The Pregnant Pause

I’ve admitted to being a walking bag of contradictions in the past, but never before have I felt so confused and exhausted by my conflicting emotions of deep regret one morning and warm relief the next. After vast amounts of thought, my brain still remains a giant plate of scrambled eggs. I should apologise in advance because I'm about to write my feelings all over your Internet and it's likely to upset a lot of people.

By age 45, half of all women will have had an unintended pregnancy and one in three will have had ended theirs, yet there remains so much shame and stigma surrounding the issue. I haven’t yet been able to say a lot about this openly in real life and most accounts I’ve found on the Internet were either very pro-life or very pro-choice. What happened to all the voices that were slightly muddled or unsure?

I’m aware of the floodgate writing about this opens, and it honestly is such a terrifying process to actually sit down, dig deep, and churn out all these words about something so sad and so personal, and then lay it out here for third party consumption. But the more I think about it, the more I feel that it is important for me to try to be as transparent and honest as I can, especially with other women, because a woman's ability to choose whether or not she wants to terminate a pregnancy – for whatever reason – is often under attack.

I have found the experience of abortion to be greatly uneven throughout the world. It varies not just by law but also by upbringing, culture, race, income, age, religion, education, family; by whether a boyfriend offered a hand to hold at the clinic or told her matter-of-factly that there are already enough human beings in the world as it is; by the kindness and warmth or callousness and flippancy of the attending nurses; by whether she had to order the pill online because it is illegal in her town or battled protesters outside a clinic. Some feel so ashamed that their family and friends will never hear of their pain; others feel stronger for having lived through the experience and regret nothing about their decision.

It isn’t every day that a story comes back full circle to bite its author directly in the arse, but such is the case for me, who has wittingly joked about pregnancy scares for a decade. I kid you not, bitch is knocked up! (Ba dum tss.)

I'm probably the least reliable narrator right now but I want to attempt to talk about this without it sounding like a fancy fur coat that everyone is keen to try on, only to have it thrown back at me in revulsion because we all know nobody would ever deliberately wear something so vile.

In my gut, I knew what I wanted to do. But the moment logic and reason caught up with my instincts, I did the thing I thought I'd never do. Suddenly it became apparent that my life right now was not conducive to raising a happy, healthy child. Even though I was in a much better position compared to the many young victims of rape who kept their babies in spite of it all, I couldn't bring myself to put a child or myself through a lifetime of chaos. Even though I'd always trusted my intuition, I turned my back on it when it really mattered.

Adoption. Murderer. Reckless. Selfish. Irresponsible. Let the judgements roll...

I will not delve into all the intimate details, such as how did it happen and wasn’t he wearing a condom and how far along are you and what did he say and is he going to take responsibility for it and whose is it, actually and are you sad and does your family know and who have you told and who can I tell and when will you make an announcement and does Nadia know and is it okay for me to tell her when I see her tonight and who is going to pay and how much is it going to cost, exactly and does Nadia know because I feel like she needs to hear it from me and are you seeing someone else and what's going on between you guys anyway and does he have a new girlfriend and what are their names and how much do they weigh and are weekends lonely and are you happier and do you think you will ever regret this and could you just tell me exactly every detail from the very beginning especially the bad stuff?

“It will hurt,” my doctor warned. No shit. I wasn’t expecting an abortion to feel like a milk bath and massage. I had 3 doses of medication inserted into my baby box before I felt any contractions. I cramped and bled the entire weekend before returning on Monday for an ultrasound. Somehow the amoeba was surviving. Just 6 weeks and already it was a little bit resistant, a little bit stubborn. =)

Because it was still early in the pregnancy, we could afford to wait until Friday before we made our next move. My sesame seed had evolved into a peanut by then and I think I saw a heartbeat on the screen but I didn’t dare ask. It's weird the attachment you can have to something you can't even physically hold. I spent another Friday afternoon at the clinic for a second round of medication. I heard a small splash when I sat on the toilet to pee that evening. Using a pair of chopsticks, I fished out a lump of curdled blood attached to a grey thing the size of a ping pong ball. It was surreal. I thought, do I just flush the toilet? And then I did.

Since then, I’ve had six bowls of really awful herbal soup cooked by my mum, two hours of sleep per night, ten plates of steamed Pomfret, forty cups of bitter tea, approximately 3,000 iron pills, and a partridge in a pear tree.

Even though I have amazing friends who guide me and take care of me and save me from my darkest days, everyone has his or her own life to return to and wants me to do the same. Everyone else has moved on and is a little tired of my situation, even though I am still in transition as I try to make sense of everything that has happened. Unless my baby daddy texted me something appalling recently, or there are some new boyfriends and girlfriends in the mix, most people don’t want or know how to talk anymore about the physical reality of going through an abortion and the psychological burdens that accompany it.

Except your mother.

It’s one thing to be tough and stalwart. It’s another to bear such extraordinary pain alone. Don’t do it. Even though it feels like nobody else understands the specific ways you are in pain, you have to be brave enough to show some weakness. You have to trust people, especially the people you love and who you know love you back. You have to give them the chance to come through in the clutch. What’s the point otherwise?

A mother is like your conscience only much louder. And nosier. In fact, your conscience probably stays out of your own affairs far more often than your mum does, which is not so much because while your conscience is negligent or busy, your mum is always watching and you are nothing without her, really.

Ultimately, any gut-wrenching experience makes you see things differently. It tears apart your ego and breaks your heart so new light can come in. It also reminds you of the simple truths that we purposely forget every day or else would never get out of bed. Things like, condoms break and pills get skipped and pulling out seems good in theory. And shit happens. And it can happen to anyone. The best outcome is that you learn a little more about what you can handle and you stay soft through the pain. Perhaps you feel a little bit wiser now. Maybe your story can be of help to others if they should ever need a hand navigating such supremely shitty times.

The fact that anyone has to feel ashamed of his or her personal decision is extremely unfortunate. The countless women who feel scared and alone when they end up needing to have an abortion are the reason I speak freely on the matter. My hope is that one day, all women will be able to feel the same way. That being said, even though I am not ashamed of my abortion, and I will never be ashamed of being a woman who exercised her rights, getting an abortion really does suck a lot. Really. Just to reiterate: getting an abortion sucks.

As I’m learning, saying I'm pro-choice and living that decision are not entirely the same things. When you decline the gift you're given, will the universe offer you that gift again? In truth, most days I feel like I need to be punished for getting pregnant in the first place, so I alienate myself and am hesitant about asking for help or support that I'm not sure I deserve. I weep at anything, even detergent commercials. Some days I wake up and it's almost too much to open the door of guilt and regret because it is daunting and overwhelming. But it’s precisely the stuff we ignore that haunts us further down the road.

So, I dunno, you guys. I'm waiting for the day I wake up feeling like my whole self again. But until then, I think we just try to do whatever we can and forgive ourself the rest.

The End

I could write more words about how different we are, but I won’t. The way we processed the world around us, the way we functioned, the way we expressed ourselves was just the tip of the iceberg. And frankly, acknowledging our differences had always been the easiest part of this game.

Still, our differences have had taken some getting used to. This seeming to be the one who desires rather than the one who is desired. Seeming to be the one to extend the goodnight kiss beyond sweet dreams and into let me hold you. The one who thinks in the middle of it, my god, you are handsome. The one who sometimes whispers, thank you, I'm so lucky. The one who, though smaller, afterwards makes up the outside part of the spoon.

I used to think that falling in love was something that just happened to us. My younger self likened it to getting hit by a magnificent force – like say, a school bus – something that was beyond our control and dependent on the stars. But what I'm beginning to understand is that love is an action we take. It is a decision we make to put in the effort to know someone, to bother to understand someone, while simultaneously letting that someone into our own life.

It's a feeling like no other when you want to know someone so quickly and so exhaustively and so urgently that you wish you could do it via osmosis. You want to give of yourself and be given to, freely and equally. Because all there really is at the core of any relationship is what you offer up and what you get back.

Being the highly individualistic people that we are, most of us move at our own speed. One evening before falling asleep, I was asking Guillaume about his favourite childhood memory, what his parents were like, the different countries he’d visited, and so on, when he said something very strange. “Stop trying to figure me out,” he sighed. Surprised by his request, which I took as an unforgivable affront to my honour, I wanted to scream. But my voice was too quiet, it didn’t leave my head.

That was the moment our relationship stalled. It became apparent that the sharing was no longer mutual, and our differences began bubbling to the surface. Someone (Guillaume) at some point revealed himself or herself (himself, really) to be a withholder, and the rejection stung (owwwww).

People – even the wrong ones, or rather, especially the wrong ones – come into our lives to teach us the lessons we can’t learn on our own. And it's not our place to kick up a fuss about it. We just have to sit down, listen, nod occasionally, let their words seep into our pores, and then get the hell out before everything bursts into flames. And often it's only in hindsight that you realize people put up walls around themselves perhaps because they are terrified of being known. (Or perhaps they simply wish to keep you out cuz you disrupt their sleep and irritate them to no end.)

I hope I don't just speak for myself when I say this, but I'd like to believe we held a mirror up to each other and saw ourselves and the world in a more dimensional way that enhanced our understanding of the meaning of life. (Deep stuff...) Our character defects – such as my inability to manage my emotions and impulses, and his blatant disregard for and avoidance of his own emotions – became alarmingly clear.

Then came the test, an opportunity to face my demons and overcome them for personal growth, which I dodged and subsequently flunked. I succumbed to my feelings of anger, hurt, and sadness, by going down the cowardice path and opting for short-term relief. The hardest but right thing to do was reach towards him, the very person who erected a barrier between us, and ask for more understanding, acceptance, and appreciation. Asking and listening is a craft that takes precise cultivation, effort, and some trial and error because of the variances in our wiring. But when you’re with someone you truly love, it’s worth taking the time to figure out. As long as you lovebirds share similar values, being with someone vastly different from your own person can be a very eye-opening and nourishing experience.

The best policy is to never leave someone for someone else. Only end relationships because they have stopped fulfilling their purpose, not because you think someone else seems like a better fit. News to no one: nobody is a better fit. That oasis in the distance? A mirage, my friend. But like every valuable lesson I have ever learnt, I had to live it to learn it. Side note: I’m quite certain I did something horrible in a past life, like drown bunnies just for laughs. Or am I just really fucking stubborn?

This narrative of mucking something up on my first attempt is a recurring theme I have grown used to after years of testing boundaries, pushing buttons, playing with fire, and walking along the edge. Sometimes, I get another chance to make it right. Other times, I don’t. Life is a big experiment. Isn’t it funny? No it’s not. But you’re a scientist, goddamnit, Guillaume. You know this.

So, there. This is what the end looks like. And that’s all right because happiness comes from staring your mistakes dead in the eye and owning them. Happiness comes from knowing that it’s beautiful and worthwhile to take that leap of faith anyway. Happiness comes from trying to be brave, to always choose the potential for growth over the fear of getting hurt. Happiness comes from realizing that you're strong enough to survive it, strong enough to change from it. Sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn’t – the outcome is irrelevant. What matters is your belief that even as a quirky entity with major design flaws, you are still someone who deserves everything under the sun. This is how you keep the love alive – with or without a boyfriend. Once you embrace exactly who you are and figure out what you want from this life, you ignite a fire within you that no one can put out.

It takes a certain kind of audacity to believe in happiness, to believe in love, to believe that you are special. This is no small feat for intelligent people in particular. If you’re not someone who can bop along while foolishly metabolizing the world’s superficial jingles and then regurgitate them in a signature brand of empty cheer ("Let go and let God," "c'est la vie," "everything happens for a reason!"), you'll know this is not an easy thing to buy into. It is not a modest decision to prioritise happiness and ask for love. Quite the opposite, it is bold and greedy. And it is embarrassing to try and fail. And I give props to anyone who tries and fails. And then tries and then fails. Again. Over and over.

The Apple & The Orange

This Just In: Guillaume and I are wired in completely different ways.

He is a careful thinker whose default mode is ‘Quiet Contemplation.’ By the time he actually gets around to vocalizing his thoughts, he's thought things through thoroughly and drawn an informed conclusion. Whereas I idea generate in real time and ramble on without a filter, often incoherently. I don't stand a chance sparring with him at an intellectual level – or any level, really. While he's considered just about every possible scenario, I've only begun percolating the necessary information. In the end, everything slips off my tongue sounding embryonic, inferior, and just plain stupid.

Resultantly, he usually spends a good amount of our time together trying to wizen me up. Weekends with him remind me of enrichment camp, when he whips out his phone at dinner and reads me stuff off Wikipedia. Though in the moment my mind is like, "sheesh, babe, just let me eat my chawanmushi in peace." I'm always glad to return home with tidbits of new knowledge. He has never hit me in the head for being dumb, but I do see how explaining things to me is energy draining to him. And sometimes, like when he translates Le Petit Prince, he wears a look of exasperation, thinking I don’t make the effort to meet him halfway in comprehension. Which is partly true, as he mumbles a lot and I usually try to avoid using my brain excessively outside of the office.

Apart from the quality of his thoughts, Guillaume also has the ability to think long range into the future and anticipate the implications of any action. He's figured out how the world works and has an inkling of where things are headed, and most significant of all, he can foresee what's coming down the pike. Or perhaps not, as we will later learn as the story unfolds.

In stark contrast, my field of vision is limited to 2 steps in front of me and I'm slightly schizophrenic. I flutter from topic to topic and jump to quick (and often inaccurate) conclusions. Touch-and-go is my forte, and I oscillate between random extremes from one minute to the next. My exploration process moves fast and works largely on my intuition and hunches. I'm absolutely no good at articulating any opinions and information with supporting data and metrics, which just so happens to be his bread and butter.

Guillaume is the ultimate planner. Not in an overbearing control freak kind of way. But more like, “wow, how does he do that, what is this sorcery?” kind of way. He seems to have mapped out how he's going to behave in future situations and gleans energy from determining the best of all possible approaches. Though extremely capable of improvising, he has shown to rapidly lose energy (not to mention patience) if he is repeatedly called to act without deliberating for prolonged periods of time.

I severely lack the foresight and focus that Guillaume is overflowing with. My plans almost always veer off-course to the point where I don't even try to make any concrete plans or detailed outlines these days. Taking everything in stride, I've learnt how to thrive on the excitement of not knowing what comes next and embrace the possibility that anything can happen. No idea where to have dinner tonight, "oooooooh..." I squeal in delight. "What! I thought you had a place in mind," Guillaume says, with no faith in serendipity and visibly annoyed that we now have to spend the first part of our lovely evening wandering the streets hand in hand, in search of food.

Aside from our minds being very dissimilar, so are our dispositions poles apart. Guillaume likes to be in a bit of discomfort. To drive, drive, drive things forward. To raise, raise, raise the bar. It's admirable, really. And it is the secret sauce to his competence and efficiency, which he prizes above all. Being a little agitated, angry, and unfulfilled is what pushes him to actualize his goals.

I, on the other hand, want fun! Harmony. Play. Joy. Cuddles. Relax. Joy. Joy. Chocolate sprinkles. Yay. Picking up on social nuances and recognizing someone's uneasiness and then comforting them is one of the few things that comes to me quite naturally. Sometimes it's just what he needs, but not as much or as often as my instincts tell me. Most days he doesn't want to be talked out of his mildly perturbed state, especially when it's about something he wants to accomplish.

As if discrepancies in our thinking and temperaments aren't enough, our intensions always seem to be lost in translation in our communication. While the French-speaking population likes to ask, "et mon cul, c'est du poulet?" the English-speaking population almost never asks, "is my ass made out of chicken?"

Guillaume likes s p a c e. A lot of it. He needs physical space. When we first started spending nights together, he (6.3 ft with slight tummy) would often accuse me (5.3 ft with cute pooch) of crushing him in his sleep and blame his backaches on the way my limbs tangled with his in my sleep. But more than that, he needs mental space with his ideas, so he can ponder and apply himself accordingly to make wonderful shit happen in real life. And most of all, he needs emotional space. He hates stating the obvious and lives by the saying "actions speak louder than words," with his assumption that his behavior makes clear his feelings. Emotion is the one realm that logic does not always apply to, and it is therefore his personal kryptonite and something he would like not to have to talk about at all costs.

To his dismay, I am full of feelings – and the unregulated kind at that. I am constantly feeling the feels, yet have no clue how to apply logic and reason to guide my expression and acceptance of them. Dealing with me when I'm emotional makes him feel out of his depth. I be like, "helllllooooooo? Hi! Hi! Honey! Hi! Hi! Are you here? Can you be affectionate with me? Affirm me, maybe?" Often he tries to talk me out of my feelings so we can all move on, act rationally, and avoid this uncomfortable situation.

His need for space in his operating style makes me feel lost in the cold at moments, abandoned even. For someone who, like a pup, constantly tries to lessen the space between herself and everyone else, his perplexing cat-like behavior is hard to compute and I'm prone to making him feel invaded. Though I have not dared to utter the words "I love you" in a romantic context since the demise of my last real relationship just over a year ago, I have screamed it a thousand times in my eagerness to play and talk and have fun together. And conceivably, so has he, in the meals he prepares for me, his willingness to do yoga on Sunday mornings, and letting me leave my bathing suit and necklaces and toothbrush lying around his apartment.

The Fight

Guillaume does not express his finer feelings like an ordinary person and it was beginning to confuse me. And by confuse me, I mean severely shake my confidence in my own ability to 'analyze his quirks and dig a tunnel to his heart.'

“Do you even have a heart? And how do I win it?” I would whisper softly into his ear while stroking his hair as he slept soundly. (This is totally not creepy behaviour at all, btw.)

We have since encountered two bumps in the road, and each time I’ve made note of the emphasis he places on directness and honesty in a way that is productive but very foreign to me. He doesn’t like playing games and expects me to tell him when I’m angry so that he can be “Okay, well, why? What can we do about it?”

Our first real fight happened the night Guillaume and I were talking about how my period was late. “Too bad babies aren’t like cats. We can’t just leave them at the neighbour’s,” he said. To which I said “goodnight,” and turned my back towards him.

“Are you mad?” he asked about a minute later. “No,” I replied. “Did you know that there’s a certain kind of fish that changes colour when it…” Blah blah blah, he told me more than twenty fish facts that night.

I don’t usually like to go into great detail about why I’m upset because it reveals what a big idiot I am. (Also, most of the time I haven’t figured out why I’m upset. I just know that I am.) I was very quiet over dinner on Friday, which frustrated him to no end. “You’re no fun when you’re in this mood. You’re ruining my evening,” he said.

Shots fired.

Waterworks began.

I don’t remember how it escalated, but by the end of the night I was in tears and screaming, “I DON’T ADD ANY VALUE TO YOUR LIFE! JUST LEAVE!”

But Guillaume didn’t leave.

(Because we were in his apartment.)

At some point last week, I realized Guillaume was an awesome person I could potentially be with for a long time, so, of course, the urge to break up with him became unbearable.

If this doesn’t make sense to you, congratulations! You are a healthy, well-adjusted human being! To everyone else: Amirite?? You’ve been there, destroyed that.

After my brain started to identify him as “good” and “healthy,” I immediately began to overanalyze everything. “Bonne nuit, baby doll! Fais de beaux rêves!” he would say. “What the hell? Is he cheating on me?” I would think. Self-sabotage often feels like an out-of-body experience. You watch yourself destroy something, but you feel completely powerless to stop it.

When something like this would happen to me in the past, it was easy to justify because the guys weren’t a great fit anyway. But with Guillaume, it was different. I had to actually face the dysfunctional music and admit, “Oh man. If this falls to shit, it’s because I am fucked up.” I could either take the time to do the work on myself or watch this happen 10,000 more times and then die alone.

I’ve always felt that Guillaume was five steps ahead of me – in every way. Initially, I found this very attractive. He had a PhD and knew lots of stuff, he had experienced 8 more years of life than me and had so much advice to offer, he had a cool job and took me out for nice dinners, etc etc.

The five steps between us became strikingly apparent to me when I’d given him a yoga mat for his birthday while he took me to Phuket for the weekend of mine. I started to lose my shit about what I brought to the table apart from a perky ass and lots of LOLs.

So I asked.

“I dunno” he said, with absolute coolness and detachment.

What I’ve realized is that Guilluame expressing his emotions in a way that is unfamiliar to me, does not necessarily imply that he is cold-blooded. I’m slowly learning to recognize and understand that he is not the kind of person who would come serenade me outside my window. But instead would go out of his way to make sure that I am really taken care of and happy and that nothing is troubling me. Which is what truly matters at the end of the day.

I’m picking up on the little things he does, like making sure I wear my seatbelt in cabs and forcing me to drink water so I don’t get a hangover and cooking me fluffy pancakes and greasy bacon for breakfast and playing TED Talks while we laze in bed so my weekend isn’t a completely futile hangover and teaching me the trick to chop onions.

“If I thought you didn’t add any value to my life I wouldn’t still call you. But I call you, so there” he said, with all the rationale and logic of a person with little trust in his emotions, who sees emotional expression as a display of poor self-governance. Distinctively different from the hot, passionate, Romeo-type response that I’m more familiar with.

But then his face softened and he looked at me in a way I’d never seen before. It was as if in that moment it suddenly hit him that I was the total opposite of who he was – highly emotional and not very rational or logical. And then he cupped my face with his palms as if he’d just realized it was fragile and to be handled with care.

The Fall

My dating life changed drastically after I decided at the start of the year that I was going to be “cute and freaking awesome.” I made a promise to myself to wash my hair daily, which brought on a tidal wave of flirtations and brief affairs that usually only happen to hot people. These days I just sashay into every fucking disco in town and shout, “HEYYYY BABE, WHO WANTS TO MAKE OUT?!” (JK, I have a boyfriend now so I can’t say that to people.)

I'm usually attracted to the mysterious one. Or the risky one. Or the one already in a relationship – or open marriage. Basically, the unavailable one that seems only the slightest bit interested in me, most of the time in spite of my inkling that it’s never going to happen. But that’s what makes it all the more enthralling, because I love the chase as much as the challenge. I’m dead set on analyzing their quirks and digging a tunnel to their hearts. And boy do I get a kick out of persuading minds and winning hearts.

I fell for Guillaume the same way I fall for most things. Not at all and then fully and quickly. It wasn’t that we didn’t hit it off right from the get-go. His offbeat sincerity and disarming smile stirred feelings in me the first time we met for coffee on a Saturday afternoon. I checked to see if he and I had a special connection that was greater than the wifi in the café we were in. We did. It only takes a second to check; half the time I don’t even realize I’m doing it until I’m already done.

The thing about Guillaume was that he did not belong to the category of unavailable people. Not once did he leave me hanging onto vague implications or wondering what his text messages meant. He carried himself in a way that left little to no room for uncertainties or questions. So I knew very well that if I wanted it, I could have it. Ironically, the simplicity of this perplexed me the most. But what's most interesting for me is that I fell for him after I had first fallen for myself, something I had never bothered to do before.

In the shower that Saturday night, I thought about his ears: darling little shells. “If you always do what you’ve always done, you’ll always get what you've always got,” the hot water whispered as it rained from above me. I wasn’t aware my showerhead was into Henry Ford, but I appreciated the wisdom it sprinkled upon me. To prevent razor-burn, I shave my legs in the direction of hair growth. “Fuck it,” I thought as I glided the blade from my ankles to my knees and up my thighs.

I was halfway through a bowl of warm oatmeal the next morning when Guillaume invited me over for a swim. “Fuck it,” I thought as I slurped the rest of it up, while a dilemma over which bathing suit would most flatter my pear-shaped body began brewing in my head.

I clung onto him the way koala bears cling onto eucalyptus trees as we waddled our way around the children armed with Super Soakers and goofy goggles in the pool. We found a spot. I kept my arms around him and he looked at me and I looked at him and he looked at me and even though I was well aware that emotional attachment is the precursor to pain, it didn’t matter because I could already feel myself rising up to the challenge of heartache.

I know now what an untrustworthy companion my heart can be after it has repeatedly given itself away without first consulting reality or prudence. The most terrifying thing, I think, about falling so fast is getting there before the other person does, with nothing to do but wait. And hope that they join me on the other side. Soon.

We all know we can only casually date a person for so long. There comes a point where we have to either make it exclusive or get rid of them entirely. In my experience, the two-month mark is usually when my assumptions begin gnawing at me. Sometimes, especially when I’m pre-menstrual, that cut-off point is 13 days. I can't explain why it is so important to my self-destructing uterus whether I will be transitioning into spring with this person, but it is.

Come-a-period-time, I feel very lethargic and sore-titted and crave crisps and chocolates and constantly have the urge to poop. I also get the general sense that I’m kinda annoyed about something, and won’t feel better until I’ve picked a fight. Some mild discomfort and cramping seem like perfectly useful alert systems, but my entire existence, feelings, worldview, and movie selection are usually derailed during this time. Dudes luv me.

I worked out the math (13 days + “Where is this going?”) and concluded that we should stop seeing each other. I’m not light. I’ve never been light. And I think sometimes it freaks people out that there’s this intensity coming at them. Taken aback by my findings when I revealed them to him, Guillaume joked about having a threesome, asked if he should introduce himself to my family as the father or the boyfriend, reassured me that Aunt Flo would be here tomorrow and then told me to go to bed.

He seemed like a chugger.

So that's how I fell – not at all and then fully and quickly – into my fifth official relationship, my first one as a somewhat mature adult who is semi-capable of expressing herself appropriately. I know this news comes as a small betrayal, especially after I’d just written several words advocating safe, consensual promiscuity as a lifestyle and way to navigate our sexuality and desires. But it feels like this could be the one, until – oops! – it’s not.

The Fine Print

Seeing possibilities everywhere can feel like seeing stars

As with any talent or ability bestowed upon us, it takes time and dedication to hone these skills before they can truly add any real value to our lives and the world. For the amateur visionary, the power to imagine alternate possibilities everywhere feels much more a burden than a gift.

Before I learnt that impulses could be managed and even ignored, I would get very easily excited and distracted by ideas, things, and people around me. Staying focused on any one project for too long was a real test and I was constantly dropping them whenever a new possibility caught my eye as it crept onto the horizon.

This gave rise to my preoccupation with figuring out my motivations behind all of my actions. I didn’t have the option to stop being a person who sees every opportunity, but I did have the option to stop being a person who seizes every opportunity. With time and energy being finite resources as my main constrain, I thought about what I wanted the end to look like so that I could filter out the less relevant stuff and prioritize going for the gold.

With my whims locked down, then came the awkward part of learning my value and evaluating the cards I had been dealt. As someone in the habit of maximizing every situation, who sees the goodness (keyword: possibilities) in being handed a chocolate cake as well as in having to bake the damn thing from scratch, I’ve never been very particular about how it happened, so long as there was a chocolate cake at the end of the day.

But here’s the straightest dose of truth you’ll ever get in this lifetime, so hold tight: there are some occasions, though few and far between, where you actually deserve to win a chocolate cake. In fact, sometimes you deserve to lounge in sexy lingerie and lick chocolate fudge off a really hot dude’s six-pack with servants fanning palm leaves by your bedside.

I’m going to elaborate on this in the context of dating because I think it’s something very relatable. Having spent an embarrassing number of years foolishly making huge sacrifices for the sake of deeply flawed and undeserving individuals, I am one hundo percent committed to steering you away from that dark destiny.

Although there are some people who set their sights way too high and expect way too much from their partners, that’s not all of us. I think a lot of us are the kind of people who settle for whatever we get and then call it magical. At some point – sooner rather than later – it’s going to be very useful knowing if you fall into the former or latter category. Are you someone who is too picky? Or are you someone who takes what is given, puts it on a fucking pedestal and then worships it for way longer than is necessary or sane?

To figure this out: take a good look at all the guys you’ve ever brought home to dinner. Did your family and friends think they were amazing, or did they ask you, WHAT THE FUCK ARE YOU DOING WITH THIS SCHMUCK? Do you sometimes find yourself warming up to a dude who looks like he has the potential to adore you forever and ever, because maybe he’s not quite as cute or as witty as you are, and even after all of that settling – surprise! – he was just not that into you anyway? But by then, you’d already made him out to be a knight in shining armour in your mind, so you didn’t want to lose him?

It’s crucial to know if you’re someone who is stubborn and delusional and great at making a delicious chocolate cake from a crappy situation. Skills like compromising and making the most out of what’s in front of you are going to serve you well for the most part – especially in marriage. But they’re generally going to screw your life up in the meantime. Trust me. I say this as a person who has managed to stay in a relationship with someone who was cheating on me repeatedly and then be the one who got dumped and then still feel heartbroken for several years after the ordeal.

More often than not, I’m guilty of actively constructing the person I’m dating – in my head – rather than actually getting to know the person sitting across me. Instead of objectively assessing him against a checklist, I entertain endless possibilities while ignoring the qualities that don’t quite sit so well with me, and sometimes even, I dunno, rewrite his personality in entirety to omit the glaring red flags. And then throw involuntary feelings into the mix, why don’t we? Chemistry, attraction, and rapport quickly annihilate the scorecard and make the process of eliminating subpar dudes who aren’t good fertility matches more perplexing than it really is.

Now, I know this is a bit controversial, but to avoid falling into this trap while navigating the landmine that is modern romance, I’m a late adopter but big advocate of casual dating in bulk. I still maintain that I’m a monogamous relationship type of person. But think that at this present moment, it would be foolhardy to jump into such an arrangement without first conducting surveys of what’s available on the market to ensure that my benchmarks are realistic and on par with the global standard.

The more you expose yourself to what’s out there, the more perspective you gain about your place in this world, the more you understand what you deserve, the more you recognize what getting the short end of the stick looks like, the more you are able to discern when you should be given chocolate cake and when you should be baking. Bla bla bla, at this point I’m just trying to reassure myself that my recent promiscuity has a higher purpose other than lots of amazing sex. So, please, make like the little sisters I have always assumed you to be and tell me that there is.

Pray tell.

The 7%

Deciding which road to happiness to embark on is a lot easier than what we'd initially thought

I’ve been doing a lot of introspection lately about what I do and more importantly why I do what I do, so here I am to dish up my deep thoughts like the Dalai Lama of 20-something befuddlement. What’s really interesting for me is how my life has changed 180 degrees in the last year, for better or worse, in ways I could never have imagined. The more I sit down to try and ‘figure it out’ as I write this blog – which feels absurdly arrogant to me most of the time, because my life is just one constant troll and who the hell am I to help anyone, anyway? – the more I believe that regardless of what life gives anybody (lemons, philandering partners, odd jobs, old men, anemia) the possibility of a delicious chocolate cake is always on the table, if you want it. You either win (a chocolate cake) or you learn (how to bake a chocolate cake); nobody really loses.

For the benefit of those unfamiliar with my background and upbringing, I’d grown up under the impression that my life was a Disney movie and I would marry my childhood sweetheart in my early twenties and then devote the rest of my life to fussing over our five children. My grandmother had done it, my mother did it, and my sister is doing it. With this road to happiness as a (read: the one and only) reference point growing up, it seemed only natural that my life would play out in a similar fashion.

Believing that my raison d’être was to run a household and bring children into this world influenced my endeavors in career and love in ways that have led people to believe that I am a complete moron. While all of my peers progressed to university, there I was pursuing an interest in a field that was not at all lucrative, which nobody even bats an eyelash at. And while I should have been taking full advantage of my perky ass and extensive library of good puns, I winced at the thought of being on the market for too long and dated with the seriousness and focus of a deranged person with a ticking biological time bomb in her uterus. Something tells me that growing up in a home with siblings at least a decade older may have had a hand in all of this, but that’s a discussion for another day.

Then as life would have it, I experienced a seismic shift in my thinking. It dawned on me that my likelihood of befalling the same fate as the other women in my family was decreasing exponentially with each passing day. Considering that I’d been blessed with the privileges and opportunities to create my own destiny, on my own terms, I should’ve been out making waves. I was clearly short-changing myself here.

Everything I once thought to be true about the world and myself turned out to be false or – at best – wildly inaccurate. The sudden loss of purpose and direction petrified me at first. Had this realization hit me a few years ago I’d have been paralyzed with fear, but today this epiphany can only be described as exhilarating. If there’s just one thing I know to be true and accurate about life, it is that when one door closes, another door (and several other doors) open.

Not to toot my own horn here, but I am a master of envisioning alternate possibilities. I didn’t think anything of this because it’s something I’d been doing since I was a kid, but I’m learning now that some of us (just 7% of the population, if we are nitpicking) are more inclined to do this and at far greater intensities than others.

Where some people see dead people with their sixth sense, others see possibilities. I see them everywhere and get so obsessed with the what-could-be that I’m constantly forgetting the what-is. It’s intoxicating and it’s infuriating. Aside from being notorious for swimming upstream and my headstrong tendencies, family and friends have attributed fickleness and restlessness to my nature. And it drives them up the wall. To onlookers, my life echoes a sense of cluelessness and aimlessness. They’re exhausted by my stress and indecisiveness, particularly so about the people I date and employment prospects I flirt with.

FAQs:
Why do you fall head over heels for someone who is good to his mother one day, yet still fall head over heels for someone who is estranged from his mother the next?
Why do you experience euphoria with someone who means the world to you one day, yet still experience euphoria when that someone is dead to you the next?
Why is it that you feel fulfilled practicing yoga 10 hours one day, yet still feel fulfilled sketching shoes 10 hours the next?

Who even asks questions like these?! Christ.

To be fair, no family or friend has ever had the audacity to put me in the spotlight like that. Parents have come close, but never this direct. These as just some of the questions I ask myself when I’m not too busy re-watching The Mindy Project.

The subconscious reshuffling of my priorities over the last year finally set off an existential crisis a couple of weeks ago. (We all saw that one coming…) I’ve never earnestly considered a job for myself, but now dreamed of establishing a career. And where I was once desperate and most thrilled to lock it down, the idea of being committed to one person right now makes me shifty and uncomfortable.

I seem to have developed a new brand of independence and confidence I’d always admired in others but could never find within myself. It was momentarily discombobulating, because it made it hard for myself to recognize the person I had become, just for a second. And although this felt like an achievement on some level, it baffled me more than it delighted me.

I’ve always strived to walk in step with what I valued and believed to be right, by living my life as my true Self – whatever that means. Actually, all that means is ignoring what most people have to say and instead just going with your gut and responding to what makes you feel alive – it's so straightforward and simple, you wonder why more people don't do this. This would account for all the seemingly erratic, random, and brazenly contradictory pursuits I have chased in my lifetime.

Up until very recently, the road to happiness for me had involved settling down and starting a family at a young age. And the road to misery presumably involved working long hours and a preference to keep multiple superficial, intermittent, and stress-free relations.

Here’s the tricky part that I struggle with: it’s not always black or white. Neither of those options is the right or true or superior path – I’ve since tried both and found each of them to be equally satisfying in their own ways. Right today is not always right tomorrow. And right for you is not always right for me. And is it the Vatican or Hollywood or mum and dad who dictate what’s really ‘right’ anyway?

All I know is that for some of us (just 7% of the population), we can pick any person – obviously with the exclusion of serial killers and rapists – to be with and be happy. And we can pick nobody to be with and still be happy. And we can pick any career – considering we put our minds to it, commit the necessary hours and work to be great at it – and be happy. That’s reductive, of course, as in reality there are many rivers to cross and gaps to bridge between where we stand and Happiness.

But the gist is this: We can do anything and be happy. Whichever path we decide for ourselves, we are going to find a world of endless possibilities and a delicious chocolate cake because that’s how our brains are wired. The journey has never been the hard part. For us, it is the decision itself that is the hardest. But once it’s been made, our extroverted intuition jumps right back into play and makes damn sure that we are making the absolute most out of whatever option we’ve chosen.

So rest assured and stop mulling over the options already. We are going to find a way to be happy either way – at least 7% of us are.

The Trust Issue

You're not in control. Deal with it.

When it comes to dating, I’ve never been too good at discerning which doubts to consider seriously and which to ignore. Owing it to my teenage boyfriends who changed me from a fun-loving QT pie to an insecure fruitcake by cheating on me repeatedly throughout our relationships, I sailed forth into adulthood with my self-worth and self-respect misplaced, convinced that having a huge amount of doubt and putting up with it was what it meant to be in lurrrrve. News to no one: it’s not.

Friends, logic and reason suggested I stay far away from the three D’s: drugs, drama and dicks. But as someone who is crushed and then oddly energized and motivated by failure, I swore off French fries, ice cream sundaes and spaghetti Bolognese instead.

Admittedly, I did go through a period of darkness and cynicism, but it wasn’t long before I bounced right back to seeking validation from all the wrong people and places. Too busy to own up to my insecurities, I never figured out how to eliminate them. In the end, I just dumped my baggage on the doorsteps of the boys I went on to date by projecting my fears and shortcomings onto them. Hindsight is 20/20.

Though something was definitely amiss, trusting other people was never a struggle for me. Now, now, hear me out!

I mean, I may have gotten mad at my bf for, I don’t know, blinking in a way that implied that he might be cheating on me? LOL. But the truth is, we’re all capable of betrayal and infidelity. And we’re all capable of monogamy. There is no genetic code, no telltale sign such as length of ring finger in relation to index finger, and definitely no particular alignment of planets or series of events that guarantees promiscuity or commitment. There are influencing factors, for sure. There are inclinations based on gender or personality, arguably. But there is no certain way to predict one hundo percent whether or not the person you’re boning is going to be faithful to you. There just isn’t. There’s just trust.

Coming to terms with this was especially hard for me, a control freak, who loses sleep over calculating the odds and trying to predict the future. Control is largely an illusion. You think you’re steering the wheel, but we all know who’s hand it is that’s really on the wheel – it’s Jesus, y’all! Jkjk. Life just likes to switch things up without giving much of a heads up. After several Mariah Carey cum Amanda Bynes style meltdowns, I brushed the dirt off my shoulder and resumed life with a new emphasis on adaptability and resilience.

Did this resolve whatever outstanding “trust issues” I harbored within my waifish frame? No.

The idea that we are mostly treated the way we allow ourselves to be treated led me to the realization that it wasn’t others that I had grown weary of. The only person I didn’t trust was myself.

The more people I encounter, the more I understand that trust has less to do with them and much more to do with my own person. Trust is a decision. It is a conscious choice I make every day, to invest in other human beings because I know that even if they pull the rug from under my feet, like artisan bread, I will rise.

I used to think trust was saying to someone, “I know you’ll never hurt me.” But all it actually is, “I know I can deal with the mess if shit hits the fan.” Whether or not we are able to trust others always comes back to how we feel about ourselves – it’s a reflection of what we believe we are capable of handling.

The Three Weirdos

Invaluable lessons you cannot soak up from a textbook. 

I’ve always found that I learn the best from and through people. Observing my older siblings from a very young age taught me how to get away with murder under my parents’ rule. Growing up in the dog-eat-dog world of an all-girls convent school taught me that bitchez be crazy unless they’re your bitchez, then they cool. A history of slightly lame boyfriends taught me that I’m someone who is very comfortable with chaos and abuse and codependency, often subconscioulsy seeking it out, constantly trying to fix and help people so I can feel loved and validated and safe. Gallivanting around Europe on my own taught me that having respect for others, charm and wits can get you as far if not further than paper qualifications.

As one would’ve expected, my restlessness began to set in as it became apparent that I’d exhausted my pool of human beings to exploit. Was I going to let my inability to make new friends at a consistent rate throughout my life, which has consequently led to my current predicament of fresh meat scarcity, hinder my learning? No way.

To overcome this dry spell, I spent the last four months dating a series of weirdos. Did I do this intentionally? No. Maybe. Just to freak my family out. I don’t know. Did I have fun? Yes. Weirdos are always fun. Always.

There were nights I’d eat dumplings along the river with a dashing Austrian, watch Comedy Central while drinking Irn-Bru on a boring Scottish man’s couch, lose my knickers in an Italian architect’s minimalistic apartment, and go dancing in a dingy disco with an openly married bloke.

Now, I know most people value their time and dignity much more than I do, and would prefer to go by the book (or blog) instead of, I dunno, diving head first into a tank of sewage water for the thrill of it and then working out the specifics – like how to actually swim – later on. So I’ve narrowed the ‘List of Men I Strongly Recommend You To Date Before Getting Too Serious with The One’ down to just three:

1. The man-child

He’s recently turned 30 and just got a promotion at work because he’s so good at what he does. He’s loud and arrogant, but you like it. (You weirdo.) He trades foreign exchange – whatever that means. But what it means for you is that on some days he will treat you like the goddamn princess that you are, and on other days he will completely ignore you because he’s been burned by the market, which has jeopardized his three million dollar bonus (USD, mind you), which has bruised his ego.

This will confuse you. You will drive yourself up the wall hypothesizing like a mad scientist trying to make sense of his behaviour. Pro tip: it has nothing to do with what you did or did not say/do.

You put up with this anyway, because you do not know better. You're addicted to his inattention as much as his attention.

He will live in a swanky shophouse (read: frat house) in a hip district with cool cafes. His best mate will live in the bedroom across his, his other best mate will live down the hall from them, and his other other best mate will live in the attic. They will have a pool table instead of a dining table, a bar with countless bottles of alcohol arranged and worshipped like an altar, and a huge hollow shell of a Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle hanging tastefully on a wall because, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle. They will have a live-in maid to cook their dinners, iron their shirts, and mop the vomit up after their raging parties.

It will be super fun. But eventually super fun will not be enough for you, and you will drop it like it’s hot.

2. The almost sugar daddy

This man is a senior managing director of an investment bank who draws a monthly salary of what you’d make in two years (bonus included). Extra points if your luck is as good as mine, and he happens to work in the same bank as the man-child trader, making him the man-child trader’s indirect boss.

Even though the bank has its traders and management working in separate offices, streamlining your operations by dating them simultaneously poses several risks, so thread lightly. This will be good practice for honing your organizational skills. You will also experience a big boost in your self-esteem if you manage to successfully pull off the act of juggling two men, significantly older than you. Who is the manipulative one now, beyotch?

Oh, and he will also have an ex-wife and two young kids. Plot twist! #instantmom #yolo. But to your relief, they will reside in their country of origin (GMT +1 in the summer). You will have small suspicions that perhaps he isn’t even divorced. But you’re 23 and your moral compass isn’t working and you generally #dgaf.

He will live right next to his office because he works an average of 18 hours a day. He will have two housemates, which at first throws you off. Why would a 37-year-old want to share his living space with other people? Because central business district, therefore rent. Practicality aside, it also shows that he is capable of living with other people – think tolerance, diplomacy, flexibility – which we know is no easy feat.

He won’t say much. His texting will be brief, which you will write off. Work. Busy. Old. Until you realize that your enthusiasm and his curtness are incompatible.

He will neither buy you expensive gifts nor take you to fancy restaurants because he has his insecurities too. As a perfectionist, he’s determined to please you in bed. But because you’re not totally comfortable around him, you will not O. One day he will tell you he has a surprise for you. “Could it be a Prada?” you ask yourself. It will be a pink vibrator, which will wake your inner prude that you never even knew existed. The end will go something like “haha, is this a sick joke? Wtf? Bye?????”

Fade to black.

3. The unbalanced extremist

This is a private banker a decade older than you are. You struggle to differentiate between a trader and private banker, but hopefully, are wise enough now to check that he works for a different bank from the trader and managing director. You are amazing and never one to back down from a challenge, but don’t overestimate yourself. Deconflicting two is hard enough.

He has a serious and intense character. He’s invested in your (his Russian mobster clients) wealth as much as he is in his health. He will be training for an adventure race, and in preparation for the race subject himself to an insanely ridiculous diet that excludes cucumbers and carrots as they contain too much carbohydrates. Waves of nostalgia will wash over you as you reflect fondly on the good ol’ days you ate nothing but lettuce in order to achieve a thigh gap. #thinspiration

He will visit the gym during his lunch hour. On Saturday mornings he will run 11km and then kayak for 3 hours. On Sunday mornings, play some sort of sport – whatever, you don’t care. Your admiration for his dedication wanes after a month because you realize that by the time he is ready for you, he is malnourished and physically drained, his mood completely erratic.

You don’t understand any of this. His commitment to his fitness far outweighs his commitment to you. Unfortunately, his absurdly chiselled bod and ability to call restaurants and make dinner reservations in advance still has you swooning over him. After all, he treats you like a lady on the days he’s had a balanced meal anyway.

He will live alone because he’s set in a routine, which he has refined and mastered. Living alone has made him reluctant to changes and closed off to new experiences that come with being around the batshit crazy 23-year-old that you are. In the moment, you will feel hurt by his resistance and rejection. Compromise comes so unnaturally to him.

His home will be immaculately clean and organized, which will impress you, coming from a background where your desk is perpetually strewn with dirty laundry. He will light candles and Norah Jones will coo from his surround sound speakers, but you will not feel at ease in his home. He will cook you dinner, a sweet gesture no doubt. But when the dust settles, you can’t help but wonder if it was a lobster marinated with love or precision, when he’s all about calories and control.

To maximise your experience, it would be advisable to select a candidate of French nationality. I don’t usually subscribe to stereotypes, but there are always a few that are true enough to merit their labels. Because he is older than you, he will assume that he is always right. Because he is older than you and he is French, he will assume that he is always right and you are always wrong. This will give you plenty of opportunities to stand your ground and defend your opinions – a vital life skill.

You will enjoy the brain tickling in the beginning. At last, someone who challenges you! Alas, you find yourself losing your voice and equal footing in the rendezvous. You may even begin to feel small and insignificant, because that’s what his bizarre personality does. Worse still, his stubbornness and narrow-mindedness will likely hinder your ability to enjoy sex with him.

Bid au revoir to this handsome and established French man before he sucks all your precious youthful and radiant energy out of you. Rest assured knowing that if you’ve managed to argue your case to the point where he's begun speaking in French, you've won. You will likely thrive among other well-adjusted adults and your voice will be heard in discussions to come.

Note: This exercise should take you no longer than four months, and is possible to complete in two months if you put your heart into it, work well under pressure, and are competent in multitasking. However, if you start feeling nauseous or find that it’s taking you longer than four months, exit stage left immediately. Someone could have put a baby inside of you, so a visit to your family doctor would be awkward but imperative.

Good luck and have fun!

Just Be Dumb

Just be dumb while you're young. Cuz you can. And cuz it makes mathematical sense. 

Hello again. Did you miss me?

Rhetorical question.

I’ve been hit with some cold, hard truths in the last couple of months and as patron saint of disillusioned and neurotic weirdos everywhere, it only feels right that they are shared with the sisterhood of the single. I’m leaving out some of the more obvious lessons here because, like please, just do yourself a favour and ditch anyone who isn’t treating you with 100,000% respect. I sincerely hope some of these small but significant lessons I’ve had to learn the hard (ha ha, pun!) way, which I will try to bequeath to you over the coming weeks/months – depending on my commitment to typing on the keyboard – can lighten your load and help ease some of those dating woes.

But first, I'd like to address something that's been grinding my gears. After subjecting an unsuspecting friend to yet another one of my longwinded rants when yet another man had driven me into the pit of despair – this happens every other day – the advice doled out was that "perhaps if this doesn't work out, you could actually try not to always be on the look out for something? I dunno. Just be. Instead of always actively meeting new guys even if it's to just hang. Just be. Things could still happen in ordinary situations."

I would take a (metaphorical) bullet for this girl, but I swear 2 G. "Just be." LOL. Whut? (I love you, Bel. I do.)

We’re told to adopt a go-getter attitude in order to get what we want from life, but ironically encouraged to stay uneducated and let romance be our guide when it comes to our love life. Is it just me or do we value people who take initiative and put in hard work to succeed in life, but prefer to leave things up to chance and/or divine intervention and/or magic when it comes to love?

This approach bewilders me because even when I use the rational side of my brain to do the math, the number of years we stick with our spouse comes up to be much longer than those we spend at our jobs. Please suspend all opinions on divorce because “till death do us part.” And I mean, “it’s a known fact that lobsters fall in love and mate for life. You can actually see old lobster couples walking around their tank, holding claws.” #fact #Buffay

If I – hypothetically speaking, of course – charted out a detailed plan of action to find a life partner, logged my progress, and organized data about my dates in a spreadsheet – which I most definitely do not do because I have zero knowledge of working Excel, ok?????? – by society’s standards, I’m A) an over-rational robot, B) desperate, C) way too concerned about this, and D) a huge weirdo.

Then comes the stigma associated with intelligently expanding our search for potential partners. Or, simply expanding our search because sometimes it’s more fun to do things unintelligently, such as loitering around bars and creating an OkCupid profile.

In a study on what governs our dating choices more, our preferences or current opportunities, opportunities wins hands down – our dating choices are “98% a response to market conditions and just 2% immutable desires.” This implies that our intentions to date tall, short, fat, thin, blonde, brunette, European, Asian, professional, clerical, educated, uneducated people are largely determined by what’s on offer that fateful night.

Despite such compelling evidence, most of us still believe that the respectable way to meet our life partner is by sheer dumb luck, at work, bumping into them randomly in the cheese section of the supermarket, or being introduced to them from within our little pool. If like me, all your friends are girls because you went to a single-sex convent school for most of your life, you prefer not to shit where you eat and work in an industry dominated by women and gays anyway, your mom picks up the groceries so you rarely have to spend more than 5 minutes at the supermarket, you’ve already dated your schoolmate’s brother, your neighbour, and your best friend’s boyfriends’s best friend, U R FCKD.

That’s not to say I think chasing your dream job is the same as chasing your dream life partner is the same as a dog chasing its tail. Oh, wait – it is. That’s exactly what I’m saying. #pointless. No, of course not. All I’m saying – or rather, all I’m asking – is that why are so many of us so ready to just go with the flow, comfortable with relying on fate, and crossing our fingers while hoping for the best when we are capable beings who can totally and SHOULD TOTALLY play an active role in all aspects of our own lives? Whether it's about an ice-cream cone, a career opportunity, a prospective life partner, next season's hottest handbag...

I dunno. I kinda like getting exactly what I want.

And going after what I want seems to exponentially increase the likelihood of me actually getting what I want. As compared to “just being,” which I’m not entirely sure encompasses what specifically. Even when I fall short of what I’d set out to achieve, usually the fact that I’d tried gives me repose (and several anecdotes). Conveniently ignoring the fact that I’m a lil restless piece of shit as it works against the argument I’m trying to make right now, all I know is fear keeps us safe. But sometimes it holds us back. To quote a certain Canadian athlete, "you miss 100% of the shots you don't take." So you do the math and work that one out.