
So that I can be free of this burdensome shadow. So that I can be free to let the air in. So that I can finally disembark from this bubble of protection.
But I know better. Gibran writes, “work is love made visible”
The only way is through what the Lion calls furnace of truth. I must throw into his mouth her old habits and childish connections. I must feed fire with more truth until the furnace roars and breathes out ashes to extinguish the darkness feeding on omission and avoidance. To let the fire create light so I can see what I had been hiding for too long. To illuminate the monsters lurking in the darkness, waiting to be seen and acknowledged.
This is another journey I hadn’t planned on embarking on. The fire makes my eyes water and tears stream down once again.
I don’t want to be here, yet this is exactly where I am supposed to be.
Don’t waste it.
Don’t save it.
Don’t dread or delay it.
Use it and use it well.
Be on time. Show up.
Time powers life’s roller coaster of ups and downs of love and birth. Of loss and death. Of good and bad. Of pleasant and dreadful. Scarce and abundant.
Opposites attract to balance each other.
On “12 Rules for Life”, Jordan Peterson quotes or writes: the line between good and evil bisects everyone down the middle. Good people do bad things. Bad people do good things. We aren’t just good. Evil is in our DNA.
I’ve been listening (on repeat) to Rule 8: Tell the truth – or at least, don’t lie.
Because it tugged at my insides. It helped me to confront my habitual sin of omission for the fear of conflict. Not saying to not offend. Not knowing how. Never been taught.
This is also a learned behavior of two generations. Therefore, it is difficult (if not impossible) to unlearn terrible habits. This may be due to inadequate parental guidance due to economic hardship, incompetence, and absent parent.
At the same time, my optimism and stubborn nature won’t let me settle for anything less than a triumphant defeat of my previous self.
I know very little. I could be wrong about many things. The frame is misshapen or broken. I may have misunderstood. And I am blessed to have special people in my life to push, prod, guide and lead by example. Superb people surround me all over the world.
I am trying to get better at speaking up. To be brave. To have difficult conversations. To ask for things. To break the cycle. To break free from the collective tyranny of my former self.
Because if we can’t reveal ourselves to others, we will be unable to see ourselves for what we are.
Life is a journey of self discovery. Time is the road. Our thoughts, efforts and actions determine our path and destination.
I used to pray to stop the suffering of the soon to be departed. Once she left us, I prayed for her peace. Then for her to protect us. Then it turned into a longing and wishful thinking. I missed her and I reached out in the only way I knew how.
I no longer pray. I still believe in the power of positive thinking. I believe in the power of acknowledging fear, facing the monster inside of me, and taking small steps to do better.
I see a parallel between bible and best of the fables.
God and Jesus.
If we are on a road to self-discovery, and we must shed our old shells before moving forward. We must destroy our former selves to reveal the next level of truth waiting to be discovered. We must forge ourselves through self-immolation of our former and younger selves. No pain, no gain they say.
Maybe God is me. God is you. God is every single one of us. The future. The end.
And Jesus is me. Jesus is you. Jesus is the past. Fallible human of the today.
When we celebrate Jesus’s demise, we acknowledge the necessary sacrifices of the past before being born anew. Transformation is as painful as being nailed to the cross of our former selves blistered with terrible habits. Maybe we must be forced to carry the burden of the past before we get the courage to offload the baggage weighing us down.
We continue the burning process until we arrive at the end of our times, when we become the best (or for some, the worst) version of our greatest (or sadly, wasted) potential.
When we pray to God, we dig into our deepest and sincerest desires. Prayers are daily reminders to do what is necessary. I wonder if we become God on our last day on earth. Yesterday and Today is all that is left. Tomorrow will never come, and with this knowledge, I wonder what thoughts flash before we take our final breath (that is, if we are lucky to be awake and lucid). Like all mysterious things, we don’t know because the ones who know are gone. And by the time we do know, documenting is probably the furthest thing from our minds.
And the wind will blow.
Ash scatters to reveal a set of bright, strong and magnificent wings of a bird.
It jumps from the ledge. Plunging into the abyss of total freedom, it spreads its wings to let truth carry its body into the embrace of self acceptance.
The Phoenix rises.