The New Normal

I had wanted to start this (private) farewell to my blog as an update. I’ve been so lax here (with entries as erratic as months to years apart) that it feels funny to still call this a personal blog.

This feels more like a living time capsule. Or if I had lived in another reality, I would liken this blog to an old tree that I would occasionally whisper secrets to…. on visits to a favorite hangout of my youth that seems more and more like a memory than a real place.

I’m closing this blog at a time when I imagine most of the world is starting to pen theirs, given all the luxury time some of us now have.

It’s 2020, the year we all thought was going to be auspicious (Yes, I was born in the Year of the Rat and was hoping THIS would be a good year). It ended up mooning us all – with the year starting off with a string of natural disasters and threats of military standoffs then releasing a surprise twist even before the first quarter ended – a deadly but inconspicuous respiratory virus. From one country, it has spread to the rest of the world.

This is the 9th week of lockdown for us. It feels like time has stood still then stopped. Then started back up again and hit pause. I spent the first few weeks in suspended disbelief. I was glad of a break from work but I was naive then to realize that it would only be temporary.

Then I hit a really low point. Not surprising as my media diet consisted of listening to news from all parts of the world 24/7. Our main source of income as a couple stalled, as we both relied on clients (patients with mine, customers with his). We found ourselves getting creative with our diet, our budget… allowing for occasional splurges with dessert and seafood (when available), we are lucky still.

I’m 18 weeks pregnant. Yes, not a good time to have the resources going into “Red Zone” territory while balancing the health risks of carrying a little one that did not ask for this danger on his/her little life.

I confess I have spent the past few weeks – mind blank. My stress coping mechanisms always stall when they hit overwhelm.

It is HARD to be going through the things we are going through, especially if I imagine that I still (for my patients’ sake) have to put myself out there and offer support… I feel like the blind leading the blind.

But we adapt. One of my wiser colleagues suggested I should start blogging pregnancy/mama topics while the patients still aren’t warming to telehealth/telemedicine. To express myself while keeping my baby and I relatively sheltered until this virus gets more manageable. She does not know this exists.

I have used this blog many times to process the things going on in my (single) life. The new normal demands of me to shed my old self and maybe there is a reason why I go back here less and less.

Though it may mean a different track altogether, I’d like to keep this living time capsule as is. It started out as my official salute to my immature, 20-something self — progressed into varying degrees of complaining about being single & in the medical profession and (ironically) was the catalyst for my (now) husband to fall in love with me.. (sidenote: The day he met me and I shared this blog with him, he stayed up the entire night reading every entry and fell head over heels then & there, according to him).

Maybe if this solitary time capsule alternative had any reason to exist (on hindsight), it would be THAT. Silent, intermittent witness to the past near-decade and like a dear wise friend, ushering me to move on. Close this chapter to start another.

 

Transitions

I once described my career path before to a medical colleague (who was also my boss at the time) and likened it to a walkalator. Those convenient belts along airports that you step on and without much effort, get to where you want to go.

I won’t be the one to tell you that medicine (both school and subsequent training) is easy-peasy. No, it isn’t. Even before stepping into its daunting halls, I knew it was a vocation. A privilege.

But as I neared the end of 15 years of education & training,  a strange predicament somehow lodged itself inside my head. A seed of a thought that didn’t go away, even when I went into more & more specialized training, training I had thought all my grown life was my sole calling and life mission. A dangerous thought, if followed through to the end.

I have reached the end of that walkalator, yet stepping off it doesn’t really seem like an achievement. This isn’t it, somewhere (someone?) deep down said.

Those (familiar-but-somehow-far-away) feelings of thrills/chills up and down my spine that were abundant during the early years were curiously absent. I didn’t feel that I was “all” there. I was drifting and sadly, empty.

Previous entries (or more specifically their absence) can attest to that.

I felt like a balloon slowly but surely floating and the “self” that went about doing everything with my body and saying everything with my mouth – was only holding onto that balloon-self with a string. Only a string connecting me to the truth.

For a long, LONG, long time, I hid from that truth.

I considered my flailing and my disengagement as proof of my deficiencies – that I only needed to put more back into it, more time, more energy, etc. But none worked. Surprisingly, the survivor instinct in me still rallied to find a solution, refusing to give up.

I attended spiritual talks, self-improvement workshops. I went into online counseling, counseling with a family/marriage counselor, a psychiatrist. They temporarily provided me brief respite but in the end, I knew the problem would always circle back to me. No one else to blame…

Not the rigors of my career, Not my parents. Not my colleagues at work or my bosses.

And somehow that made me feel even more hopeless… more alone.

Then, a fork in the road.

The School of Life says breakdowns happen because it is a way that our Inner Self delivers a message. The Inner Self, rich with the wisdom of experience our Outer Self often just glosses over or denies… A message that CHANGE is imminent and urgent, for Survival/Growth to happen.

Not a few weeks ago, I was forced to consider between two futures (details of THAT can fill another entry) and I chose one. Both carried its own consequences, both would require me to go through massive suffering, now and in the future.

But for the first time, in a long time, I stopped to ask myself what I wanted, what I really really wanted. What kind of life and what kind of future I would regret not living through if I said No. Fears hounded me if I chose that path, because I would definitely hurt people I love, people close to my heart. But I asked myself – if I chose My path and because of that choice, had to weather storms and such, would I still be happy?

I didn’t need to pause, it was an automatic Yes.

Then one by one (as if I had pressed a secret button or said the veritable Abracadabra), arrows that pointed down a different path – off that Walkalator path – began emerging. Each small act I made towards that different direction, somehow gave Me back to Myself.

And when I revisited my earlier thought – that in the end, the common thread running through all my miseries was Me – it didn’t seem dark at all. It was liberating.

To be honest, nothing really had changed on the outside. I was still going into the profession I trained for. Still several pounds overweight. Still struggle with getting the words out of my mouth and the message across.

But then, there WAS a difference. This time, the roles I played fell away (fellow, daughter, girlfriend, doctor, best friend). This time, I didn’t ask “What kind of fellow/daughter / girlfriend/doctor/friend should I be?” I just only needed to ask Me. My values, my vision, my limits, the shit sandwich I can stomach eating…  Live to the fullest of my authentic person.

Subconsciously – the career I was building up towards and the partner I chose – all aligned with that. And when I had it laid down before me, the facts staring me in the face… the dark tendencies and the harsh inner voices began to fade.

I had every reason to feel Whole. There it was, I only had to own up to it. To claim responsibility for my losses and emptiness led me towards the path of claiming my joy. It’s a small step, but a step in the right direction.

love after love – derek walcott

The time will come
when, with elation
you will greet yourself arriving
at your own door, in your own mirror
and each will smile at the other’s welcome,

and say, sit here. Eat.
You will love again the stranger who was your self.
Give wine. Give bread. Give back your heart
to itself, to the stranger who has loved you

all your life, whom you ignored
for another, who knows you by heart.
Take down the love letters from the bookshelf,

the photographs, the desperate notes,
peel your own image from the mirror.
Sit. Feast on your life.

 

 

 

 

-the tunnel-

It’s been the better part of the last 5 years that I have felt like this – a cycle of ups and extreme downs. Sometimes, it happens gradually; I call it the “D”.

Darkness. Depression. Despair.

In our culture (and maybe moreso in these hateful times), depression has become ubiquitous.

Everyone has gone through their own intense period of sadness – it spins creative art, it drives others to their doom; it’s what your irritating next-door neighbor and your gregarious high school crush have in common.

But even with all the public awareness campaigns and (surprisingly) open-minded personal accounts of those coming forward to share their stories, people in the grip of depression still know. It doesn’t matter.

I cannot tell you how isolating “D” is, but it’s been beautifully depicted here and here.

Everything is muted. For me, everything slows to a crawl. I have had days I wake up and stare at the ceiling, thinking how difficult it is to put my left foot- then right foot- on the ground. To take a bath. To brave the commute. I don’t feel sad… I just feel empty.

My thoughts slow down. Every word out of my mouth is a struggle. A complete sentence is a celebration in itself. My writing is non-existent (as you can see from the absences in my blog).

My thoughts are on a continuous barrage of self-deprecating scripts – how unworthy I am, how I continually f*ck up all the chances given me, how fat/ugly I have let myself become, how my patients don’t deserve me, how I have made the worst major life decisions so far, how pitiful my future children would be (to get a mother as mentally unstable as I).

Yes, “D” has far-reaching claws.

I know when I’m like this, I need to spend one day just to disengage – I unplug, I absent myself from any social event (even to the point of ignoring my partner’s calls).

Isolation feels comforting, it is the only thing that soothes, that lulls. But it is also the act that disables the very thing you need to stop the cycle.

This is the danger of “D.” It tells you…nay, screams at you… how alone you are.

Some days, I force myself to write. My writings when I am in dark periods are voluminous and revealing, terrifying in its savagery and self-hatred but heartbreakingly honest.

I’ve sought professional help for the past 2 years. None have really worked and I don’t want to try medications.

I try to apply the salve I crave when I get like this – I “go through the archives.” What has surfaced again and again is Fear and a deep sense of “Not Enough.”

To get at and to overcome this shame and self-hatred will hopefully be my purpose for the next few months. Too much is happening in my life, too much that demands my presence – and “D” holds me back.

I cannot allow it to do that anymore… too much is at stake.

My spirit, my sanity, my light.

I was trolling articles from KateC and Book of Life once more. This hit the spot tonight:

“We cannot stop the attacks of the world, but we can – through an exploration of our histories – change what they mean to us.

We can take measures to expose ourselves to the gaze of friends or, more ideally, of a talented therapist who can hold up a more benign mirror and teach us a lesson that should have been gifted us from the start; that like every human, whatever our flaws, we deserve to be here.”

From http://www.thebookoflife.org/criticism-when-youve-had-a-bad-childhood/

I wonder how many suicide success stories would have been averted had someone made them realize this: We ALL deserve to be here.

No conditions necessary. No checkboxes to check for us to deserve our life, to deserve to keep living.

Our very humanness is proof.

 

Returning

I have been absent for so long in this medium, I fear I have rusted.

In a blog where you are the only witness, one asks “Why bother?”

But then the compulsion to finish something you started, the drive behind going back to private ‘what if-s’ — it’s an open secret, really.

Call it a misguided sense of entitlement and an exercise in self-centeredness (though I do prefer “self-awareness” or X-enially, “being woke”).

Any writer – especially those unpaid and those squeezing this in into their already-filled schedule – knows. A writer writes for him/herself. The audience is a formidable influence, but always secondary.

So here, I am. Creaking on her hinges and almost tangerine with accumulated ore; it has been (almost) 4 years from the time I started this blog. Many, many reasons come to mind – What to write about first? What happened? And I can answer in a number of ways.

The Sacred Romance

New Year periods are always the ripest to look back and review – where you have been and simultaneously, plot out the outlines of the Future you’re looking forward to.

The past few months – heck this entire 2016 – was a constant struggle for me. In all aspects. Writing (the non-mandatory kind) has taken a backseat, thus cutting me off from my own voice, my inner Jiminy Cricket.

So I go back.

Found this in the archives, so beautiful I am placing it here (from “Pilgrim’s Progress” cited in “The Sacred Romance” (Eldredge, Curtis 1997):

Pilgrim lay in despair because he had forgotten.

Hopeful urges him to remember, both all he had been through as well as the assurances he has from the One who called him on the journey.

Life on the road requires recollection of our Love’s past deeds on our behalf and his promise of continued faithfulness to us.

We will need courage and patience and those are strengthened by remembering.

We will need memory, which is to say, we will need faith.

Faith looks back and draws courage; hope looks ahead and keeps desire alive.

And meantime?

To appreciate what it may be, we have to step back & ask, what is all this for?

The resurrection of our heart, the discovery of our role in the Larger Story, entering into the Sacred Romance – why do we pursue these things?

If we say we seek all of this for our own sake, we’re right back where we started: lost in our own story.

Jesus said…give your life away & discover life as it was always meant to be.

Self-preservation, the theme of every small story, is so deeply wrong because it violates the Trinity whose members live to bring glory to the others…We…give our glory to increase theirs. In order to fulfill the purpose of our journey, we will need a passion to increase glory; we will need love.

Sa last, it talks of darkness and how sometimes, it is a part of it all.

Our emptiness is often the first thing we find when we face honestly the story going on in our heart. It is the desert’s gift to us.

Our mind is busy with “oughts” …”while the heart instructs us on what is.

 If we allow our mind simply to listen, we perhaps begin to hear our heart speak – faintly,..It says “I am so weary, so lost. I have no energy to redeem myself, how I long for rest.”….

Resting in Jesus is not applying a spiritual formula to ourselves as a kind of fix-it.

It is the essence of repentance.

It is letting our heart tell us where we are in our own story so that Jesus can minister to us out of the Story of his love for us.

When, in a given moment, we lay down our false self and the smaller story of whatever performance has sustained us, when we give up everything else but him, we experience the freedom of knowing that he simply loves us where we are.

We begin just to be, having our identity anchored in him.’

Breaking Fast…

…Over not writing.

I read a very beautiful article on Journaling here and of course, the idea of restarting this Blog came to me again. The gap between my last article and this feels so WIDE, one of the reasons I had difficulty restarting is I didn’t know where to start.

Isn’t this a GREAT excuse to have though?

For procrastinating.

For not starting that BIG project that seems so far away and so insurmountable. For waiting for the PERFECT time to ask him/her out. For asking for a raise. For taking that vacation. For cleaning up my impossibly haphazardly-organized corner of the room.

The funny thing about a “thought-hoarder” like me is I don’t allow myself to tolerate that kind of excuse. Such that an itch (harder to reach and harder to satisfy) starts to make itself felt until I take a step towards action in (literally) ANY direction.

It is both a curse and a cure.

Everyday, I tell the patients and their families that to go a step beyond addressing the kid’s weaknesses, we should also never forget to offer ample opportunities to discover strengths. Whenever I let loose things like that, it isn’t really about me doling out “sounds-comforting-but-is-totally-irrelevant” advice from my hoity-toity Ivory Tower of Medical Knowledge. It truly is something I personally believe in as well.

Hence, this long introduction to my breaking the writing slump.

Let’s start over.

Signs

The other day, my coworker was talking about the dependence he had on almost all decisions – “Lord, give me a sign. Should I buy the white shirt or the blue?”

I have a slight problem with that. Don’t get me wrong. I acted and thought like him a long time ago.

I thought that God talked to me through Signs – events unforeseen that would (usually) derail my original plans… Just this image of this Great Big Oz moving everyone around like pieces on a chess set –

“You think he was the one? I think not!” 

or

“You were so looking forward going to that? Ooops, you have to work. Sorry to burst your bubble.”

I interpreted every event that happened to me as a “sign.”

Until I realized that I wasn’t living My life, I was living another’s – a wimpier version of myself who gave up easily and didn’t know what or how to think for herself anymore. Because I had always acceded that I was not in control.

The more I believed in “signs,” the less I could see my Life solidifying before me. Until I dared to ask what kind of situations was I slapping with big “SIGN” labels all over my life?

Even if they “were” signs (aka literal events that shifted my action/ course from that originally intended), the Story I attached to it wasn’t God’s. It was Mine. All Mine.

Mine, mine, mine. (Insert Ego here)

That was why even if I thought I had been receptive to His “signs”, I wasn’t really getting any answers deep deep down. The questions I had for Him never changed – why do I still feel so alone despite being surrounded by friends? why do I always feel like I am not performing up to par? why do I feel like I can’t just “settle” into my Life?

If I truly was grateful for my life, my asking revealed a dissatisfaction. A refusal to simply be content and say “Fine” when someone asked “How are you?” Despite my foolish notion that I had “interpreted” all His signs, I was this emotional internal ball of knotted string.

And the more I tugged to unravel, the deeper I got myself into an existential circuitious battle that aggravated only one person – me.

I offer no solution, that isn’t the point of this entry. In fact, I still think this way sometimes. 🙂 Perhaps the only difference now is, I am more aware when I do this “Sign!-slapping” thing.

I also know that I can never really decipher His real will for me if I sit in a corner or do everything I usually do, think all the things I usually think and say all the things I usually say. The “Other Me” that I believed existed in a parallel universe I dreamed I would one day inhabit, that “Other Me” with the more fantastic life with a flashier, wittier, more confident (happily attached) Me would never ever materialize.

And that’s it. No “buts” to that last statement.

They will never materialize and the more I acknowledge it as True, the more I need to slap my Dreaming, Sign-slapping self to say: “Wake up! Here we are! Do something about Us NOW! Not in that parallel universe but in THIS universe.”

So I wake up.

Eudaimonia and Authentic Happiness

In the book, eatpraylove, the protagonist (in sessions with her Italian exchange student/teacher) was asked to pick a word in the language she was learning that encaptured her entire being, and so I have my version as well.

Eudaimonia.

Authentic happiness. Before you scoff and tell me happiness is only defined by the person expressing it, or that it is subjective, it is actually a concept with meaning.

Eudaimonia is the Meaningful Life, in my favourite definition of the word, “using your signature strengths in the service of something that you believe is larger than you are.” My name literally means small but I think it is only in relation to the work I envision doing, or being part of. Because you cannot be part of something big without accepting your “smallness” –  the very essence of meaning in your contribution being the rejection of fame or pride or self and subsuming it under the “larger-than-life” Mission that you believe in. Believing that the whole IS greater than the sum of its parts.  Being willing to acknowledge It and to allow It the life of its own, praying it to surpass your expectations and even rejoicing in your anonymity towards its Being.

The birthday article is stalled this year, I have been writing and listening to so many stories with this overarching theme visible and relevant only perhaps to me, that I am entirely full of it (in the good sense), bursting with it that writing about it is a challenge. Snippets come forth from the darkness, proof probably of its complexity but also may be proof of my indecision and old bad habit of procrastination.

Sex and Connection

In my last year of college, I had three free units I could complete in any Department of my choosing. I took Creative Writing. One of the first pieces I wrote (given the fact I was in 4^th year college and dreaming of entering med) contained a lot of medical terms, but not in the way we usually say them.

For this assignment, I went into the area of the Main Library I hardly enter (References) to dig up the bulky Anatomy Atlas and whisper to myself the names of all the body parts, picking and choosing those that rolled easily off my tongue.

This was the poem I wrote after that (very teen-boppery but hey, this was an elective).

---

The Lover

 I have done this a thousand times and yet

The tingle of anticipation slumbering in me

Wakes

At the timbre of your voice.

 You invite me to unsheathe you,

Unravel

The mystery inscribed on your skin

The secrets whispered by your cells

 Plunging into the dizzying depths of your nakedness, I

Seep through your pores

Burst through your bloodstream

Filling your dense, dark interstitial spaces

Breathlessly,

I count my reasons for living

 Gracilis femoris soleus

Long and limber

Hidden power thrilling me

Bringing you, on wind’s wings,

To my side

 Pollicis longus pollicis brevis

Exploring Caressing Tracing

My contours & crevices

Each finger tied with strings playing marionette on my heart

 Pectoralis major

In their expanse beats your epicenter

Inferior vena cava

Superior vena cava

 Clavicle platysma scapula

Slopes created for my own delight,

Yielding, to my sharp insistent bites

 Sternocleidomastoid

Softness in hardness

Astonishing how your strongest is your weakest point

 Orbicularis oculi

Illuminating my being

Cochlea temporalis masseter

Cupping them in my hands

I drink my fill of them

Like wells of crisp, clean water that never dries up

 Labia

My life and my death

My alpha and omega.

 My vision extends down the length of love’s territory

Your hills and valleys

Your craggy peaks and dense forests

I alone

Know how to navigate You

Mapless.

Overkill I know but besides the conclusion I was a “batang emo”, my point is I had an idea (even then) of desire.

Like any girl, I dream of wedding days and wedding preps (who wouldn’t?) but mostly, I fantasized about what happened after a.k.a. the honeymoon.

Not in the way (I think) guys fantasize about it (I wasn’t really a fan of porn or “romance” pocketbooks). It was more of the idea of making love, the ultimate sacred union of one with another (yada yada yada).

Of course as you get old, the world (and your expectations) changes and ideas evolve. But that was my idea of love (or more specifically lovemaking) back then – bold, consuming and passionate. It’s nice to remember sometimes.

In the culture of present times, sex has become “normalized” into a rite of passage that younger and younger people gleefully partake in. Love-making is physiologic and necessary, but then for me, “normalizing” it removes most of the passion and meaning that it could hold.

Although I still believe that choosing to be sexually active prior to marriage should not be dictated by culture or religion or the pressures of other people, the individual (whose shoulders that decision finally rests on) is influenced by all of the above, and more.

Without someone to tell that impressionable pre-teen/ teen what lovemaking is, the rest of the eager world (via 9gag, the internet or worse foolish peers) will happily substitute.

One of the best analogies about making love I read before was from a sex therapist named Esther Pensel. She said that sex is not something one does, but a place one goes to.

Making love is one way of allowing the other (literally and figuratively) inside your inner circle, the longing to be intimate with the Other.  But it doesn’t always need to involve sex.

To me, the peak of intimacy (the key to a lot of female O’s, actually) is in Connection.

And I don’t mean purely physical.

A partner lowering your voice when they talk. Watching them talk about their dreams for themselves, the hobbies they pursue. When they perk up to listen when you’re talking about things you’re proud of. The gentle pressure of a hand on the small of your back.

Those things can be just as, if not more, intimate.

I don’t usually talk lightly of things I hold sacred. And even though I may not hesitate to talk dirty, making love will always be a sacred act to me.

A space we enter where we can drop our inhibitions and stand naked (literally, figuratively) before the other and be seen.

And be admired.

And be loved.

A Postscript

And just like that. I close the book on my first real relationship – short but sincere. (Possibly) doomed from the start.

I keep on thinking that maybe I am missing something, that my seeking a relationship is missing an ingredient – that’s why nothing ever comes out of it. Also thinking why for other people, it seems so easy, so fall-into-place easy that it seems terribly unfair. Like I have been dealt with really bad cards the day I was born.

The chaos that current national events (our mayor-less state, the uncertainty of national elections) or even community events (horrendous traffic, robberies and rapes left and right) provide do not diminish the fact I still feel absurdly deflated and comically dysfunctional because of my own private tragedy, however small and inconsequential in comparison.

So I repeat the mantra – inner, outer, everybody.

INNER: Focus on my inner script and use another healthier one.

OUTER: Get my outer body (or shell) moving.

EVERYBODY: Care about other people aside from myself.

Pretend and pretend and pretend until there comes a day that I will not need to. I find that I meet success in healing when I give the reins to my mind first.

Not let the heart overtake my entire body but at the same time, not shutting its cries out either that it accidentally bursts open in unguarded moments. Instead of clamping down on black moments, I allow myself these short drama “walling” moments – cry it all out, scream and curse and cry “Oh fie, how unfair the world is,” (ala Austen heroine) and then allow small but significant daily duties overtake me. Let the drama moments come but also remind myself Life goes On.

The most successful daily occurrence wrestling my need to have MY need be center stage, is to care about others.

Yes moving my body or getting fresh air helps. Yes talking to myself through this medium and rationalizing away doom-gloom scenarios help – but it doesn’t have that same HUGE impact that enlarging and expanding my self (or the context my self inhabits) does. I compare my current problem with the enormity of the rest of my future life and the possibilities it still holds and the first chinks of light shine through.