It is the Pride weekend, and I am reminded again that I should not take my freedom to be who I am for granted. For many people this is the only time in an entire year that they feel truly free to express themselves, in the open for the whole world to see.
I have never truly been in the closet, if there was one it was only because I didn’t know it myself. By the time I knew and started telling people, nobody was ever really surprised.
Many people confuse the term “gay” with the narrow identity roles they have in their world views. If you have a male body and gay, you must be effeminate. If you have a female body and gay, it must mean you like being a boy. Our prescribed roles are so constricted that even as I acknowledged my own gayness, I was confused to which end of the spectrum I belonged, if there was actually one.
As I reached adulthood, I grew comfortable telling people that I love being a woman and being in love with one. There were many looks of confusion as people tried to sort out who in my previous relationships took on the masculine role. They didn’t seem to understand the beauty of being in a gay relationship is that we never had to define any roles.
Then my thirties hit, and for the first time in my romantic history I stopped having the desire to have a romance. I could no longer define my identity with who I am with.
I still identify as a gay woman, but it no longer felt adequate for who I am. Increasingly as I grew into myself, the more I didn’t feel right being defined. My identity shifts according to the time of the day, the context, the people whom I’m with, and the fluctuations in my psyche. I identify much more as a woman versus a man, but to be honest I don’t feel much like a woman either. Just to be clear, I still have internal struggles over whether I identify as a human being.
I am beginning to tell people that I don’t think of myself having a gender, and even if I wanted to have one, it never felt right to me that we had to choose between being a female or a male.
Pride, we must carry, no matter who we are and who we truly want to be. I recognize I am truly blessed and very privileged, for I have never struggled against wanting to love women my entire life. I have never felt bad about it as my experiences were only tremendously empowering for me. It felt so natural to me that I could never have imagined myself to be otherwise. There is just something that is so unapologetically powerful about acknowledging my own gayness that I wish I can be equally unapologetic in other areas of my life.
But I see that there are still many people who are unable to be truly themselves. There are still many of us out there being bullied and driven to suicide because we are different from the very narrow categories society seems to like putting us in, for their own selfish peace of mind.
I have never felt the need to be out loud and proud, because it just felt so me that I am a walking advertisement of my unapologetic-ness of my freedom to be and to love, in every moment I express myself without even having to consciously do so.
Yet it must be a conscious choice and reminder than I have to be carrying that pride not only inwardly, but very outwardly, not for myself, but for the millions of others who are still dependent on the strength of those of us who are privileged to be and love whoever we want, in any given moment of our lives.
There’s something about traveling that makes it always uncomfortable. We can travel in all the luxury we can afford, but nothing prepares us for the unexpected twists, delays, turns, jarring and new experiences.
I remember backpacking eight years ago, weathering spontaneous decisions by not flinching even as I slept in a insect-infested room with a cold shower. These days I feel the difference of just the pillows keenly – they are not the same as the ones I am used to sleeping with at home. Then there were the fourteen hour bus-rides I used to take to faraway places. Now I zip around in an UberX, too tired to take a thirty minute bus ride.
Am I losing my sense of adventure, or have I become one of those always-anxious, controlling, workaholics? Have I lost my capacity to not only feel free, but be free?
I comfort myself by telling myself that I am preserving my energy for a different kind of adventure. In my youth I thrived on spontaneous, non-committal adventures, now I am learning to walk each step with a very deliberate presence, yet keeping my heart open to being called in new directions.
I have had to give up people, places, situations, objects I love. Through traveling I am learning to understand what it means to love freely. I love, that is why I leave. Staying longer than we should only seeks to artifically prolong a moment, without realizing that clinging on is the antithesis of love.
All things change and all things move, and that is how nature has always chosen to demonstrate her love. Even a rock changes its form with time. What would the world be like, if we have learned to love this process of change, instead of constantly trying to hold on?
I walk with a renewed sense of freedom, coupled with a sense of purpose. Every second I am loving what I experience, then learning to let go, knowing that my consciousness will never be the same again, and that is enough. The knowing that everything we love changes us permanently, and we too, change everything we love, permanently.
Life will never be the same again, and life has never been the same, it is our expectation that it stays the same, that brings us not only the greatest grief, but also the biggest obstacle to fulfilling our potential as a humanity capable of great leaps and evolution.
It was 5pm on a Saturday, still sunny and bright. I was driving back from the lighthouse at Point Reyes. In the next split second I drove into an uneven part of the road, and there was a sound and vibration that no driver ever wants to hear. Especially if it is the middle of nowhere with no cell phone reception:
Where it happened and where I drove to for help
I almost had a panic attack right away, considering I am alone, never had a similar situation happen to me before, and there was no way I could call for help. I drove into the right shoulder, and almost immediately a car stopped behind me.
The first stranger
He would be the first of many other amazing, kind strangers I would meet later that day.
His entire family was sitting in his car waiting, but he took the time to look at my tires, asked if I wanted a lift to civilization, felt apologetic that he was driving his wife’s car else he would have had an air pump. He felt so bad that he couldn’t help much that I felt bad he stopped for me.
He estimated that we were 10 miles away from anything. There was no reception, so we didn’t even know where exactly we were.
I thanked him for his gracious help, knowing that he didn’t have to but he stopped for me. Perhaps it was subtle back then, but he gave me a little boost of strength that was enough for me not to collapse in pure despair.
I put my hazard lights on and drove really slowly, annoying all the cars behind me in that one-lane traffic. I was in luck, because his estimate was off — it wasn’t 10 miles but 3 — I started seeing cars parked on the street.
I drove into the first parking lot I could find. It was Tomales Bay Resort. A very beautiful little resort, which I would have taken beautiful pictures of had I not been in such anxiety. I walked into the reception, hoping that they would allow me to park my car there just for a bit until help arrived.
The receptionist and her husband
The receptionist greeted me with a huge smile. She didn’t even hesitate for a second when I asked for permission to park the car. I rented the car via Getaround, so I called them for help. They didn’t know what to do except tow the car back to San Francisco. From Point Reyes. Since it was peer to peer, I would be responsible for the tow charges plus repair costs.
Moral of the subplot: don’t use a peer to peer service for long road trips.
It was a logistical nightmare trying to get a tow service on a Saturday evening to the middle of nowhere at Point Reyes. I would stay in that reception area for the next five hours, searching, calling and waiting. Receptionist lady and her husband ended up doing whatever they could for me, including her husband driving out his air compressor from their place to see if they would work for the flat tires. I told her that I felt really bad imposing on her, and in return she told me to pay it forward.
I insisted that they return home while I wait for the truck, but they refused. She said she wasn’t raised to be capable of leaving a someone alone by herself. I just didn’t know what to say except to feel bad and grateful at the same time, as I ran out of words of gratitude.
At 10pm the tow truck arrived, by then I was just glad someone came for me, driving through a dark lonely hill late on a Saturday night.
This is how far the tow truck had to drive
The tow-truck driver
On the hour-long ride back to the tire shop at Greenbrae, we somehow started conversing about his kids. He told me how he is giving his daughter a space to be creative because schools don’t offer that space much. More tellingly, he shared that he’s teaching his kids that it is okay to fail.
That society should be better at giving people space to fail.
By that point at 11pm I was hungry, tired and emotionally drained, but upon hearing that I was re-energized and I had a giant smile on my face. Even the tow truck driver seemed to be specially sent to me, for me.
He drove me all the way back to Mill Valley where I had an airbnb for the night. He didn’t have to. I got home near midnight, seven hours from the time it all started. My host came out, heard the story and gave me a huge hug. I made a peanut butter sandwich for myself. It was the first thing I ate in more than 12 hours.
The next day, I needed and wanted to get everything over with so I can be back in San Francisco. It would have exhausted me even more if I had to extend both my stay and car rental, with the prospect of missing work on Monday. Daryl, the tow truck driver managed to find me one of the very few tire shops that is open on a Sunday in the north bay.
The tires were replaced within thirty minutes with not much fuss. I had to find a way to travel from Mill Valley to Greenbrae. I called three taxi companies with not much success. I opened Uber, not even believing that there would be cars available.
The Uber driver
There was a black car. Just one. He picked me up, listened to my story, felt so personally upset on my behalf that I had to go through all of this on my supposed vacation — again, a random stranger demonstrating exceptional empathy and connection to me, for me.
This was an expensive story to tell. The financial cost is secondary to the emotional cost I have to pay — I was supposed to be recharging myself after all, and now I am actually more exhausted than I was, before my trip. Just to see this:
Yet I know that it could have been so much worse. I could have had the flats literally in the middle of nowhere where it would have been impossible to get any help except the blind hope of having someone stop for me again. I could have been stuck at the roadside in the cold, dark night for five hours instead. But I had a warm space with amazing, kind people at the resort even though they had zero obligation to help me. I could have encountered a grumpy receptionist. There could be no tow-trucks willing to drive through a hill at night to get to where I was.
I could have been left with no car, no lodging, no warm clothes, and worse — no way back.
To top it all off, the tow truck driver said the words I needed to hear, even though he wasn’t even aware of it. On education, on kids, on space, on failing. I didn’t even initiate that conversation and I have no idea why he started talking about something that seemed so randomly, chillingly co-incidental with what I have been thinking about for the past few weeks.
I still managed to get back to a warm bed in Mill Valley against all odds, despite the location and time were not at all in my favor.
I feel incredibly lucky to return back home to the city on time. Nobody knows how long this could have been dragged out.
It seemed like the Universe was trying to tell me — even if it seemed like I had gotten into the most dire situation, I would still have humanity’s grace and kindness to support me. None of these people had any obligation to me except the common thread of belonging to a larger whole.
If burning a huge hole in my pocket and having to feel all that anxiety were both needed to reignite my faith in humanity, I would gladly go through this again.
In the end, I am grateful, because through this misfortune, I rediscovered my fortune.
Epilogue
The tire shop owner explained to me that the tires were already worn out due to a weak suspension so the other two tires were on the way to flatten anyway. I guess I just happened to be driving a car that may not have been maintained in a while. I replaced all the tires at my own cost including the tow charges — perhaps it was naive of me to drive a p2p car out to Point Reyes where the roads are questionable in the first place. I don’t think the owner wanted this to happen either so I am not going to spend anymore energy debating this issue. I would be curious to see what any of you would have done. ☺
There was this episode in “Scandal” where someone was wrongfully shot down by the FBI because he was actually a spy working to inflitrate enemy organizations. His mother couldn’t even know, and she died thinking her son was a terrorist.
I often wonder how many people in this world do what they do even though they will never be seen or acknowledged for it. I also often question myself if I would do what I do if I would never be seen, understood or recognized. There’s this old philosophical question along the same lines, “If a tree falls in a forest and no one is around to hear it, does it make a sound?”
I think it is important to consistently question my own motives and agenda for pursuing my goals. It is incredible how easy to lose sight of one’s original identity and purpose. I want to be the person who tried my darnest to live life, and not the person who tried her best to be successful based on societal terms.
Life loves the person who dares to live it, says Maya Angelou. Plenty of times feeling alive or doing what truly matters come at a price of never being seen or understood and this is where the genuine love of one’s self and life comes into play.
Ultimately it does not matter who sees you if you cannot see yourself.
An used book arrived from Amazon. It was titled, “Being and Nothingness”, and I caressed the cover with great affection, as though Sartre was the grandfather I never had.
My mind drifted, as she always does, pondering the adult I could have been, had I been exposed to philosophy at a much younger age.
The what-ifs
I grew up disempowered in a system that prides on academic excellence and conformity at any cost. I never had anybody who told me I can be anybody I wanted to be. I was only told to stop dreaming. I fought for my individuality and my dreams in any way I could, but over the years apart from the defiant resilience I acquired, I also developed a sense of paralyzing numbness. To be resilient we learn to put up walls, and one day we wake up to find out we cannot even reach ourselves beyond those walls.
There are many what-ifs we ask ourselves. What if I could learn anything I was curious about instead of those subjects that bored me to tears? What if I had authority figures who nurtured and encouraged my differences instead of being bent on exerting their power in anyway they can? What if at age twelve I was interested in reading Sartre and understanding quantum physics instead of spending my best formative years memorizing facts that hardly anyone remembers after leaving school?
I would grow up with so much less pain from fighting to be me, I would spend a lot more time being creative and productive instead of having to work so hard to recondition my mind to believe my existence is worthwhile in a dysfunctional society. I would spend my time exchanging ideas with like-minded people, and not spend any fraction of my energy worrying about being understood by those of a different frequency.
Imaginary obstacles
Sometimes all we need is one person in our lives to affirm our creative potential. To demonstrate that linear progression can sometimes be a fallacy and a society construct. That we can be capable of defining our own constructs. Why can’t I read Sartre at age twelve? If there was someone who would listen to a twelve year old talk about her existential crisis, if that someone could direct me to an appropriate shelf of books, I would be running at full speed living the life I should be leading instead of tripping over imaginary obstacles.
I grew up thinking it was just me. Till I started meeting one by one, similar experiences of other people permanently scarred by the education system we belonged to, having to spend copious amounts of time covering up those scars that would never heal. We are all tied by a common thread of destiny — to dedicate ourselves to a lifetime of work that will contribute towards a world that will truly empower our next generations.
Boxes
Every now and then I meet some young person, mostly in their teens. Some of them contemplate erasing their existence, others condemning themselves to a life of mediocrity because they had failed in the system. Many of these kids fail precisely because they are driven by their creative impulses and do not learn by regurgitation. Some survive brilliantly, because they have an empowering figure in their lives, telling them they are still capable despite the system. Others thrive when forced to be in a foreign system because the local system rejected them. Many of us are not that blessed. Our authority figures are part of the system. The people who love us want us to fit into the system using any means because that is the easiest way to survive.
Imagine having your entire formative years being told you are dumb or disappointing by the very same people you should trust and respect, because of your grades in a system that was not even designed to empower learning? Where would you find the capacity to believe otherwise? If you have never seen a rainbow in your life, would you believe it is true?
We are handicapping some of our young minds, if not most of them. By fitting them into pre-configured boxes, we are telling them these are the only boxes they can grow in. We will not have opportunities to see how they would grow, flourish and surprise us, if we keep on insisting these boxes are the only channel for us to groom our next generations.
I will read Sartre now, in my thirties. It is never to late to expand our minds. I cannot turn back time. I consider myself blessed to be able to reignite my passion for self-directed learning. I want to remember those debilitating emotions for the rest of my life, so I can never, ever, choose the easy way out by giving up the pursuit of my life’s work — to contribute towards building a world that will be proud of our next generations’ capacities instead of trying to make them be more like us.
It is part of the human instinct to seek a sense of belonging and acceptance. We are innately social creatures, no matter how introverted or shy we are in reality. I have tried to find somewhere to belong to my entire life, to prove that my existence was worth something to someone. I did eventually find various micro-communities to belong to, and that was the first step to making me believe that I can have a real stake in this world.
While that was enough for me to survive, it wasn’t enough for me to flourish. I desperately wanted people to see me, to understand me, to know my strengths and weaknesses so they would be able to help me to maximize my contributions as a human being.
I tried to look for the same thread of understanding from my peers. If I could make people understand my fundamental motivations, it would prove that I was not insane. It almost killed me, because whenever I tried to express an ambitious idea or demonstrate unbridled passion for a vision for the world — each time I see that look of confusion or judgment from people’s faces, a little piece of me would shatter into a thousand irrecoverable pieces, never to be fixed again.
Eventually I learned to shut up and shut down. I didn’t let anybody know me again. I didn’t even allow myself to know myself. Each time a provocative thought bubbled up in my mind, I would be the first to kill that thought. Some people spend copious amounts of time looking for radical ideas, I spend mine trying to kill all of them. I cannot bear another look or another raised eyebrow, because people seem to feel uncomfortable when I am nakedly honest and too serious with my feelings and thoughts.
That is the way our society functions. We are incredibly uncomfortable with honesty, vulnerability and change. We don’t like things that shake our firm foundations or challenge the status quo. Nor do we seem to pride people who wear their hearts on their sleeves. Why build giant metal birds that fly in the air when ships have functioned well? Why be honest when dishonesty sustained your existence longer? Why wear your heart on your sleeves when people seem to like trampling all over it?
Poor Galileo. He tried telling the world was round and spent the rest of his life under house arrest until his death. We are not very kind to our change-makers. We persecute them, jail them, shame them when all they really wished for, was a better humanity.
I am obviously not Galileo. But I want to believe in and work towards a world that everyone of us has a moral responsibility to shape, to be ambitious enough to make quantum leaps so that we can leave behind a world that our next generations can be proud of. Quantum leaps, not just in terms of technology, but in terms of societal compassion and empowering every human being’s right to express himself or herself authentically and creatively.
Change is in my blood. It has always been. I am always looking to change something. Myself included. Yet I spend a lot of time trying to quell my own desire for change, because I have been battling a sense of low self-worth for as long as I can remember, ironically for being constantly put-down and criticized for my authentic expression.
Everyone, including myself, is limited by our own world view, and by seeking the validation and approval from other people I am essentially limiting myself to their limited world view. Maps cannot be drawn for places where no other human being has gone before. By depending solely on people to guide us to to places they have already been or places they want to be, we are essentially giving up our capacity to explore our own frontiers.
What makes the world beautiful is diversity — we should be empowering each other to expand our horizons instead of trying to shape someone else’s to our own. That also means we shouldn’t let anyone dictate how we should form, shape or limit ours. Evolution depends on biological diversity, not homogeneity.
Can you imagine what is going to happen to the human race if we all had the same thoughts and ideas?
I am no longer willing to live within the limits set by other people for me. Change is always going to be difficult and controversial. If I want to live a life thriving with change always pulsating in my blood, I can no longer be afraid to stick out like a sore thumb. I will need to develop a compassion towards people’s judgment, because it will always be hard to embrace and understand something that is unknown. It is my responsibility to make people understand why we should always be aiming for better, but I don’t need people to understand me. I am fundamentally wired not to covet life for its own sake, and it is impossible to make most people understand that, with the survival instinct so much part of being human.
I am not interested in survival, never was, and never will be. I am interested in thriving, in empowerment — not only for myself but for the world. I am not going to look back at my life and regret all those safe, conventional decisions I could have made. I am only going to regret not trying harder, not taking more risks, not pushing more boundaries, not living to my own expectations and potential, and letting imaginary limits dictate where I can truly venture.
What do I fear, since I am unafraid of death? I fear breaking the hearts of people who love me, but more so, I fear waking up one day and finding out I no longer have the privilege to create and to move; and then having this painful, horrible realization, that I didn’t do all these things I could have done, and experience so much more of what life has to offer — because I was paralyzed by my own fear and restricting myself based on the limits other people had designed for me.
Nobody but ourselves, can be the shepherd of our own vision for who we can truly be.
The story goes — I went to New York, and came back a different person. Something shifted in the core of my soul. A question kept popping up in my head, “who would I be if I lived and loved fearlessly?”
I came back with a sense of urgency, driven by a sense of mortality. I am beginning to truly comprehend that my time here is limited, and every current moment compounds to the future I have ahead of me. Every act I do, every decision I make, will matter in the course of my destiny.
Here’s the reality. Even if I lived to my life-expectancy of somewhere around the range of 70s — I am right smack in the middle of my entire life.
There is not much time left. I only have half of my life to go.
Another 30 years or so with the capacity to create, is being optimistic and generous. What if one day I wake up unable to use my hands anymore?
I want to do things that matter to me. Things that I deeply care about. And that may mean that I have to stop caring about other things. I think it is a tradeoff I am willing to make, that one day on my deathbed I know I have spent the second half of my life the way I deliberately want to. Even if it ends up in a series of failures defined by the rest of humankind, it would still be a life I lived. A life that is not being defined by society’s or anyone’s expectations of me. A life defined by the greatest expectations I would ever have in my life — mine.
“Watch me choose you,” the fictional leader of the free world said to Olivia Pope, on the popular television show Scandal. It made me swoon for a split second — if only there’s someone who loves me this way, I thought. Having someone choose an entire country over you is incredibly moving.
Except when it is not.
How is it love in its finest essence, when someone thinks the best way of expressing his utmost love, is to give up his own responsibilities towards the greatest purpose of his life?
Why would he distribute the weight of crushing his own dreams, to the very person he loves? How is he a man deserving of Pope’s love, when he cannot discern the true weight of his choices?
I am a recovering die-hard romantic. I had spent a whole lot of my life seeking my one true love to complete me, before learning the hard way that I am really the only person who has the capacity to fill up that gaping hole in my soul. Several hearts were broken along the way. It was a very expensive lesson.
I fell out of love with that sort of love — the love that is so all-consuming that nothing else mattered except being with that person, the sort of love that makes people grieve over Romeo and Juliet while getting angsty over the finale of How I Met Your Mother.
I fell out of love with love, because now I have greater ideals for love. Love is unconditional, it doesn’t seek to possess, place labels or desire for sacrifices. Love is about having the capacity to understand that empowering the people you love is the best way you can ever love a person. To empower this person to achieve his or her own greatness, even if it means we may not belong to that same picture. Unconditionally loving is not the same as being a crutch or incessantly coddling a person.
The greatest romance for me, is when all parties involved want nothing but the most joyful and purposeful existence for each other. Sometimes that means supporting each other’s goals while being in a relationship. I have witnessed amazing couples who serve as amplifiers for one another and the relationship becomes an exponential force on its own. Other times it may mean setting somebody free with all the love and hopes you have for the person, to graciously step back and assume the role of the silent supporter.
I have found my one true love. My love for the world. It sounds really frivolous. Love the world, what does it even mean?
It means wanting nothing but a joyful and purposeful existence for the world. I want the world to achieve her own greatness empowered by her people.Can I be part of that?
I want to be free to romance the world. That anytime I can freely and consciously choose to experience different parts of her, different expressions of her, to serve her in any way I can. Her needs, hopes and aspirations will always be greater on my mind than anybody else’s.
I woke up one day in bitter-sweet realization — I can no longer belong to or be with a person. No matter how much I loved her and could have given to her, it would never ever be close to what I want to give for this world. She would always be second place, not even tying for first place.
I still fall in love with people, and with animals. It would be easy for me to get a dog for example, and the only justification I need is that I love dogs with my life. Someone asked me if I would consume my dog (hypothetically if I had one) for survival if I was stranded in a deserted island with it. I didn’t even think about it. I would let my dog eat me.
But here comes the paradox coupled with irony. If I truly love dogs as much as I think I do, they deserve all the love in the world with better people-companions. Not me. Love sometimes means recognizing we’re not the best people to give. I know my attention will drift away from it, and the most painful thing to realize is — if my dog truly loves me, it will want me to be free to love the world, the world I have chosen to give myself to.
In between moments I miss the people and animals I loved and still love, for a split second I wondered if it could have been different.
No matter how many times I think about it or how much time I spend going through all the possible scenarios, it still comes with the same conclusion:
I had fallen in love with the world, and I would not trade her off for anything else. Perhaps, just perhaps, there will be people out there who loves the world as much as I do, and we can all beautifully be each other’s second places, while pursuing the greatest love of our lives, together.
I have an unbroken habit to write once a week, either here or at Medium. It is usually my favorite time of the weekend, where I would sit quietly, stare at the screen and wait for words to appear. Today I am nursing a slight migraine, but I don’t want to break my habit, so I am going to be even more spontaneous with my writing than usual.
Someone over at Twitter asked me how to write in a way that would express ourselves better in order to connect to our audience. I told him honestly that I write with my heart, if that is not the best way to express myself, I have no idea which way would be better.
I honestly don’t care if people think I write well or if I write posts which are too long. In some perverse way I am not even writing for an audience. I think when we start writing for an audience we lost a part of ourselves. It really depends on the why – why we write in the first place.
Life is extremely transient. It is a waste of our living moments trying to be an agreeable person. I take that back. It is a huge waste of our lives living as who we are not. It came to me in the middle of my New York trip. I stopped in the middle of my thoughts and wondered. Why am I waiting to be the person I want to be?
We are afraid because we have something to lose, but if we’re afraid of losing we will never be able to take the risks needed to truly live and love. If I cannot be my true self, people around me will always be shortchanged because I can never be capable of giving them the best of me. We are always waiting for people to validate us, only to realize that no amount of validation would suffice if we cannot validate ourselves.
I want to write as me, live as me, love as me, work as me. And my identity will keep on shifting because I will keep on growing. Every now and then I go through phases where I tear myself apart and put myself back together again. I feel like I just went through multiple phases of this and I am only expecting more to come.
At the end of my life, I want to look back at everything I have attempted to do and know that at the very least my very self wasn’t one of the obstacles put in front of me.
That May of 2012, I moved into a one-bedroom apartment in North Vancouver. It was the first time I had truly lived alone.
I moved out at 19, but I always had a romantic partner or housemates. I did travel alone before, but on my travels I am always out exploring and observing, which is quite different from just being in your own space.
It was a spectacular revelation.
Most of us spend an insane amount of time with other people. We grow up with our families, then there are more people we meet at school and work. We fall in love, or find friends to hang out with. We are hardly ever alone. When we are conditioned to be so used to having people in our environment, we have no idea what it means to have space.
I never really wanted to have that space anyway. For so much of my life I was trying to find that someone who would complete me, not understanding I was the only soul in the universe who was capable of doing that. I never felt the desire to be alone, because I equated solitude with loneliness. Being with myself exacerbated the gaping hole in my soul — people distracted me from feeling that disconnect, or so I thought.
But that May in 2012, I was ready to start a relationship with myself, I just wasn’t aware of it yet. It was gradual, the discovery of that space. The first morning I woke up all by myself, I felt something was different, but I couldn’t put a finger to why.
I slowly trudged to the kitchen to make myself coffee, I could have crawled if I wanted to. Nobody was there. Wow. Nobody was there. I no longer had to hide in my bedroom listening out to whether my housemates were awake because the last thing I wanted to do is to demonstrate my capacity to be polite in the morning when I have trouble adjusting to my mind and body upon waking up. I didn’t have to be awakened by someone pacing in the room. Nor do I have to deal with the possibility of waking up to someone upset about something. Or feel guilty that I negatively impacted someone’s morning by waking up angry with the world for no apparent reason.
I finally had that space to be me. To be as ugly as I wanted, as beautiful as I felt. To have that non-judgmental space for my emotions and moods to belong to. For my mind to kickstart into awareness before being hustled into a discussion about why I didn’t put my cup back to where it belonged.
I stopped having bad moods. I don’t even remember the last time I had one. It was so simple, only on hindsight. My adrenals have space to recover by not being triggered spontaneously by my external environment all the time. My cognitive load is drastically reduced because when I am alone, I no longer have to think and react to people’s behavior, their body language or anything, really. My stress hormones do not get fired up because there’s something different in the ambience. I no longer feel nervous all the time because there’s so much nervous energy in this world.
By shutting myself up religiously, I have created the space where I can be fully open to people and environment when I desire to. I am able to be present with the people I care about because I am no longer that perpetually stressed-out grumpy person.
I have been living alone since that May. It took me roughly two years, but I gradually healed from all those years of being under the stress I wasn’t even aware it existed. And how could I have known, when I never had the chance to be without it?
Inability to suppress. Unnecessary cognitive activity. Whether I identify as a creative person is up to debate, but here is what I realized. I am ultra-sensitive to my environment, and that is a beautiful blessing and a potentially life-destroying curse. I cannot be the person I am and do the work I do if I am not vulnerably open to what’s going on around me. I absorb everything like a sponge and it silently manifests in ways I cannot imagine.
That also means if I am not careful and I stop protecting myself whenever necessary, I bear a literal risk of burning out my neural network at any given time. I have been there before — you know what is worse than feeling sad? It is when you feel numb and no longer give a shit about anything.
For a person who thrives on her empathy, feeling numb is worse than death.
I spend most weekends alone now. Sometimes I break the rules, for the people and work I love. But I hurry back into my solitude as soon as I can and I am always watching out for signs that I am on the verge of burning myself out.
And slowly, it is no longer about giving myself the space to heal. It is giving myself the space to just be. To write, read, think, be a slob, eat, roll around on my floor, stare open-mouthed at the window, or bite my toes if I want to.
The space to not react to anything, not even to myself, is one of the most beautiful spaces I can ever be in.
