Over

I think it's finally over.

It has happened a couple of times before. My mind is often only one realisation away from being able to let go of someone. It's like jumping off a cliff and landing in the ocean; one minute it's dry and hot, and the next, it's wet, salty and chaotic.

It happened for me today. I was walking past these awesome shiny walls and checking out my profile when a phrase popped into my head. "He makes me feel safe." It was an answer to a question that a friend had posed to me a month or two back, asking about why I was into him. The answer still stands. I had felt safe, protected and cared for. He was like this huge and mighty harbor, and as long as I was in it, I was safe. I had perceived him as this strong, kind and passionate force.

He doesn't protect me anymore. I don't feel safe. Instead, I am scared. I am scared of his backlash; I am scared of his volatility. I am scared because taking care of me is no longer his priority, and it means that all that power he possessed can now be turned against me. He is someone that can belittle me and push me around on a whim. He has no respect for me and little compassion. He does not make me feel safe.

I have no interest in the present him.

Intimacy and Kundera

The intimacy that Kundera creates between reader and character is so poignant it is almost perverse.

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"Agnes recalled that once as a child, she was dazzled by the thought that God sees her and that he was seeing her all the time. That was perhaps the first time that she experienced the pleasure, the strange delight that people feel when they are being watched, watched against their will, watched in intimate moments, violated by the looks to which they were exposed. Her mother, who was a believer told her 'God sees you', and this is how she wanted to teach her to stop lying, biting her nails and picking her nose, but something else happened: precisely at those times when she was indulging her bad habits, or during physically intimate moments, Agnes imagined God and performed for his benefit."

- Immortality by Milan Kundera

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A Lifelong Marathon

A lifelong marathon.

I am someone that is intrinsically motivated by self-discipline. I love it. I get off on it. I want to see it in me, and I savor it in other people. My obsession with it probably stems from the fact that I am a lazy, floppy and chronically sleepy person.

Today as I was doing my bible reading, I looked at the date that I had scribbled on the top right hand corner of my notebook and saw 8/10/2012. I then proceeded to flip backwards to see how many consecutive days of bible reading have I managed thus far. 21 days. A little bubble of self-satisfaction was starting to emerge in me, when the phrase "A lifelong marathon" popped into my head, and squashed it. I made it 21 days. I have tens of thousands to go.

For tens of thousands of days to come, I would have to make the right choices to engage in good, healthy and godly behavior such as working, running, eating right, sleeping well, going to church and being nice. Just the thought of it is enough to make me want to crawl back under my covers. However, there is a little glimmer of light on the horizon. All of these things take a conscious effort to maintain right now, but our brains are much too clever to put us through such arduous pain for long.

- Automaticity is the result of learning, repetition and practice. It is the ability to do things without occupying the higher functioning of our mind. It is the miraculous stage when self-control turns into habit. -

I believe that we are all running a lifelong marathon. It takes conscious effort, self-discipline and self-love to continue running. There is no reward without struggle. No fit body without exercise, no knowledge gained without studying and no growth in god without first knowing his word. However it does get easier as we go along. With learning, repetition and practice, making the right choices become habitual and less effort is expended on struggling between choices. Getting good at something brings a sense of fulfillment and self-efficacy which reinforces the behavior.

Maybe a few hundred more days would get me there. ;)

P.S.

I came across this phrase in my cousin's fitness blog the other day. To credit him a little, here is the link to his page. http://www.edwinchew.com/readmore.php?id=106

Love Vs. 爱

One of my favourite passages from A Concise Chinese-English Dictionary for Lovers by Xiaolu Guo

"Love," this English word: like other English words it has tense. "Loved" or "will love" or "have-loved." All these specific tenses mean Love is time-limited thing. Not infinite. It only exist in particular period of time. In Chinese, Love is 爱(ai). It has no tense. No past and future. Love in Chinese means a being, a situation, a circumstance. Love is existence, holding past and future.

Anlene

I have been obsessed with the idea that I have not been getting proper nutrition lately. Milk is too expensive and I just cannot afford to buy fresh milk that is going to get stolen from the communal dorm fridge.

The 20s are extremely important for building up the body's resilience towards diseases that are sure to come. Therefore, after much worrying about osteoporosis in my future, I stumbled across the best solution to getting a cheap source of calcium in my diet.

Voila! Powdered Milk! Anlene and I are going to keep me healthy!

Stupidity

I am a mess.

At least I feel like I am. Ask any of my closest friends and they would tell you that I am someone that appears to have it all figured out, a person that is together in the most self-possessed sense of the word - Together.

I have proof to refute them. Let me brandish the proof like a self-mocking, triumphant flag.

I missed the deadlines for the scholarships to Oxford. 

Cognitive Control

I think I have cognitively controlled my self-esteem into a funk.

I really like this boy that is neurotic, deeply passionate, manipulative, controlling, magnetic, vulnerable and beautifully spiritual. In one of his short-lived but intense periods of passion, I was drawn into his world.

His passion for me has been extinguished.

I want to be close to him again. I want to be special in his life. I want to know why. I want to take care of him. I want to be there for him.

It is a drastic drop into insignificance.

As a sane, pragmatic and self-loving individual, I have been trying to take measures to protect myself. My chosen method of coping has been cognitive control. I try to kill all hope within and suppress wishful thoughts. When I want to walk towards him, I tell myself that he does not want me anymore. When he takes the seat beside me, I tell myself that it is because of the person on the other side. When he says that he does not care about my feelings, I take it literally. When he only sees me in a group, I tell myself that it is because he is keeping a distance from me. When he spends time with the girl I was a rebound from, I tell myself that it is because she is more spiritual, pure, innocent and more lovable than me.

I need to stop this. I wanted to write my thoughts out so that I may realise how absolutely disgusting and self-defeating they are. So he isn't into me anymore. Well, I sincerely think that it is his loss. I refuse to be a martyr. I refuse to even be in the same competition as a teenager. I am a strong, intelligent, loving, supportive and beautiful young woman. I am growing in my faith every day, I have found, and am immersed in study that makes me excited for life. God loves me. I am his daughter.

Now, I just have to work on believing all the above when I am standing in front of him.

Cookie Cutter Christian

I want to be a Cookie Cutter Christian.

When I was 13 going on 14, I had a crush on a girl named Jasmine. She was soft-spoken, kind, and a badminton player. Jasmine wasn't particularly pretty, but there was something about her that made me deeply desire her attention and admiration. Jasmine was the first person to invite me to a church event. It was an outreach by the beach on the other side of the island. I remember that I felt awkward, and in my eagerness to prove myself to Jasmine, made several false starts in a running game.

Jasmine's basic info on FB consists only of one line: Religious Views - Christian.

Jasmine could be viewed as my teenage dabble in homosexuality, or she could be seen as the first in my pattern of cookie cutter christians.

While other girls went through their phases of being attracted to bad boys, I was drawn irresistibly to the good ones. The ones that shone with a loving gentleness, the ones in whose lives god is inextricable. I put on a pedestal the ones who grew up in loving Christian families and were conditioned from a very young age with premium christian values. They knew how to speak Christian-nese, they knew what was right and wrong, they knew without a doubt that god exists. Their worlds were painted black and white, their moralities taught to them and they knew everyone at church. The attraction wasn't exactly romantic, it was admiration with a power differential.

I have a theory about my admiration. I do not possess naivete or an easy smile. Happiness, ease and contentment do not come easily to me. I am over analytical, morally ambiguous and a sensualist. Even as a child, I was hypercritical, anxious and negative. All these aside, there has always been in me a longing for good, for lightness. I became and stayed a Christian because of the heart wrenching goodness of god. Salvation, eternal life... these are concepts that I am deeply grateful for, but have never quite resonated in me. I believe that it is the contrast that draws me to these cookie cutter types. They have what I do not and because of that, I desire intensely their approval.

The problem with my attraction is that the closer I get to these cookie cutter types, the more the proximity highlights my darkness relative to their light and my moral ambiguity in contrast to their black and white worlds. I begin to feel overly critical, I start to resent my moderate christian line, I start to panic as to why I don't seem to want the right things, or say the right things, or possess the right values. I don't even listen to the proper music or read the right books! Being in church is difficult.

I want to be a cookie cutter christian. I wish I was conditioned when my mind was malleable and impressionable to believe that god exists. I wish sunday school taught me Christian-nese and told me exactly what to do and what not to do. I wish I was conditioned to want and seek happiness, to embrace positivity and love. I wish I was less analytical, less critical and more accepting. I wish my world was clearly split into black and white for me by a spiritual youth group leader. I wish I was Cookie Cutter Christian enough.

Yes. It is obvious that I struggle with feelings of inadequacy that should not have a place in the heart of a child of God. I want to be more loving, I want to possess a spirit of gentleness and servitude. I want to love god and his people more. I know that there are other non cookie cutter ways to go about it, but sometimes I just wish things were easier, that I would not have to struggle so much with my faith. I want to be there already. However, we all have our unique challenges in God. I believe that the God that placed me in a non-christian household, that gave me my critical mind and slightly neurotic personality did so with complete control and divine intent. I trust in the one purely good entity. I long for a different path, but I know that it is not my road to take.

I want to be a cookie cutter christian, but I do not want to become one.

Hypomania

I thought I was mentally unwell last week. I gave myself the diagnosis of Hypomania.

I had boundless energy, a constant grin on my face, reduced need for sleep, and confidence to surmount all obstacles. I talked to strangers, was quickly irritated and accomplished a large amount of tasks in a short period of time. I felt good, strong, and slightly unhinged.

Today I learnt that periods of Hypomania are a result of excessive dopamine secretions in the brain. Dopamine floods the system and results in increased feelings of pleasure and action seeking to attain rewards. Hypomaniac episodes last 4-6 days and are normally followed by depressed periods due to depleted stores of dopamine in the brain.

As it stands, I don't think I have Hypomania, it was a misdiagnosis. I attribute my elevated mood to the sense of newness and freshness each new school year brings. I attribute my reduced need for sleep to excitement, my confidence to past experience. I attribute my crazed sense of purpose, my commitment to filling up every minute of the day, my increased reliance on god and my increased sociability to a defense mechanism - protecting my brain against thoughts that would undermine my self worth and thoughts that would wipe the smile from my face.

An organized and packed schedule helps. Watch me turn the anger and the self-doubt into something that would shine brighter than the sun.

Iatrogenic

Word of the day: Iatrogenic
Induced in a patient by a physician's activity, manner, or therapy.

An example of Iatrogenic in a sentence would be -

"A common concern among physicians is that asking about the presence of self-injury will have an iatrogenic effect by giving individuals the idea to engage in such behavior when they would otherwise not have thought to do so." (This concern has been proven invalid by recent research)