Room of Doors

Ciel opened her eyes and found herself in a circular room full of doors. Doors of different shapes and sizes. Doors of different colors and differently-shaped doorknobs. Doors with peepholes, and catflaps, and bells. Doors adorned with wind chimes.

Some doors look familiar, and others do not. Some were outright strange, and others were flat-out scary.

“Where am I?” Ciel mutters to herself.

On the floor, she noticed, right at the center of the circular room, were keys.

Keys of all shapes and sizes. Some look modern and others look ancient. Some don’t even look like keys at all.

“Maybe those keys open certain doors,” Ciel said to no one in particular. The room was eerily quiet yet loud at the same time. She felt scared to hear her blood flowing through her veins and the steady thump-thump of her heart wasn’t bringing her comfort. So she speaks her thoughts out loud.

Ciel bent down and examined the keys. She tried sorting them out and placing them beneath the doors that felt like their matching set. She did this until all doors have a key beneath them.

“I wonder which door leads out of this room?” Ciel wonders aloud.

She stooped down in front of a plain white door and grabbed the key on the floor. She tried to put in the keyhole and turned.

The door was unlocked, but it would not open.

She tried the same for the next one, and the next one, and the next, and even though most of the keys are the right fit for the doors, none of them would budge.

“What’s going on?” Ciel’s voice started to get higher.

She’s slowly feeling suffocated and closed-in in this circular door with lots of doors that don’t open.

She tried again, and again, and again. Until she got too tired and scared and sat down the middle of the room, hugging her knees to her chest.

“Calm down,” she tried to soothe herself. “Think. How do I get out of here?”

She noticed the catflaps and peepholes and bells. She tried them all, peeking through the catflaps, trying to see through all the peepholes, ringing all the bells. None of the door still opened.

Discouraged, and tired of freaking out, Ciel decided to lie down on the floor, at the center of the room.

She can’t make heads or tails of how she got here, feeling trapped. She can’t figure out why despite having all the right keys, none of the doors would open. She lay there, trying to empty her mind of the panic that is trying to consume her.

She cried, and then she stopped. She freaked out, and then she calmed down. She lay there for hours until her back started to hurt, then she decided to sit up.

“I am tired,” she whispered.

She decided to rest her head on her knees, hugging her legs to feel safe. She curled into a tight ball and decided to empty her mind.

“I’m okay, I’ll find my way out,” she kept telling, over and over and over, until she feels like she’s starting to believe.

She decided to stand up, stretched her sore body from being still so long, and walked to the door in front of her.

It was a familiar door. It looked like her bedroom door. Back when she was a child, and living in the suburbs with her parents.

She chuckled, remembering how her father banged his shoulder against her doorknob, making it slightly loose.

“I have to jiggle it a bit and turn it just the right amount,” Ciel muttered.

She did just that, and the door creaked open. She saw her childhood bedroom and felt tears sting her eyes.

She moved on to the next door, another familiar door, and remembered little quirks, which doors need banging near the hinge before it will open, that apartment door that needs a little kick, her best friend’s room, where she had to knock softly three times before opening because her friend has a little OCD.

Every door she opened was a memory, a story, an idea. She revisited places she missed, and places she never wanted to see again.

At first, she was just looking for the door that seems to lead outside, but as she went on opening them one by one, she got lost in all the stories.

Then she got to the unfamiliar ones. The ones she’s forgotten, the ones she never opened, the ones she never remembered seeing.

“How do I open doors I never knew how to open?”

She gave it a light experimental push, a little knock there, some scratching sound here. She tried different sorts of things, envisioning different scenarios of what kind of people would open these doors, and who lives on the other side. What would they do? What are their quirks? Do they have passwords?

She played and discovered and managed to open some unfamiliar doors. Some of them led to familiar places, some she never saw before. Or she’s forgotten.

But the new places beyond those unfamiliar doors told her new stories.

She continued her quest to open all the doors, forgetting her original mission of getting out of that room.

Finally, she got to the final door.

“What’s the key?” was written in nice, loopy cursive.

She smiled. She realized something as she went through all the doors, and opened them all.

“I’ve been the key all along,” she whispered.

And the final door swung wide open.

Sometimes, we feel trapped in our minds, looking for the keys that would unlock the ideas that lead to a story, an artwork, a song, a title, a topic, a solution.

We are so busy sorting, filing, panicking, lamenting, forcing doors open, when really, we are the key all along.

Snapshots

*Click*

The shutter sound echoed in the quiet room.

“Why do you still have that old thing?” Robin asks Iris. Iris just smiles as she turns the knob on her old analog film camera.

It was a relic of her childhood. Her mom owned the camera even before she met her dad. It was old but well-loved.

Iris grew up in a small town, surrounded by trees, lulled to sleep by the sound of insects rubbing their wings and the click of the shutter. Her mom loved taking photos. She was a memory hoarder of sorts.

Iris turns around and walks toward the mysterious red writing on the walls of their shared apartment. The paint was fresh and they had to open all the windows to let the fumes out.

TRAITOR was written in large bold letters across the wall, splattering some posters, a few polaroids, and sadly, some of Iris’s books on the shelf. “Who would break into their apartment for the short span of three hours they would be out?” Robin thought.

*Click*

The shutter snaps again. Robin, on edge from the vandalism they went home to, clicked her tongue, feeling impatient and getting annoyed with Iris’s loud antique camera.

“I bought you a new camera for your birthday,” Robin snaps, “why are you still using that fossil?”

“Fossils are for living things that were,” Iris softly replied. “Relics are for things of the past,” she added, turning to Robin and smiling.

Robin had been pacing back and forth, waiting for the cops Iris called five minutes ago to arrive.

“Who would do this crap?” Robin seethed.

Iris looked at him in silence, before turning back and taking more photos of the big red word.

“Will you stop taking pictures with that old crap?” Robin snapped when the camera shutter made a loud clicking noise again.

“I’m preserving a memory,” Iris said simply.

Her mom was a memory hoarder. Growing up, she had tens of photo albums filled with photos of different events in their life. When her parents got divorced, the only proof of the happy family they once were were the photographs. And when her mom died six years ago, she was left with the burden of all the memories her mom had collected like a squirrel preparing for winter.

And it got her through that winter. At first, it felt like a reminder of everything she had lost, but now that she’s slowly healing, she’s glad to have something concrete to remind her of the happy days she had in the past. She no longer remembers how her mom’s (or dad’s) voice sounded, but she’s glad she won’t forget her face in the future.

“Why are the police taking so long?” Robin ranted. “And why are you being so calm about this?” he asked Iris incredulously.

“Because,” Iris said, looking him straight in the eye, “I know who did it.”

“Who?” Robin asked, taking three long strides to grab her shoulders.

“You don’t know?” Iris asked, tilting her head a little while hugging her old camera safely against her chest. Robin tends to be a little rough when he’s agitated.

“I wouldn’t be asking if I did,” he groaned, frustrated.

Iris smiled. “Look behind you,” she said.

There, standing in the doorway was Robin’s “ex-girlfriend” Kaye. When Iris let Robin move into her apartment almost a year ago, she thought they’d already broken up. She bumped into Kaye several weeks ago. She found out the truth.

Iris slowly held her camera up and snapped a photo of a bewildered-looking Robin.

“Click,” goes her camera.

“You see, Robin,” Iris said slowly as if explaining something so simple and obvious to a child, “you might have forgotten, but we both remember.”

Iris fell in love with him a year ago. She remembered seeing Robin talking to a crying girl and hugging her, two months into their relationship. When she asked him who that girl was, he said it was a desperate ex wanting to get back together.

But apparently, Kaye was pregnant and didn’t know what to do. Robin convinced her to get an abortion and promised to be there with her. But he never showed up, and Kaye couldn’t bring herself to go to the clinic alone. But they were still seeing each other five months into Robin’s and Iris’s relationship.

Iris was busy with work and school, so she never had time to figure out who Kaye is. Eventually, she forgot.

Until they bumped into each other three weeks ago, and Kaye told her the truth. She showed her all the texts she and Robin exchanged. All the photos. All the dates. Then around the time he moved into Iris’s apartment, telling her a sob story of how he got into a fight with his parents and they cut off all support for his school and living expenses, he borrowed a huge amount of money from Kaye. Then three months later he disappeared from Kaye’s radar.

Then Kaye’s stress piled up and she miscarried. She needed the money Robin borrowed to pay for her tuition and medical expenses but couldn’t find him.

When Iris learned the truth, she gave Kaye a copy of her apartment keys. They hatched the plan.

There were no other people in the apartment building tonight. It was New Year’s Eve. People went home to their families to celebrate.

And there they were, the only three people in the building.

In the distance, they can hear people shouting a countdown.

“Three! Two! One! HAPPY NEW YEAR!”

Bang! Bang! they heard the fireworks go off.

And on the floor in apartment 303, Robin lay in a pool of his own blood.

“Got all the important stuff out of here?” Kaye asked Iris, putting down the still smoking gun. Iris nodded, clasping her old camera closer to her body. “Everything important to me had been in the storage unit for a week already.”

“You owe me for the books, by the way,” Iris told Kaye.

Kaye chuckled and nodded.

As the two girls walked away, the whole apartment building, along with all of Iris’s memories of Robin, went up in flames.

Wisdom from flight stewards…

In case of a crash, and the cabin is pressurized, please put on your oxygen masks [on yourself] first before assisting others.

The number one rule in any emergency is to take stock of yourself and make sure that you are safe first. The last thing we need in case the plane crashes is someone acting the hero, forgetting that he/she/it/they don’t have superpowers, and collapsing from lack of oxygen. Instead of helping others, you are just being a danger to yourself and others. Now you are just a nuisance because instead of a smooth-sailing evacuation after a safe emergency landing, we have to step over your stupid corpse, which is really holding up traffic.

Yes, I am being sarcastic and maybe needlessly abrasive. But it infuriates me how stupid people can be.

If a mother is sick, to the point that she’s having difficulty breathing, and she’s started throwing up, even if she has a baby who is seven months old and is still nursing, YOU. PRIORITIZE. MOM’S. WELL-BEING.

I was so infuriated during the weekend.

I know someone, a person I care about too deeply, we shall call her Amy. They brought Amy to the emergency room because she is sick, enough to consider it an emergency.

When they got there, they were advised to have Amy admitted for observation. But because of a series of stupid events, mistaken advice from (another healthcare professional we will call Agnes who happened to be a relative of Amy’s husband, but hadn’t seen the patient and her current condition), and wrong decisions (by Amy, Amy’s husband, and Amy’s mom, who was there at the time), they decided to take Amy home.

Because her 7-month-old still needs his mother. Because she’s still breastfeeding her son. Because they have “no money,” and they were told by Agnes that if she can still hold on, she should hold off being admitted. Because Agnes is an OB and her focus and main concern was the kid. Because, you know, COVID. “Don’t want to get more sick than necessary.”

The next morning, they already noticed that Amy looks so weak, that she can’t even lift her arms or open her mouth herself to eat food. Something is wrong.

If you were advised to get admitted, you are well within your rights to refuse medical attention. But if in the next 8 hours, the condition gets worse, GET YOUR ASS BACK TO THE HOSPITAL IMMEDIATELY.

But no. They waited till she got super worse and started turning blue and seizing before they start panicking and almost dropping her down the stairs, driving, very rattled, to the hospital. When they got to the hospital, she had to do a CT scan, so they needed to transfer to a hospital with a CT scan. And the ambulance took forever to arrive because of the traffic.

By the time she arrived in the next hospital, she needed to go to the ICU.

All their reasons for not having her admitted 12-13 hours ago?

• She has a 7-month-old who is still full-time breastfed, and they were afraid he would reject baby formula: Now she can’t see him longer, and the baby ended up loving the baby formula.
• And now she might not be able to breastfeed her son anymore after she recovers.
• They had no money for a ward in the hospital? They spent three nights in the ICU, and every lab test and scan ordered from the ICU costs twice or three times more than if they were in the ward.
• Besides, money is probably the easiest problem to solve there. It’s not like they are part of the lower economic class. Amy’s mom can pull out half a million easily if it is for the right purposes.
• And, if they stayed when they were advised to have her admitted, she would have just needed IV drips for dehydration because her electrolyte, especially Sodium, levels got too low: From fatigue due to dieting and exercising (when it’s just been seven months since she gave birth–CS) because her husband often teases Amy about how “fat” she is, and Amy had a poor body image in the first place. She wasn’t even fat, to begin with. PLUS even if she is, she gets to be fat, she’s eating for two people, because she’s feeding a whole other person aside from herself, which by the way is THEIR son. I don’t see him contributing to that whole feeding process but HE is getting fat too.
• So in the end she got sicker than necessary.

All because they listened to the wrong people and forget the number one rule in emergencies: put yourself and safety first, before you can worry about the other people around you.

Listen to those flight stewards. They know how to prioritize properly.

Don’t be like Amy, or her husband (who I have a lot to say about, but none are constructive at the moment–I’m still too angry), or her mom who listened to Agnes and forgot her mom’s instincts at home.

24-Hour versions of me.

I was writing streams of consciousness stuff yesterday, and I wrote some pretty fascinating (sort of morbid) “reflections.”

I had to remake myself over and over to get to where I am today. Some of these changes were subconscious, and others more deliberate.

I would also probably have to remake who I am now, over and over, in the future.

We all need to change a little in order to grow. We always have to die a little, day by day, to live a fresh new tomorrow and move forward to the future.

It’s like a relay race between multiple 24-hour versions of “Present me“ that stretch an entire lifetime–each day that passes by once today’s present me passes the baton to tomorrow’s possible-future me, present me dies to become ghosts of multiple versions of past me’s.

Some ghosts of past me will linger and haunt present me. That’s okay. We have some room to entertain ghosts here until they are ready to move on.

In their wake, we leave behind grave markers, epitaphs, shrines, and temples, but only the present lives on.

Only present me lives on.

And tonight when I go to sleep, present me will die too. I will become a ghost tomorrow that haunts one of my possible-future selves.

But right now, present me is still alive. I will do what I must so my future ghost has no regrets that haunts tomorrow’s present me.

This is how I live everyday as my last–quite literally, in my head.

Every 24-versions of me I can’t get back will have regrets that future 24-hour versions of me might not be able to settle–because my future 24-hour selves will have their own regrets to leave behind once their time is up. So, do all that you can today, present me. You only have 24 hours to exist. Make it count.

Rest while you can, play while you can, work your best work while you can, confront all you need to confront while you can, and love the people you love while you can.

“I will die tonight,” yesterday’s present-now-past me writes, “I tried to leave no regrets behind. I leave the rest to you, my possible-future self.”

Don’t Try

Yesterday, I felt burnt out. Super burned out I wanted to claw the faces of talking people. So I skipped blog day and slept, and I feel a bit better now.

Today, I got several big tasks at work out of the way, so I feel at peace.

I was writing about the law of reversed effort for my boss, and I dropped by Mark Manson’s blog. He wrote about SEAL training where they tie you hand and foot and lower you to a deep pool or something. The goal is to survive 5 minutes in that situation.

If I was training as a SEAL, that activity will have me nope-ing out of there, fast. I can swim, but I am deathly afraid of drowning, and no amount of patriotism or loyalty or desire to sacrifice my life for the common good will have me chilling the flip out as they lower me to my watery death. No sir.

But I do understand the concept. When I was learning how to swim, I quickly realized that the more I fight the water, the faster I sink. The trick to floating is to surrender yourself to the laws of physics and just chill.

And in life, there are a lot of things that run in the same principle as floating in water: the more you struggle, the more you fail at it. When you learn to let go and, as the Taoists say, “be like water,” or, (I don’t quite remember where this is from, but) “be like bamboo and bend with the wind (or bend when a sharp sword is swung at you so you won’t snap).”

Basically, don’t try. Or at least stop being so stubborn and rigid.

We like to have control and agency over our lives. Who doesn’t? I became a freelance writer because I wanted “freedom.”

But the more freedom I had, the less I can do, and the more limited I felt. When I got hired as a (sort of) VA, full-time, I had less freedom with my work schedule, but I am able to do more, and I have (sort of) more freedom in what I want to write.

The Backwards Law, first coined by Alan Watts (I think), tells us the same thing. Mark Manson further expounds on it on his blog (at least, in my perspective, he expounded on it, but Alan Watts could have said more) by saying, more effort=better results only work on simple, mindless, mundane tasks (answering emails, doing laundry, cleaning, etc.). The higher-leverage/more complicated tasks that have a lot of thinking and other factors involved follow a diminishing returns curve (the more you do it, the less impactful it becomes–like jokes, for example). And the things that are purely psychological follow an inverted curve, where the more you try, the more it starts to suck because our minds are basically just little f*ckers who get a little wonky in stuff involving itself.

I might sound a little over the place right now, but I swear I have a point. I just got a little distracted.

Let’s have one last wet and watery metaphor, then I hope I can land my point.

Whenever I feel overwhelmingly depressed, anxious, or any time I am in my period of darkness, I always describe it as drowning in a deep, dark, stormy body of water. Kinda like the ocean, only with less creepy crawlies (swimmies?) and scary creatures.

I get tossed and turned around, I can’t breathe, and I couldn’t see myself, nor know which way is up, down, left, or right (to be fair, I am very much left-right challenged even on dry land, to my fiance’s frustration whenever he asks me to be his navigator). And it feels like the more I struggle, the further from the surface I get, and my limbs are burning from the effort to get a mouthful of breath, but I’m about to pass out.

I want to stop struggling and just sleep underwater.

The weird part is, whenever I do stop struggling and adopt a “Whatever” attitude, opportunities to break the surface come my way.

When I wasn’t desperate to earn money, I would always find a job wrapped and hand-delivered on my Messenger or email. When I don’t care about how I look, I lose weight and my skin clears up. When I don’t care who likes me, people seem to see me in a better light. When I stop begging for attention, people start messaging me on their own (sometimes to my annoyance).

When I stop struggling to be happy, I can appreciate my life better, ugly parts included. And when I stopped searching for love, Dan came to flirt with me (and here we are, after one hell of a bumpy 7-year-ride).

When I stopped stressing about keeping this house for a sense of safety and security, I found the opportunity to buy a lot that will be in my own name and found people who can help me build a house that will be in my own name.

When I stopped trying to be more, I became complete. And when I stopped looking for meaning and wrestling with how unreasonable this world is, I felt more at peace.

Sometimes, hard work and effort will pay off. But for the things that matter, letting go is the answer.

When I let go of control and focus on my present, I can do more productive things that build towards my future. When I don’t obsess over my plans, I have more clarity, mental headspace, and energy to work on actually achieving them.

I still have goals. I just try not to pressure myself with timelines and every minute detail. I don’t need to count how many steps to get to somewhere in order to get there. I just need to know how to commute, or I can use Waze to show me the way.

And if I do get lost every now and then, (because I don’t know where left and right is), I can always take the scenic route too. Or I can retrace my steps. Or maybe discover a new road once Waze is done recalculating my route.

Not everything has to be orchestrated by me. I just need to know where my destination is, and the journey can go whichever way the wind blows. And if I pick up awesome people to become part of my crew along the way, and learn new things, see new places, eat new food, fight new people, even better.

Do. Don’t try. (Nailed it!)

Some days, your brain just rests

Mondays to Wednesdays (PST) are often the toughest on my mental load at work. I have two heavy projects, back-to-back, that I treat with the highest care out of all the tasks assigned to me. Usually, I can deal with them just fine, but today, my brain is slush.

It is all murk and mud up there, and I’ve had four cups of coffee in the last 8 to 10 hours already, and I still feel foggy.

I think I am burnt out, which was ironic, because I’ve been working on a podcast about burnout, and I am transcribing-slash-taking notes, and all I could think of was “That’s so me, that’s so me right now.” I couldn’t focus long enough to form a coherent outline in my head, and I welcomed all distractions with grateful and open arms.

Some days, you just want to distance yourself, even if you love what you are doing.

The owner of the business I work for is really lovely. My teammates are awesome too. Plus, I get to work with my fiance too. And I report to a really wonderful person who helps me edit my work, and has really just been instrumental to my improvement in writing.

But there’s something I see that is wrong, and I don’t know how to broach the subject. At first, I thought, “maybe I am just being entitled,” and to be fair, I could be. But it has begun to chafe at me, even when I am just witnessing it, and it isn’t directed at me.

I struggled to get through the whole day, and I feel guilty because I felt unproductive, but my brain is at my limit.

How did I come to the conclusion that I might be burnt out?

The moment 5:00 PM (PST) arrived, my brain woke up. It’s like, “the threat is gone, the coast is clear, I can come out now.”

The scary part is, I haven’t even noticed that I was in survival mode for quite a while now.

Margins

I have a notebook addiction. On top of that, I can’t finish a notebook, because when I buy a new one, I am excited to use it, and move on to that one. Sometimes, I start notebooks for specific purposes (Ideas for stories, Undelivered letters [to myself or others], etc.) and I would get tired of it, run out of things to write, and/or forget the purpose of the notebook was, originally.

Point is, I have a bad habit when using notebooks. I also have a bad habit of writing without margins. I love blank notebooks. I also love dotted and grid notebooks. Alright, I like lined notebooks too. I like non-white papers (specifically cream-colored papers and kraft/brown papers). Basically, I like most notebooks, but I never really liked those with a margin.

I never figured out how to use margins properly. I suck at annotating. I also suck at highlighting just the important texts, underlining, or whatever people with good studying and annotation habits do. I tend to color the whole page with highlighters (especially when STABILO released their pastel-colored highlighters).

Whenever I set up my bullet journal layouts, I look at minimalist layout inspirations, but for some reason, it always comes out wrong.

Because my notebooks rarely have breathing space or margins.

I remembered, I once searched for good note-taking methods when I was still in school. I wanted to make my notes prettier and more effective because I always take notes, but I find it hard to study my notes because they are just one big chunk of text.

One of those note-taking methods was the Cornell Method. It has margins on one (or was it both sides?) and a section below for notes. YouTube also taught me variations of the Cornell method. One has only one margin on the left side, without the space for notes below. I also tried the mind-mapping thing, but it didn’t work out.

Because I never figured out how to write with breathing space.

For some reason, I have this irrational feeling that I will run out of pages, so I try to make my writing as small as I could, and as cramped as I could. I would try bullet points instead of sentences, and I only ended up with bulleted sentences. And the margins. Oh, the margins frustrate me. I always felt like they were a waste of perfectly good writing space.

Today, at work, I was listening to a podcast. The guest said she interviewed a doctor in Sweden about burnout, and people nowadays try to live out their (our, me included) lives writing from edge to edge of the pages, metaphorically speaking.

We plan our days to the minute and pack them with a lot of activities, from edge to edge, edge to edge, disregarding the margins, so whenever we want to make changes, reflect and annotate, or make notes, we no longer have room left for those things that are important if we want to take stock of our lives and how we live our time. We also leave no room for us to breathe and rest and make changes.

We are afraid of uncertainty, not just because it is anxiety-inducing to not know what happens next, but because changes mean disrupted plans and losing control.

So we burn out.

I noticed it recently in my bout of bullet journaling this year. I think I am being productive, but for some reason, I feel like I can’t breathe. I don’t feel in control. Whenever I look at my bullet journal, I feel panicky, and this dread over how limited time is starts haunting me.

I always feel like I don’t have enough when really, I’m just cramming too much into a single page.

Just as I want to let my notebooks breathe with space, I need to let myself breathe with enough rest time. Funnily enough, “Breathe” was the word of the year I chose for myself. And yet, I am still having trouble “breathing.”

I need to learn how to draw margins and respect those margins–both in my life and in my notebooks. I need to respect the fact that time is limited, but it is the same for everybody else, and I am not the only one with goals to achieve, and things to do.

But I only have one body, one mind, and one “me” to deal with, and “me” says I need to give myself room to breathe. Room to rest. Room to grow. Room to re-calibrate, so that when life happens and ruins all my plans, I can get frustrated for a second, breathe deeply (several times), and move on. I need enough room to accommodate whatever shit life decides to throw at me.

I need to be more firm with my “no’s” and be more strict with my procrastination.

Otherwise, I would fall off the page again, and I am at that point in my life where I really don’t want that to happen unless I have done all I could and it still wasn’t enough. (Because sometimes shit happens, and other times SHIT happens. Like the really big, ugly, hard, and stinky kind.)

Draw your margins, write within the page, leave room for rest, and space to reflect or edit stuff, because life is full of surprises, and in order to regain control over the unexpected stuff, we need to let go of control over the everyday minutiae stuff (Backwards Law/Law of Reversed Effort). Like seriously. Chill out, me. And maybe, chill out, you?

The Subtle Art of Not Giving a Fuck

I just finished reading Mark Manson’s book, the first book I’ve finished in a while, and the last chapter talked about confronting the reality of death.

While I read about how he described his experience sitting at the edge of the cliff of the Cape of Good Hope, and when I read the last few sentences of this book, where he relayed how an Aussie came up to him, concerned about him sitting there, asking him “Is everything okay? How are you feeling?”

And when I read how he said he felt alive, very alive, I cried.

Until now I’m crying actually, while typing these things, trying to capture my thoughts before I completely forget about it. Because I don’t want to forget about it.

I NEED TO REMEMBER IT.

I’ve been depressed since my teenage years, and all these years, I’ve been telling myself, I want to die.

Today, I realized the truth.

I don’t want to die. I want to feel alive. To find a reason to keep living.

-me to myself

I only bitch about wanting to die because I don’t know whether I have something like that in store for me out there.

It is something I already know deep within my soul, I want to live. I’ve just been ashamed to say it. I want to live. I want my life to be worth something.

I want to see life as vividly and in full color as this new mechanical keyboard I just got this morning–it is a bit distracting, but I need it.

I want to feel alive. I want to want to live, and not be ashamed to say I want it.

I don’t want to be dead inside anymore.

Things I learned (about myself) from getting back into Bullet Journalling

I have an on-again-off-again relationship with bullet journaling. I’ve been on the bandwagon from around 2015 to 2016, but I would always fall off the habit whenever I either got too busy or depressed.

But I picked it up again early this year because I wanted to be human again. So, for the past six to seven months, here are some of the things I learned about myself from bullet journaling:

• I fall off the habit because I always get so caught up in the artsy-fartsy side of the #BuJo community. I like pretty things. I get envious. I want to do that too. But it doesn’t come out the way I want, I get frustrated and overly critical of myself, and suddenly my journal looks ugly and annoying I don’t want to ever have to look at it again.
• I need to remind myself (a lot, almost every day) that I am doing it this year to plan, organize, and get back some control over my life. It was a hard battle, but I think I am winning (most of the time).
• My mind is as cluttered as my space. A bullet journal is a good place to dump out all the stuff, sort through my thoughts, and attempt to organize them in a way that makes sense to me, but is not too overwhelming. When my mind was a clearer place, I had the headspace to declutter my physical workstation as well (it is still a work in progress, but it IS progress).

• I need to make peace with the fact that I AM NOT A MINIMALIST. At least not yet. I want to be. But it is hard. I want to simplify my life too, but I am a hoarder by nature and it is hard to wrestle it out of me. But I will get there. Eventually. I hope.
• Bullet journal is great for planning, and customizability is an awesome aspect, especially for someone like me (at the stage of my life and mental health currently) who needs some serious and unstructured space for journaling. But, here is where my dilemma lies:
  • I want to plan AND do some hard-core “Dear Diary” type of journaling, and sometimes, when I have already drawn up my weekly/daily set-up, the space for journaling isn’t enough. I have days when I am feeling rambly. And brain dumps in a different section make me feel like it is disjointed (also why I can’t jump in on the Filofax/binder planning community: I want to see my days in a continuous spread, but I also need space to pre-plan)
  • Buying a planner for my tasks etc would be simpler, but I like having the freedom to change around the structure of my journal and experiment with different layouts. Plus, drawing my own calendars, weeklies, and dailies makes me a bit more intentional: they force me to slow down and be more mindful of (1) my time, (2) my energy, (3) my procrastination, and (4) how often I repeat things.
  • I don’t need to hard-core journal every day, and I don’t want to be restricted to 1 page a day either.
  • My solution: Have a separate bujo and diary. Preferably something that looks similar. Makes the notebooks feel like the set I want/need them to be.
  • (Of course, I might change my mind again later, or I might just be finding ways to justify and satisfy my notebook addiction.)

• I have to face it: I have a really bad notebook addiction. I don’t feel ashamed of it, for the most part, but my wallet is trying to urge me and slap me back into financial reality and clarity.
• When I brain dump to organize my thoughts, I tend to obsess about it. It’s become the physical manifestation of rumination, especially when it comes to goals and other future plans and current thoughts. I write things a lot repeatedly, it almost feels like it’s becoming an Obsession/Compulsion thing.
• I either have no discipline over my money, or I lack financial literacy. Or maybe I am struggling to save because things are so damn expensive nowadays.
• I still don’t have a purpose/mission/calling, and I still can’t put words to what my personal values and principles are.
• Bullet journalling slapped me in the face on how I spend my time. Apparently, the most I can give to myself is time to sleep (which I had to allot 5 to 7 hours for. Otherwise, don’t expect anything good from me.)

These are just some of the things I realized while reflecting (because I was procrastinating) on my journaling process.

Knowing these things help a lot, because now, I know what parts of my life I need to work on and improve. Although it will take a lot of trial-and-error before I get to the right (meaning an answer I can live with and be happy about) conclusion.

Oh, and I turn 27 today.

Feed the fire

Burnout is a common feeling for all of us. Our world is so fast-paced and demanding, it is hard to take a breath. In fact, resting almost feels criminal to rest in our culture.

It is interesting that we call that feeling of being so tired and fed up with our everyday life we just want to stop moving, that if someone tries to nudge us to “keep going,” “do our best,” or try to shove happiness, or sell us their definition of “a good time” or “a productive time” down our throats we just want to snap their heads off, as burnout. Because fires burn out when you don’t feed the flames.

There are three things for fire to keep burning: fuel, oxygen, and heat. When one of those three runs out, the flames die out.

For people, we also need three things to keep us going: time, money, and energy. Those three are what enables us to get the things we need: food, shelter, sleep, work, time for ourselves and for the people we care about, time to explore our passions and interest, time to learn and feed our minds, soul, and body. And most importantly, rest.

But there is very limited time to earn very limited money, and if we want to have more of those two, we need to expend our very limited energy—there’s just not enough left for us to keep going at the pace the world expects to move.

So we burn out.

We stop moving. We stop functioning.

And unlike fire, it takes a while to get over burnout.

I saw this article while doing topic research for work. According to Galloway, young people nowadays want “work-life balance,” but that is impossible to get in the early stages of our career, because, as he said we live in a culture where we “need to earn our stripes.”

If we want to have the freedom to dictate how we balance our personal and professional lives, we need to have enough influence, experience, and I forgot what the third thing was.

It sucks, but it is true. If we can’t pave our paths ourselves and have to work for big capitalist corporations to earn a living, we need to play by their rules before we earn the right to rest.

So, it’s either you work for them, or we find some other way to survive and disrupt this, quite frankly, really sucky society we live in.

We can always try to take that balance we need to avoid burnout. Or we can accept the fact that burnout is just a part of our cycles and surrender to the fact that we will have to stop and start over so many times. Or we can just go through the “best years of our life” running on empty until we snap and start shooting everybody.

The point is, the world is unfair. You either change it, live with it, or bear with it while you are dead inside. Choose which battle you want to fight. You can try all three if you want until you find what battle you can win, or at least until you find one worth fighting in.

Keep burning (and burning out), pick your battles, and whenever it is within your means, feed that fire.