The Biggest Weirdo

This story about coming to terms with the fact that I am a dysfunctional moron who has been doing it all wrong is a clichéd narrative but a potent one. I’d fallen in love so many times that I was beginning to suspect that I was not falling in love at all, but doing something much more ordinary: falling. Just falling.

My epiphany relies on a logic so foreign, I still feel a little bit disoriented. Taking a deep dive into my shadow was no stroll in the park but seems to always unearth gold. It’s scary to think how little I understood about what drove my attachments and motivated my relationships prior to this. And even scarier to discover how much I’d underestimated the effect we can have on another human being.

The question of how and more importantly why there are such great discrepancies in the way we see, experience and respond to the world and each other continues to plague me. I’d always had a vague awareness that I was doing it a little funny – seeing things from a very skewed perspective, rushing through experiences without being fully present or engaged, and reacting in very bizarre and extreme ways.

In my quest for answers, I’ve turned to Math equations, theories on personality types, our own self-perception, and even ideas about reincarnation. My tired mind insists that it’s outlandish for a person to have his or her paradigm shaken and reframed twice daily, but it’s been said in the bible that there is no rest for the wicked so we trudged on. And slowly but surely, the pieces seem to be coming together.

In an effort to not be dramatic, I will be frank: Ainsworth and Bowlby’s Attachment Theory is a long but worthwhile read, particularly if you find yourself unable to connect with other human beings in a healthy and balanced way.

The longing for emotional connectedness is the most powerful drive in each and every one of us. It’s a survival drive, a primary instinct, and a basic human need. No man is an island and a stable, loving relationship is rumoured to be the absolute cornerstone of human happiness, personal fulfillment, and general well-being.

Our interaction with others is an intricate dance of connection and disconnection, wired in our brains to be recognized as safety and danger. Our brain interprets disconnection from those we depend on as a threat, and the ways in which we deal with these moments of distress are governed by our attachment style, which according to the theory is shaped by the bond we shared with our first caregiver.

Even though I’d been blessed with what could only be described as a blissful and easy childhood, I’ve still somehow managed to blossom into a full-fledged weirdo, prone – desperate, even – to forming fantasy bonds instead of developing truly intimate and trusting relationships.

Perhaps the endless teasing about being picked up from the dustbin or being called an ‘accident baby’ gave me the absurd idea of overcompensating as a means to prove my worth. Perhaps having been made the butt of one too many jokes laid the groundwork for a lifetime of idealizing others while belittling myself. What I’m learning is that my tendency to give too much of myself, which I’d always thought of as pretty darn noble, comes from a dark, dark place of unworthiness and a desire to please others for validation.

But wait, there’s more. Such as my need for constant touch and reassurance, my preoccupation with monitoring my partner’s emotions and jumping to catastrophic conclusions the moment I sense a change, my immense fear of losing the attention or affection of my partner, blah blah blah. I’m just a weirdo, basically.

N-E-way, I’m struggling to ignore my bleak reality now that it’s become apparent.

Some days I’m convinced that it’s too difficult, that I’m doomed to grow old with nine cats and then be buried with only forgetfulness when I die. But other days I feel inspired and determined to process and unlearn my fears – of being unworthy, of rejection, of abandonment – despite how deep they may seem to run. The more I grow, the smaller everything and everyone else seems.

The Teachers

I used to think the concepts of reincarnation and soul contracts were a load of horseshit, in so many words. But the more I reflect on everything and everyone I’ve encountered throughout my life, I can’t help but embrace the idea of past lives and sense of a higher purpose.

I’ve been tripping on stairs a lot lately, both figuratively and literally, and it very much feels like I’m just going in circles, as though life has got me chasing my own tail. So after a gentle nudging from my father who threw a chair across our living room as he shouted, “WHAT THE HELL ARE YOU DOING WITH YOUR LIFE?” I’ve been thinking a lot about what the hell it is I’m doing – and what the hell it is I’m meant to be doing.

The eternal question springs up again: What is the purpose of life? I don’t know, but let’s assume (we’ll be asses together) that we are all here to learn. From my understanding, we each have one primary life lesson and several secondary life lessons. Thankfully, we don’t have to be a rocket scientist to figure out what our deeply personal life lesson is. The universe has a pretty sick sense of humour and what I’ve observed is that whenever there’s something to be learnt, something that needs working on, the same situation will relentlessly present itself until I either learn my lesson or at least find a healthy way of dealing with the issue.

We seem to naturally attract and choose experiences that help us to grow. Truth: Our primary life lesson affects the events that show up during the course of our lifetime. The universe doesn’t ask us to head out in search of lessons. All it really asks of us is to tune out the white noise and be still, be alert, be open.

Borrowing the words of Chuck Palahniuk, “what we call chaos is just patterns we haven’t recognized. What we call random is just patterns we can’t decipher.” Paying heed to our feelings and trusting our intuition is essential to the process of identifying our patterns, which eventually lead us to our lessons. Whether it's a lesson in humility or a lesson in gratitude, it definitely helps to be aware of what our lesson is because it is only in knowing, can we consciously bring more of that energy into what we do and how we behave, which will subsequently make living our life easier.

Even though this goes against what I was brought up to believe, I think our soul decides which weakness it is ready to work on, which negative pattern it is ready to transform and then chooses the circumstances to be born into in order to learn that. And before we incarnate, we make agreements with other souls to meet in this lifetime to help and support each other on our journey.

“Cya at Nando's for dinner tonight,” said his soul to mine. Whether it’s pure luck or mere coincidence – or in recent times, good ol’ Internet algorithms – that brings you to me/me to you, I’ve likened this phenomenon to the ancient saying that goes ‘when the student is ready, the teacher will appear.’

Sometimes people are sent into our life to help us manifest our own intentions, bringing with them information, resources, and support. Or to simply be a match for our intentions themselves, which inspires and influences us, provides us an example and role model to follow, ultimately revealing another layer of ourselves to us, helping us to grow.

Other times our paths cross because we have unfinished business with each other to tend to. Upon first meeting, the person will seem familiar, as though we’ve known them all our life – chances are we have known them all our life, in a previous life. These karmic relationships are usually fraught with complexities because of the baggage we carry, and often push us through what we previously perceived to be our limits. They test our extremes so we are compelled to search for our true meaning and purpose.

It could be about healing past issues and then building something in this present lifetime together, or about healing and then moving on and finally letting this person go. But once we complete our cycle of karmic connections, we stop attracting repetitive lessons and gain an awareness and a profound sense of what it is we want and need in our life.

The thing about soul contracts is that they are neither our destiny nor our fate. They are simply our past being presented to us over and over again until we learn what it is that we need to learn and are willing to make the right decisions for a balanced, healthy and meaningful future.

2016 was going to be the year I finally erected that wall around myself, which I’ve witnessed so many others put up in the name of self-preservation. This was going to be the year I knew better. But as luck would have it, just as it was decided that those foolish days of letting people in heedlessly – without hesitation, without question, without defenses – were over, my paths crossed with a man who’d gone through his life keeping all but a couple of people at arm’s length. And almost at once I knew that I wasn’t going to be breaking any patterns or learning any lessons by shrinking my heart two sizes smaller.

Still, I found myself stuck between a rock and a hard place. As it happens, it’s nearly impossible to have a worthwhile relationship with someone who guards his or her heart like the gold in Fort Knox and puts you down in subtle, creepy ways. And perhaps the worst thing about it is honestly believing that you can change them.

So this is my pattern – running into unavailable people. Since we’re working on the presumption that people are our mirrors, wherein what we see in others is a reflection of ourselves, that could only mean one thing. Yup, you guessed it.

There’s been a remarkable amount of self-awareness on display over the last couple of months, especially so from two seemingly unavailable people. But it occurred to us that if we had any kind of shot of making this a purposeful endeavor, we really had to confront our issues.

Watching each other unpack these little tidbits of truth about ourselves has been pretty real. What initially began as an intimate and possibly lustful union has now evolved into a rollercoaster ride with confusion, twists, resentment, frustration, running, hiding, chasing, bewilderment, intensity, contradiction, and depth. But also a promise of healing for us both if we are willing to stay the course and see this through.

Not every one of our close encounters with people will end in happily ever after, and that's ok. Some relationships are just crucial stepping-stones to reach the next stage. But what makes them just as important and worthy of our time, attention, love, and respect is simply the willingness to ask hard questions, to sift through harder answers, to have long conversations, to accept not always knowing the answers, and to ensure that our intentions, actions, emotions are aligned.

At the end of the day, no one really knows why anybody is here anyway. But still, no one belongs here more than you.

The Injustice

Having enough kids to form a soccer team is one of my main aspirations in life so I felt conflicted not embracing the opportunity, however surprising and untimely it was. But after pragmatism set in, I was 100% behind my decision – for the most part. My reason was and remains simple: I am not ready. I am not mature or selfless enough to be the mother I want to be. And I have neither the mental nor emotional nor economic resources to raise a child on my own.

Even though I believe that it is our responsibility to protect those who cannot protect themselves, I have always found it odd that we assume a fetus would invariably choose its own life over the life and welfare of its mother and family. Why do we make that assumption? Is such a choice moral? Is it not incumbent on the parent to make the decision for the fetus?

On the other hand, when a soul decides to incarnate, doesn’t it select its parents – or parent – and life circumstances? And when I cross that line and say that I have the right to choose if the human being living in my womb should die, at which point does the value of life begin? When the fetus has fingernails? Right after a child is born? When they are three years old? When they bring home their first A for calculus? I don’t know. And I’ll never know. Life is often about choosing the least of all evils, is it not?

The moment I amped my rationalizations up to a self-serving degree, the paralyzing emotions I’d felt during the initial aftermath began to dissipate. One by one, they left – fear, guilt, denial, anguish – as if to go out for some beer and chicken wings and then never come back. Yet, abortion continues to be a confusing and hellish experience, just not for the reasons I’d foreseen.

What I’m realizing is that society now judges me as a woman who has fallen from grace. It’s as if there’s an unspoken law that women could have the freedom and right to choose their own future, but only on the condition that they are duly ashamed. And what strikes me as particularly unjust is that while I’m obliged to shroud my abortion in private remorse, the man involved has not been made – and will never be made – to feel marked for shame. It irks me that only one party is saddled with the weight of this perverse social contract, wherein abortion is considered a women’s problem, for which women must pay the price.

… Yes. And on Thursdays I sit in the backyard and burn my bras.

Anyway, I’ve always prided myself as someone fairly open about my own person, quirks, defects, blunders and all, of which my abortion is – as I’ve come to understand in the last couple of months – not included. Suddenly I found myself with a new identity, that of a person with something to hide. And I hate it.

The first rule of abortion (for women) is that you don’t talk about your abortion outside of your therapist’s office. And as far as I can tell, this rule applies even to women who are otherwise proud, confident, and pro-choice. They are happy and eager to shout about women’s right to have an abortion — just not their own. And I empathize with them completely.

But storytelling is vital, distinctly so and especially so, when we are told to keep quiet. There aren’t enough honest conversations about the painful and complex curveballs life sometimes throws at us, and it’s essential that we try to change this. Today I write anonymously because my story involves others who don’t necessarily want to be identified, but it's a step nonetheless in the right direction. One day we will all speak freely and put a face to each and every one of these precious stories.

The Irony of Life

You guys are fucking awful, really. Just fucking awful. Google Analytics tells me you’ve been lurking on here, just waiting to read about which one of my fingers I’ve cut off in an attempt to assauge my guilt. I knew I was going to be underestimated by everyone, so – surprise! I still have all my fingers. And toes. In fact, I even went on a date last weekend, which I’d like to think of as an act of stoicism, not wanting an abortion to interrupt my life, to show off that my existence though irrevocably changed by it, was not arrested by it.

LOOK. AT. ME. NOTHING. WRONG. AT. ALL. HAHAHA. HA. HA. HA.

I don’t know if I’d take a bulimic to a buffet on the way home from rehab but I figured it’s probably different with abortion, right? The idea was to normalize my days, so I tried. But my dad was flummoxed and seemed certain that I would return home preggos again. Lol. A girl can’t get pregnant from sharing a pizza with a boy. Wait – can she??

In case you haven’t noticed, I’m still basking in the afterglow of flushing my embryonic baby down the toilet last December. And in this time, my mind has become a sort of battleground. Most days I feel like everything and nothing at once, and I’m certain that there’s a hole in the middle of me that every happy thing falls into. It seems crazy and dangerous that nobody has put me in a straitjacket (read: chastity belt) or confiscated my computer yet.

I usually have to put a little distance between myself and the past before I can really understand it – and I use the term “understand” loosely, the way you’d call the 10 steps between your couch and fridge “exercise.” So I rang in the New Year thinking “not this year,” because time heals all wounds, and 2020 seems perfect for processing that sort of thing, and ignorance is bliss – and admittedly, so is denial. But then I had this other thought one day – not an original thought, but it’s better than no thought at all: If there’s just one thing I know to be beautiful and true about life, it’s that it is nothing more than a colourful parade to the grave. JK. It’s that if you aren’t honest with yourself – cuttingly, painfully honest – life can’t be honest with you. And so of my infantile experience thus far of life after an abortion, I have this to say:

Every morning, my mum asks me how I feel and I say, “I won’t be home for dinner this evening,” which is an answer to a question I wasn’t asked. So she asks again. “Stop it,” I snap back with a mouthful of warm porridge.

Emotionally, my anxiety made me brittle and easy to anger. Physically, seven continuous weeks of bleeding had taken its toll on me and if I appeared to be very selective about how I expended my energy, it’s because I was and I still am.

I felt myself retreating from the world like a slow-motion magic trick. Even though everyone reassured me that the passing of time would eventually carry me out of this nightmare towards feelings of joy, I waited many days and had no such feelings.

I used to be horrified by the idea of people telling me what to do or think, but this gesture was something I’d come to greatly appreciate in the last few weeks. And although falling on my own face is nothing new to me, this latest burn ripped my ego apart and shook my sense of self in such a merciless way, I really did not know what to do but to do absolutely nothing. It made the most sense to stop being an active participant in my own life, to become a passive observer instead, after the colossal mess I’d created for myself with my own hands. I had almost no desire or confidence to be present or engaged, only to be presentational, or to pretend.

As you can imagine, I’m beyond French’d out at this moment. Frenchmen, french toast, french kissing… Say it with me: ugh. But much has to be said about the way the French respond to pain and embrace their pain day after day with uncompromising zest for life and admirable poise. FYI, pain means bread in French in case you had the nerve or cluelessness to miss my clever pun.

Despite how tempting it is to surrender to emptiness, to withdraw into the safety of our shells, and to drift away from anything we’d once called familiar whenever tragedy strikes, it’s so important to remain determined to pull something meaningful out of the abyss of dissonance. “Paris is our capital. We love music, drunkenness, joy. For centuries lovers of death have tried to make us lose life’s flavour. They never succeed,” was what French writer and cartoonist Joann Sfar had to say in wake of the massacre last November.

There’s a good chance going back out into the world to reclaim my identity, to reassert who I am and what I stand for, to take back ownership of my life will at some point – or rather, several points – challenge everything I believe to be true about myself and break my heart into more pieces than it was made of. But that’s not anywhere close to the worst thing that can happen to me. Far worse is living a life motivated by fear and ruled by pride.

So, how do I move forward from here? How will I use myself, everything I’ve been given, to serve that which is greater than myself? The only way I know how to, I guess. I’ll find a man I like a lot and have as much amazing sex as humanly possible – obviously with a condom this time. (I think there’s a saying that goes ‘once bitten… please bite me on my arse again, please’ ????) Then I’ll do it again the next day until my legs are so weak and wobbly I can hardly stand up. I’ll tell him what turns me on and ask him what turns him on. I’ll teach him how to touch me so that I have really good orgasms. We’ll stay up ridiculously late telling each other the long stories of our lives. And then meet for ice cream and walks in the park at spontaneous hours of the afternoon. I’ll buy him my favourite Douglas Coupland book and write him SparkNotes inside in a coded, erotically tender language that only the two of us can decipher. When he says, “You’re so beautiful.” (Oh, and he will.) I won’t blush and say, “Thank you.” I’ll ask, “What makes you think that?” And then watch his face very carefully while he answers. It will be fun and interesting and hot and sweet and bloody terrifying all at the same time.

But this is what we’re here for. It’s what we're meant to do in this colourful parade to the grave we call life. Joie de vivre, it’s such a simple – and, it must be said, fundamentally French – idea. How wonderful it is to be alive and how ironic the medium in which this lesson revealed itself.

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.

Sunday Kind Of Love

Wives saying goodbye to their loved ones in the Navy, 1963. The reality of love and marriage continues to ruin my life.

When it comes to matters of the heart, it seems that I’m not just old-fashioned. Apparently, I’m very nearly prehistoric. I’ve always depended on my parents’ enduring marriage as the barometer of true love. On one hand, I feel extremely blessed to have such a solid example of love and marriage existing under the same roof as myself to aspire after. But as I venture further out into the wilderness, the fog is beginning to lift. And it is scary, you guys.

According to data published in 2011, the average length of an American marriage is 8.8 years and more than 5,000 couples were getting divorced each day in China that same year. Professor David Popenoe of Rutgers University mentions in an article that some 40% of American children are living apart from their biological fathers, and majority of these children aren’t in the habit of seeing their fathers regularly or often, if at all. Worse still, a third of children are now born out-of-wedlock, many of who grow up without ever knowing their fathers.

It’s become painstakingly clear to me, marrying your childhood sweetheart at a young age and staying by each other’s side even after 40 years, is not a common occurrence in the real world even if I may be coming home to it every single day. I repeat; it’s a complete fluke. Back then, if you found someone you could stand who could stand you, you’d hold on to him or her for dear life because meeting someone new wasn’t so easy.

Today, we’re just a swipe, like, retweet or click away from someone better because any social media app or website can be used as Tinder/OkCupid if you’re good looking. It’s distressing how similar the Internet algorithms for ordering mini skirts on ASOS and finding a life partner are. By trying to emulate my parents’ relationship all these years, I’ve basically set myself up for failure and condemned myself to envisioning life as a hopeless romantic.

Mind you, it isn’t just the concept of love that this wonderful bubble I’ve been living in has sugarcoated – it’s the concept of life. Allegedly, dresses aren’t just pressed, foie gras at brunch isn’t just served, and gallivanting around Europe for several months doesn’t just happen. How far removed from reality have I been all this while? That deserves an essay all to itself.

Dating is just trial and error after all, isn’t it? We actively seek out people we’re interested in, we try these people out for a bit and see how they fit into our lives, we learn about ourselves and grow from the relationship, we bounce once we’ve had enough or discovered it’s not for us, and then we start over again and slowly figure out what it is we do and do not want. This operation does get tiring and disheartening at times, but I’ve found that by just appreciating the honesty and simply moving on, we can avoid becoming blasé. As the Japanese proverb goes, "fall down seven times, stand up eight."

Good Chat, Mate

The sequel: How to lose a guy in less than 10 days (2014)

Real talk: there are two things a woman can say that will ingrain ball-shrinking horror in every unwed man’s heart. The first is “I’m pregnant.” The second is “Where do you see this relationship going?”

How long do we have to date someone before we are allowed to drop these bombs on them? I think it’s clear-cut for pregnancy. Anytime between seeing the double pink lines on your pee stick and the due/abortion date seems pretty appropriate. Anytime outside of that window, you’d just be a sick liar.

But when it comes to dating, even the experts (don’t ask who, I don’t believe in using real names here) have varying opinions, citing time frames that start anywhere from after the first time you sleep together to after you have gone on something like eight dates to six months into the ‘relationship’. One can only presume that the true answer is probably: after you have binged on fudge for nine consecutive nights and can no longer bear not knowing where you stand in the liaison anymore.

And there we were, fretting about just finding a potential suitor. Well, congratulations on your match and welcome to dating purgatory – make yourself at home! This is where the real fun actually begins because your prospect isn’t super keen, yet isn’t entirely disinterested either. Often, there’s still visible enthusiasm, but not nearly sufficient to pass off as conclusive evidence for anything.

Most people claim to know within the first three seconds if they would fuck someone or not, according to a bunch of psychologists at UPenn. (Who are these people?? Did the study only sample 13 year old males?) But deciding whether to be in a relationship with someone, to firmly invest in making a purchase instead of just window-shopping, now that can take, umm… Forever.

I’ve a knack for looking for love in all the wrong and very hopeless places – mainly dingy bars and Tinder – I do it for the story, really. Even though Rihanna released a super catchy single about it back in 2011, which topped the Billboard Hot 100 for ten weeks, if you pay attention to the lyrics, all she has to sing about this predicament is some “yellow diamonds in the light” and then repeats the phrase “we found love in a hopeless place” only about 350 times. And if you actually play the song backwards, you’d hear her singing, “don’t do it, don’t do it.”

I find the commercial success of this song a bit misleading. Finding love in a hopeless place is far from ideal, gurrl. What we’re more likely to find are one-night-stands and friends with benefits. And – speaking from experience – what we’re even more likely to do is expect unrealistic things from perfect strangers. Most of these people aren’t looking for relationships. Plot twist: some of them may already be involved in one. Use these people as bodies, and then leave it at that because that is all it is.

“What do you want from this?” I blurted (over text) without warning one day, emboldened by my excruciating need to manage my expectations about bungee chord possibilities in the distant future. At this point, I’d like to highlight that there is indeed a difference between what I asked and the navigational enquiry pertaining to relationships that we'd discussed.

“Honest answer: I don’t want anything out of this. I don’t even think about it. We’ve seen each other like, 3 times. I just like seeing you,” was the response I got after some nudging. Earth to Sean, we’ve seen each other like, 4 times. Not that I was counting. Expert tip: responding to rejection with violence is never the answer and my research has shown that firing gunshots by way of texting “pew pew pew” is not particularly helpful in such situations.

We Got Dis

I wrote this as a kind of affirmation for myself that I have at least 5 things going for me at the moment and to convince myself that all the resources I need to advance in the game of life over the next few years, I already have.

“Things in my life that could change my life”

Passion

“Follow your heart”; “find a fulfilling career” and “do what you love and you’ll never have to work a day” are relatively new ideas that have only really gotten going in the last couple of decades. Having economic prosperity by way of a satisfying career had never held any importance to preceding generations, but still, these catchy slogans and delusional expectations of the future have somehow found their way into the fabric of our (young people’s) lives today and constantly pop up in the millennial manifesto.

As a person born in the early ‘90s, my subscription to these beliefs during my childhood happened by default. On top of that, having been subjected to brainwashing throughout adolescence, I find myself studying my reflection in the mirror at age 21 years and 5 months old, thinking that I am special and believing that I am an outlier. Completely oblivious to the fact that everyone else had been exposed to those same sacred messages from the media, I admit a sense of higher purpose, a desire to remake the world, to create my own laws, and live by my own principles.

But what exactly happens when these concepts are applied outside of a chick flick?

Figuring out what you enjoy doing and then finding a way to get paid doing it is tricky business. Many people – myself included – sit around convinced that if only they could turn their yoga hobby into a fulltime job, they’d finally be happy. When in reality, doing an activity all day long and depending on it for survival could suck the playfulness and enjoyment out of it.

I don’t want to sound like a brat, though that may be unavoidable. Ultimately, I think that if the option to “earn a living doing what you love” is available to you without too much force or an exorbitant cost, go for it. Because you’ll be doing it for at least 8 hours a day for at least 5 days a week – considering that the economic model of retiring at 55 with a pension is gone and the likelihood of inventing something Facebook may want to buy is slim – for at least the rest of your life.

Talent

Are we born or are we made? Things like piano, ballet and Math may come much more naturally to some as compared to others, but it’s a common misconception that talent is innate and comes solely from within the individual. This observation only explains the variance in talents. For a large part, talent needs to be nurtured over time and can be influenced by a myriad of external factors ranging from societal, cultural and economic, to name a few.

So take comfort in knowing that if you’re not completely retarded at it, it’s only matter of X hours before you become an expert at it. *X = 10,000 hours of practice – number of hours you’ve put in to date (Malcolm Gladwell)

Education

With tuition fees getting more painful to afford, a growing number of people with degrees they don’t need for their job, even more people taking up positions unrelated to their major, and the evolving landscape of our global economy, the necessity of a degree to be successful today is questionable. To be totally clear, a degree from a distinguished university is always good to have under your belt. Skipping university (or dropping out) may have worked out for Mark Zuckerberg and Bill Gates, but it’s definitely not for everyone.

Some industries require a bachelor’s at minimum, period.

If I’m looking to get my car fixed, I’m just as inclined to get in touch with the guy who’s been working on cars his entire life with his dad as I am with the guy who paid for an education. If I’m looking to get my body worked on, whoa… Hold up, that’s a whole new ballgame.

• If you’re interested in becoming a lawyer, a job in the STEM field or any other academically-focused trade, the no-degree route isn’t for you. Sorry.
• Many creative jobs will look for a level of training, but if you can produce something cool, somebody will be impressed and want to hire you. And if you know somebody who knows somebody who knows somebody, somebody will also hire you.
• Blue-collar work is another sector where formal education is often forgone in favor of on-the-job training or apprenticeship programs. If your life’s goal is to be the best electrician you can be, chances are that taking out loans and pledging 4 (or more) years of your life to university won’t be necessary. Learning is our responsibility and teaching ourselves in the Information Age couldn’t be any easier.

The question is not whether or not we need a bachelor’s degree. It’s whether the job we want requires it, because not everyone is running the same rat race. Some careers do. Some will just be more convenient to pursue with a degree. Others simply don’t care what our papers say as long as we can get shit done.

At the end of the day, higher education is only a means to an end, because the proving grounds are in the real world. We don’t leave a mark in the world as a passive student.

Confidence

Post-WWII, society had developed protocols, procedures and processes for everything. I won’t go into great detail because world history was never my best subject at school, but basically everything was crap and then some guys dropped a couple of bombs in Japan and almost all the Jews got killed by another dude with only one testicle and then everyone decided to get really, really organized with their stuff.

Majority of us have grown so acclimatized to how aspects of our lives have been classified into tables, plotted onto charts and fitted into tidy lines, that we don’t always realize that what we’ve essentially done with all the red tape is to put ourselves into boxes. In time, we find ourselves running up against the invisible walls of such boxes constructed by our particular preconceptions of “how things should work”.

We are accused of being lazy, selfish, entitled and rude. Older generations scold our lack of initiative and our apparent expectation of being shown through, but the wall is very real to us. Fortunately for us, these walls can easily be broken with some boldness and a change in perception – it’s all right to step outside the box. Especially when we have the skills, the passion and the connections to empower changes, challenge established traditions and update the rules accordingly.

Most of us will dedicate our early twenties to finding the place we will fill in this world. It’s a riddle of life containing a limiting presupposition, which suggests that we will eventually grow to fill a spot already provided and predefined, which is a formidable thought for a twenty-something such as myself. Taboo, motherfucker!

We’re fired with passion, but the odds in society are against us – incentives misaligned, consequences neglected, methodologies adopted with little consideration. This may come off a little strong, but it almost seems as if we’re coming of age into a world that doesn’t have a place for us, that can’t fully utilize us, that expects us to wait idly on the sidelines and be thankful for placeholders like internships.

The first step towards overcoming these issues is having the knowledge that life is not a mere multiple-choice test. The second step is having the confidence and perseverance not just to change the options handed to us, but also create new opportunities for ourselves even if it leads us off the well-worn path. The third step is to do as Beckett suggests and “try again. Fail again. Fail better.”

Luck

I don’t want to say too much lest I jinx myself. Also, I’ve run out of steam and feel exhausted from writing this.