How do you know

Being your own person is a daily exercise. It requires daily effort.

Who you keep, who you keep at bay, and who you keep away are daily decisions along with what to eat and what to where and its coincident questions of when and how.

We renew and build. We destroy and banish. In the end, what matters are relationships, whether in your dying bed or in your pursuit of happiness, one of which is better shared.

Being alive is an active decision. Like being happy – being happy is a decision. Choose to be happy by doing what matters most. Be happy by doing what scares you because you enlarge the areas where you are less afraid.

Write about it. Play it in your mind like an LSS. Talk about it. Expose yourself to it externally. Roost and let it stew internally. Breathe it, drink it and eat it until you live it. I know is not I am. What are you going to do about it? That's the only thing you can control.

Communicate

 

29 December 2021

Dated the last entry with today's date. That's corrected now. Do I want the year to end so badly I skipped a day?

Nehemiah is with me now for Chapter 2. It seemed so simple. He shows up sad and the king concerns himself with him. That's a compassionate king and Nehemiah is a detailed planner. His conversation with the king sounds like a scripted dialogue, as if Nehemiah anticipated the king's reaction and had answers prepared.

That's the key to communication, tailoring your speech to your conversation partner-audience. A concept known but is still hard to practice. My speech is raw and spontaneous - Matthew 12:34. And now I must develop that skill.

Progress

 28 December 2021

I still don't know who I am and what I'm doing. 30 years alive and I still don't know shit.

It's not safe to assume that other people don't either.

How do I know? In reality, there's no subtext. In reality, people's motives are unclear. In truth, the world has no borders. It is large and limitless. Shadows are as prevalent as light. And you become aware that you are suspended in a vast space and that whatever holds you together are weak compared to everything that exists.

And because I am precariously placed, I will treasure my moments, no matter how pointless or passive. 

There will be no point in resistance. Because I could not fight, I will allow happenstance. I will accept the randomness of life, exerting my will only when I am enticed to.

My reality now does not appear real. It has no stench of suffering or pain. It is curated and brightly lit. Where people leisurely stroll and hear the water roll. How delightful it sounds! The induced drips on porcelain has simulated the sound of waterfalls. It sounds soothing and cool.

I dislike all the manipulating and posturing which I can't help but notice in this upscale place. But that's how it works. Prejudice and bias are irrational but real.

I am fighting the compulsion to type how I think and feel. I am before people who I chose to spend my dinner with.

Supposedly, I am celebrating a successful webinar. Must be a cynic because I don't see it that way, merely grateful that it's over.

2 hours after, dinner's over and I still am amazed at how other people could be consistently sharp - every word they say could cut. In a manner of the samurai, where every flick cuts as intended; a surgeon where every nick is purposeful; a butcher where every hack is deliberate. These people are not god, but their words do as they bid. And here I am, I speak the same language and use the same words, but they do not make contact. They do not penetrate and embed themselves in other people's consciousness. They are conveniently unheard and reflexively forgotten. If only messages are heard as they are, not only according to whose words they are.

There are many ways to categorize people. How there are others who could make mountains move because they believe they could. And there are Jon Snow people. People who have been given everything to be powerful but keep on choosing not to be. I mean, come on, from his lineage, his alliances, his bearing, the situations he was placed in, great things were expected of him. He could change a lot of things and he missed them. He did not dwell on his standing and its implications. He chose to be himself and lost what he could become until he finally ran out of opportunities to influence. Then there are Bran Stark people who, from esoteric means, weild power by building up on other people's misfortunes like they are pawns then delegate the responsibility to others so he could look into a future he could not change as he desires.

Let me prosper. I am a seed and I do not know what I would grow to be. Sunlight, rain and soil combine. Air be there and thine. Whence I shall see what I'll grow to be.

Diaspora

27 December 2021

What is the best way to ensure that my thoughts are well-sorted out? By writing. That's how it seemed to be. I bombard myself with watching stuff to make sense of myself but it did not work out. If I remain quiet and silent, nothing wiill work well. I have all this repressed anger for how I've been wronged. But I'd rather not. I will focus on being myself more than anyone else.

Who am I really? I don't know yet. But I am more than willing to figure out - risking face, failure, effort, time and resources. What do I see? I am floundering. But for more than a moment, it feels good. I am now in a point in my life where there is no comfort in where I currently am. I have no other recourse than to make another path, live another life, be another me. This does not mean I am to lie to myself and not be me. I am now free of myself, free to be a person who is free, who will be brave and strong, unhampered by expectations, pressures and the anxiety of responsibility. I am a slave but that does not encumber me to be filled with misery.

What do I want to talk about today, well for the two nights I was at home with my dad and mom and youngest sister, I dreamt of death. The first one, we were in a skirmish and was pursued. Sam had to kill them. Eventually, someone came for us and it was clear to me that they were targeting Sam. The next dream, I was the one killing, I speared people with sharpened bamboo.

The first dream was empty. I felt nothing. I was only watching it take place. All the violence. People were being killed everywhere around me. I may not remember it, but maybe I killed others too. There was blood, but it was in 2D, dry and certainly not flowing nor metallic smelling. Dreams have no scent. It surrounds me but it was unimportant. Like something that has to happen, a rite of passage I need to go through for a future I don't know.

Like the blood, the entire dream was fake and fantastic. I was empty. People were dying, or were they dead in the first place, merely animated for that scene? That's what it felt like, something that's played out for no reason at all. Incidental killing in a scene of kill or be killed.

The second dream showed me differently. I was actively killing. I desired bloodshed. I revelled in inflicting pain and death.

What is it that I wanted to end? I wanted to end my naivete. I am 30 years old. I have seen how weak I could be, how weak I actually am. I give up easily and complain as often as air is available. I am stoppable and tend to not resist, moving sideways.

It is easy to accept this and not resist. I am passive and accept things as they are. Let's try it consciously and observe where it brings me.

Things follow a natural course, like a cycle. And as much as I could not extract myself from society, I am orienting myself to abide by its expectations. I'm 30 and never even had my first kiss, much more a boyfriend so I subscribed to Bumble. This year, I also lost to Kinney and TuneGaga. It is tiring to lose.

It feels like I live for nothing.

I work over and over, trying to be frugal and streamlining stuff. It does not work that way at all. How differently should I live to get a different result?

What rankles me most is the absence of crickets. Just when I've pegged myself to be serenaded by them everyday I take the bike route to work, I lost them. I thought they were perennial. They've been absent since August. I want them back. I remember putting off writing because I wanted to write something clever that parallels the loss of the crickets, entitle it with missing crickets or cricket migration or something to that effect. Then write about my thoughts on mundane living. If I don't start writing about it haphazardly now, I wouldn't get to writing about it at all.

Because I am older, I got to thinking of how far I've gone and what I've been doing so far. I stopped writing and reading. I turned to  listening more. I learned about podcasts. By the by, I incurred my own list of debts. I've learned differently from simply intuiting why people only go by doing the bare minimum instead of giving it all out. I said I changed how I saw my parents, that they are now like overaged children, in a sense that they don't know what they're doing and where they're going. But they are still astounding, having to live twice as much as I have and still being able to live well, living life in a manner where they go on despite all those decisions they cannot undo.

I am not genius. Nor am I clever. I do not know how to strategize. Nor do I adapt easily. But it isn't about me.