This is the story
I hold on stubbornly to the distant yet vivid memories. I am at once happy, yet sad. Happy, because I savoured the sweet taste of love. Sad because that is the sweetest I would ever had tasted.
Emptiness and Heaviness
What does it feel like to have emptiness occupy every space of your heart? You only feel the full force of emptiness weigh down on you, while you attempt feebly to find that magic sparkle to banish the emptiness from existence. The heaviness of the heart sinks one down to the depths of emotional darkness. You only wish that what formerly occupied that emptiness could once again return to make the heart complete once again.
Tripping at the final hurdle
Your whole life has been a journey, where one deed is built on another. The existence of a previous experience is often rationalised and justified by the subsequent one it paves way for. The movement of experience fluctuates in troughs and peaks, but at critical checkpoints, you successfully clear the necessary hurdles to move forward - with the confidence of your history safely in your hands.
You are to be judged by how you cross the final hurdle. The final hurdle defines the path and conclusion of the journey you have taken thus far, for this is how the journey will be remembered. The final hurdle is one that could be gracefully and dextrously sailed over, clumsily but effectively breached - or disastrously negotiated to the point you are stopped dead in your tracks. Tripping at the final hurdle cascades in a domino-effect to taint, contaminate and trivialise the fruit of your toil and sweat in previous manouevres. One by one, the hurdles are all fallen, and you have nothing left to show, except for that fallen masterpiece that had been mercilessly robbed of its stature by a careless, awkward brushstroke across its face.
I've found the answers i've been looking for
While struggling to rationalise my pessimism, unhappiness, and source of discomfort in recent days, I had tried to find answers from around me - the people whom i am close to, the things that i do, the things i didn't do, some things that i had done, and happenings around me. What I had found offered a brief and superficial respite to the nagging sore in my chest. Like an analgesic, they only dull the pain. They offer the illusion of comfort and resolution to the deep-rooted problems i was confronting. Unfortunately the pain prevails to consume that ephemeral consolation, and ruthlessly swing me back into grim reality. The nagging sore throbs with vigour, truimphant in spirit, leaving me as beseiged and beleagered as before.
In fact, the dark grey clouds i had construed to be around me turned out to be inside me. What had in fact cast a pall on my otherwise cheerful enthusiasm was in fact the construct of a self-imposed pessimism. To break free, I had to reconcile my paranoia with the lighter shade of reality. I had to be ready to break free from that self-reinforcing negativity to liberate myself, to feel free again, to feel happy again. I was causing my own unhappiness because I had forged an alternative to reality which i was so ready to accept as being more likely to happen. As such, i had caused pain not only to myself, but to others around me. My unhappiness was a source of unhappiness for people who cared. And they were unfounded, merely the product of narrow-minded conviction. Once i was ready to dispel these dark clouds, all it took was a smile to myself to once again see the bright sunshine and the happier tomorrow.
I will not hurt anyone like this again.
Nurturing notions of yourself
What are you? And what do you ought to be? The former is largely a product of your own doing, literally speaking. You've shaped yourself into the person you are through your actions, or sometimes inaction, but ultimately you have been largely responsible for turning out the scoundrel that everyone hates, or the bona fide charmer everyone loves. The latter of course is the construct of the perspectives and expectatations of people around you, what they think you are capable of achieving, what they want you to become for their sake, and of course what they do not want you to be, if you are already one. Complementing this aspect of peer appraisal would thus be self-appraisal. This is the bridge between you and what you ought to be, where you reconcile the differences between what is prevailing and what is ideal, as seen from your own eyes and from others'.
It boils down to the management of expectations between what some people have of you and what you have of yourself, where you confront the apparent chasms, that leaves you sorely inadequate. We always strive to measure up to these expectations, but in some moments, we confront setbacks which leave u emotionally bruised and inebriated. This is the source of both a sense of emptiness, and heaviness in the heart, because you want so badly to be something or someone, but you are not, yet, and you wonder if you ever will be.
Emotional implosions.
Do you ever experience the feeling of extreme congestion in your guts coupled with a leaden heart, a deadly combination which threatens to psychologically cripple you? It renders the flow of your blood torpid, sluggish. Leaving you shackled to the infinite weight of an emotional baggage composed of memories, retrospection, and doses of regret. Whereupon you question the meanng of your existence. That the golden rules that you've always lived by have only been empty and frivolous dreams. These are moments which one feels almost silly, but is yet secretly pining for the good old days.
You wish you could let it all out, but unfortunately, they stubbornly grow like tumours to consume your happiness and hope, leaving you dry, empty and pointless.
Silent introspection
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The inescapable truths
On a related note, I also find myself confronting inescapable truths. Truths are defined as matters of fact which authenticity and veracity are undeniable. Inescapable somehow implies that the truth applies to you, and there is little way you can expect to worm yourself out of it, or even attempt to deny its existence. The matter at hand, of course, is what we commonly refer to as "work". That there is work to be done is an inescapable truth. The highly negative connotation conveyed through the usage of the word "inescapable", as if one were trying to run away from something, reinforces the nauseating notion we attempt to broach and expose into broad daylight.
And as we all know, there are the truisms, aphorisms, and maxims associated with the concept of cause and effect. The inescapable truth of the effects of not doing work are well-explored..very...let's not go into that. It just makes me feel more guilty, and we go back to the part where i discussed about wrestling with emotions.
Wrestling with emotions
As some of you may know, living with housemates is never easy, especially when your housemate(s) happen(s) to be what we know in hokkien as "buay zi dong". For the past month, i have been assailed with problems relating to a pesky character of a housemate i had to endure, with which there is little avenue for recourse except for that occasional lamentation to my friends. Even then, it is not in a true sense a form of recourse, because there is no resolution - I am simply too nice to do the right thing and stand for my rights. And on that rare occcasion i summoned enough justification to warrant an outburst, it backfires for all the wrong reasons because i have, alas, misunderstood. That is the way it is, when we attempt to rectify anomalies to life the way we are used to living, which if otherwise left unchecked, emerge as insurmountable barriers which impede our progress, and distract us from the much more pertinent issues at hand.
The perfectly rational approach towards an emotional blockade is to simply ignore it. But emotions are there precisely because they supercede a rational paradigm. Emotions are classified as such because they are representative of a state of consciousness which attempts to define our personal sense of logic and thus rationality. The expression or manifestation of a particular emotion in response to a situation, incident, is highly atypical when generally viewed, typical only to that very individual from whom it has arisen. It is a subscription to the view toat you are what you feel, and in a sense, your emotional make-up forges your personal identity. Wrestling with your emotions is a way of discovering ourselves, so it may not be such a bad thing after all. Ignoring it may be as good as denying yourself the opportunity to set yourself apart.
