A letter from my writing to me

You speak of your great love for me. Yet, these forlorn phrases echo off the empty pages. You tell people your big dream, "the dream is..." but you hide your greatest creations in a folder in another folder in another folder. You lodge each piece in the tightest crevice and you stuff each of the four ventricles with loose sheets. You are afraid to open that book, bound in oil-stained brown, because it contains sketchy work. Raw, much like yourself. You think that peeling open the page of the book would be equivalent to having your heart wrenched out and displayed like a centrepiece for anyone to devour. But this fear you have is only natural. To let others see your work is like revealing a part of your soul. And that is something to be fearful about. But letting this fear stop you from doing what you love is stupid. So stop it. Your love for me should be enough.

Me and me and mememememmee

I decided.

I will only make time for people who make time for me.

And this applies to everyone.

No matter when I met them, the history we've had, what we're "supposed" to be, and more than anything, how I feel about them.

And if that goes, I will be making the most time for myself.

non

Now you may think that I am being clingy or desperate. But I assure you, I am not. I have no time for childish games, frankly. I barely have time for school work, much less time for myself and my family so there is no way I am going to waste my energy thinking of what nonsense you are up to or whether your big fat heart has any space for me. Because I am tired of games. I am 19 years and 9 months old, much too mature for you and your thinking, clearly not of the implications of what you say, that perhaps you may be setting expectations which you cannot fulfil but of only yourself and your primal childish needs. Wants, rather.

Some days are unremarkable, but that doesn't mean you are

19 Things Every 19-Year-Old Girl Needs To Hear Right Now

Crissy Milazzo

 

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When I was 19, I slumped onto my sophomore year bed, back against a drab cinderblock dormitory wall, and cried my eyes out as I scribbled this into my journal: “I am not anyone who I would be interested in talking to.” In the coming days, weeks, and months, I would scribble more notes to myself. Over time, they became encouraging. Looking back, I can see that I was not the uniquely sad, special snowflake that I thought I was. Age 19 can be a harsh introduction to the solitude of womanhood for a lot of us. Here are 19 things I wish I could tell my 19-year-old self.

The Ashlee Simpson Show

1. YOU ARE NOT A MESS

Your bed is unmade, your best clothes are dirty, you haven’t written a word of that paper, and you feel like you haven’t talked to your parents in days. Everything feels out of place. Where are your keys? You feel like you never know, and you’re constantly apologizing to people for it whenever you can’t do something fast enough, even if it’s something as trivial as hastily searching for your debit card at the register: “sorry, I’m such a mess.” No. You are not a mess. You are a human. Stop apologizing for being fallible. It’s okay not to have every single thing in its place as long as your heart is in the right one.

2. YOU DON’T NEED TO BE BETTER

You want to improve: move up the ranks at your job, make more than $8.75 and hour, finally pick a major, exercise more, spend more time reading for pleasure, damn, you just want to be better. You don’t know why, but you never feel like you’ve mastered anything you practice, even if you do it every day. This isn’t a sign of weakness, it is a sign of self-awareness. It’s like hearing the TV in the other room and feeling like you can almost see it play out in front of you– you know what’s going on, but you can’t get the picture exactly right. You don’t need to have the perfect picture yet. If you know what you want to do, keep doing it. If you don’t, let yourself find out.

3. YOU WILL GET BETTER

You know when you are doing something wrong. Do less of that and you will be fine. Don’t overthink the consequences of every move. You will misstep and it will help you memorize the right steps later. Keep moving.

4. THE SOPHOMORE SLUMP IS BOTH AS REAL AND FAKE AS THE FRESHMAN 15

Did you really gain 15 lbs your freshman year? Probably more like 5 or 10, and honestly? Who cares if you gained 15 lbs if you finished your first year of formal learning and an institution of higher education? The same goes for the sophomore slump: it is real, but it is not as bad as you think it will be. Your second year is more difficult because the word is harder and the rewards greater, but on a much less frequent timetable. That is adulthood, and you are beginning to understand how it feels.

5. IT’S OKAY TO LET GO

Freshman year friends will fall away. Exes will become people you don’t even get drunk texts from, they will just disappear. What is it that you lay in bed at night thinking about, blaming yourself for, wondering when the hell you’ll know better than to do again? Let it go. You’ve learned your lesson.

6. CLEAN UP YOUR SIDE OF THE STREET

If you feel like you really messed up and hurt someone else, then you probably did. It is (almost) never too late to be humble and apologize, or to do the thing that you’ve been neglecting to do. Having said that, you are too old to keep apologizing as a self-rewarding mechanism. Are you the only person who will benefit from this apology? If so, just learn and let go. Forgive yourself and maybe, someday, they will too.

7. YOU CAN LEARN HOW TO VENT WITHOUT COMPLAINING

I used to find myself getting annoyed with my own comments, infuriated by how aware I was of my own whining even though I couldn’t stop. It was addicting. You have to break the pattern of letting complaints be your release. What’s the difference? Complaints are negative comments about things you had all the power to change or ignore. Venting is talking about the frustrations of things you are uncertain about, or things that you can’t stop thinking about that you have no power over whatsoever. It’s okay to complain sometimes, but it is important to know that there is a difference.

8. SOME DAYS ARE UNREMARKABLE, THAT DOESN’T MEAN YOU ARE

There are days where you will not accomplish anything but being alive, and it will be hard to even feel like that is an accomplishment, let alone a good thing at all. You will want to sleep forever. It will rain and your favorite shoes will be ruined and you will be hungry and the only food place on the way home from work will be closed, and you will feel so stupid for crying in your car, but you will do it anyway. You aren’t stupid. Your life isn’t boring. You are remarkable even though some of your days will be completely unremarkable. The content of your day is not a reflection of the content of your character.

9. IT DOESN’T HAVE TO BE THE BEST OR THE WORST

The best sex ever. The worst boyfriend ever. The worst class ever. It feels like the value of everything dwells in its potential for hyperbole. Don’t let extremes control your feelings. You’ll come to see the best things as the most simple, indescribable feelings, like the moment when you can’t stop talking to someone even though you’re both exhausted, or the way unclasping your own bra after a long day feels. They are not the best or the worst, they transcend extremes. Some things are just good or decent or alright, and none of them need to be ranked.

10. YOU ARE NOT RESPONSIBLE FOR THEIR FEELINGS

Don’t let anyone make you feel miserable because they feel miserable. There is a fine line between being there for someone and being someone’s emotional punching bag. Draw boundaries and keep them. It doesn’t make you cold, it makes you responsible for your own happiness.

11. YOU ARE IN CONTROL OF YOUR OWN ACTIONS AND REACTIONS

No one can make you cry. No one can use you. You can cry and be justified, you can feel used and be justified, but you are not a tool that people can readily control. Embrace your emotions and own them. As a wise woman once wrote, “you cross the line from having needs into being needy the moment you start believing your needs are someone else’s responsibility.”

12. YOU WILL CHANGE AND BE DIFFERENT

Pushing yourself to excel is one thing, but forcing yourself to make drastic changes is another. Don’t force your own personal growth. Know that you will change as you make mistakes, learn, and have the chance to act again. You will be different someday, you don’t need to stunt that shift by overanalyzing what you need to change right now.

13. DOUBTING EVERYTHING MEANS YOU’RE PAYING ATTENTION

Being skeptical of authority– your parents, professors, and the systems that you’ve abided by ever since you were born– doesn’t make you a subversively cool intellectual. It just means you’re becoming aware of new information on old institutions. That is a good thing. Do not abuse this new open-mindedness by trying to win arguments or undermine everyone around you. Keep questioning things. You might never find the answers, but you can always find new ones.

14. DISAPPOINTMENT IS A RESULT OF KNOWING WHAT YOU WANT FOR YOURSELF

People will let you down. People will break your heart. You will be rejected. Sometimes, your experience will not be enough to qualify you to do a thing that you want to do more than anything else in the world. You will be let down, but you can get back up knowing that you are always one turn away from getting the thing you know you want.

15. HEARTACHE IS A RESULT OF KNOWING WHAT YOU WANT FROM SOMEONE ELSE

We project our expectations for affection onto the objects of our own affection. It’s natural. There will be perfectly lovely individuals who just cannot give you what you want. It neither a flaw in their character nor a problem with your brain. It’s just a mismatch. Sometimes it will be so uniquely painful and all-encompassing that you will wonder if any of it is worth the suffering at all. It is. Keep going.

16. EVERY RELATIONSHIP IS A PARTNERSHIP

Your friends, family, employers, significant others, hell, even the person teaching your yoga class: these are all people that you are working with on something that isn’t a given. They don’t need to show up and neither do you. Your job is to keep showing up and keep listening. That is the most basic component of how you keep your relationships alive. Don’t overcomplicate it.

17. YOU ARE NOT YOUR OWN EVERYTHING, AND NEITHER IS ANYONE ELSE

As much as I would’ve loved to be a completely independent cold bitch with no emotions at age 19, I wasn’t. The worst part? I thought I was. When I would let my emotions through the chain-link fence of my personality (that I saw as a brick wall), they would ooze all over another person and form a little cocoon of “you are so perfect please never leave me ever.” I made other people feel like they were the source of everything I needed, and that is neither cute nor healthy. Know that you really do need other people sometimes, but you will never be so simple that you only need just one person.

18. YOU CAN BECOME WHO YOU WANT TO BE

Set goals. Write things down on paper. Fuck up and fix it, or fuck up and know how not to fuck up next time. You are not going through a ‘phase,’ you are just you, and you are always growing into being you.

19. YOU ALREADY ARE EVERYTHING YOU NEED TO BE

You have the power to do what you want to do. Smile. Or cry it out… and then go fuckin’ get it. 

First love

Do not fret. The love you feel now will not perish all of a sudden. It will not vanish in a puff of smoke. Neither will it degrade like flesh in a valley of bacteria. A love like that, built from sheer innocuous apprehension and teenage naivety, comprises only honesty and soft strokes on the cheek. A love like it resides in the deepest, most lonely crannies of our heart.


The love you feel now will pulse in your heart and linger in your thoughts for years to come. But there will reach a point when the love you feel cannot overcome the persistence of time. However tight you cling on to this feeling of hope of feeling more, or at least not feeling any less, it will only give way and you find yourself at the end of the road. Time will signal the end of something good, something full.

Turn to the next page

Tomorrow Yusra leaves for Toronto. And I'll be leaving for university camp. Tomorrow marks a new chapter of my life.

Gone will be my infantile adolescent days. I feel much older, but more than that, independent. I can think for myself and I know myself so much better: what makes me tick, what makes me happy, what makes me weep.

Speaking of weeping, I think Muffin's passing has a lot to do with my feelings of moving forward. His death marked a stoppage of some sort. I feel entirely different without him around. But different isn't necessarily always bad.

I won't be seeing Jie for at least 2 years and I feel we will both be wholly different people from who we are right now in this moment chomping down mentaiko rice and ramen. We'll have different people in our lives and very different thoughts.

I'm afraid of what's to come, and what I will become. But I am also extremely excited.

"Learn to be yourself first"

Don’t Fall In Love When You’re Young

MAY. 19, 2014 

By ELISSA SANCI

Do not get into a serious relationship when you’re young. Play around. Kiss more than one person. Don’t fall in love with the first and only person you’ve ever kissed. Don’t date that person for years. Don’t invest your life into that person.


Do not get into a serious relationship at age 16. Especially not at age 16. 16 is the awkward stage in life when things are confusing and frustrating. 16 is so young, even though at the time, it feels so old. 16 is when you still have braces and shop at Abercrombie & Fitch. 16 is when you don’t listen to your mom’s advice, because what does she know? 16 is when you think it’s the end of the world because the boy you have a crush on prefers texting your best friend instead of you. 16 is when you stand awkwardly at the edge of the dance floor at a Sweet 16 watching the cute girl from math class dance with that kid on the football team you can’t stand. 16 is when you still fight with your dad, because you don’t realize he’s just doing what’s best. 16 is not the time to love someone else because at 16, you don’t even love yourself. 16 sucks, which is why 16 isn’t the time to get into a serious relationship with anyone other than yourself.

Do not get into a serious relationship when you’re young. Because when you get into a relationship when you’re young, you learn how to be someone else’s girlfriend, but not how to be yourself. You aren’t your own person when you grow up as a girlfriend; you made it through the milestones of young adulthood attached to another person, and so because of this, you grow into that other person, and before long, it becomes nearly impossible to untangle yourself. You identify as a girlfriend or a boyfriend before anything else, and because of this, you forget that you are yourself first.

You learn how to love another but not how to love yourself. When you’re in a relationship first, you push aside the problems you have with yourself. You kick loving yourself under the rug, because learning to love yourself is a lot of work, especially when you’re too busy loving someone else. When you’re in a relationship first, you expect the other person to love you enough for the both of you.

Do not get into a serious relationship when you’re young — I cannot stress this enough. Learn to be yourself first. Have an identifier other than “boyfriend” or “girlfriend.” Be a writer or a soccer player or an actor before wearing that boyfriend hat. Learn to take care of yourself, to make friends, to be happy on your own, to stand on your own two feet without the support of another person. Most importantly, learn to love yourself just the way you are. Loving yourself will go a long way.

But if you did get into a relationship when you were young and it didn’t work out, don’t regret the relationship. It was good, and it treated you well. You know what love is, and a lot of people your age don’t. But you can regret loving someone else before loving yourself. Regret becoming dependent before learning to be independent. You’re allowed to regret that. 

Absence makes the heart grow weaker

I miss my cat. Especially at times when I wish he wasn't there. Like when I'm home late at night, and my sole purpose is to shower and get to bed. He'd usually be getting in my way, rubbing his oversized body against my calves, begging for some food in his bowl.

So nowadays, I go around expecting something black at my feet to trip me. But there never is. But his absence is a black hole, and I'm just there; on the precipice of a downward spiral.

Do Not Fall In Love With People Like Me

“Do not fall in love with people like me. 
I will take you to museums, and parks, and monuments, and kiss you in every beautiful place, so that you can never go back to them without tasting me like blood in your mouth.
I will destroy you in the most beautiful way possible. And when I leave you will finally understand, why storms are named after people.” 
― Caitlyn Siehl, Literary Sexts: A Collection of Short & Sexy Love Poems

raisin at the base of the sink

raisin at the base of the sink

hello
you've been there for quite a while, haven't you
lolling around like a restless child
jumping every time a spurt of water hits you
from one triangle of the drainage plug to another

hop
      hop
   

                           hop

you were but once a lowly raisin
shrivelled and tight

fate has caused you to plummet off the edge of the crust
(either that or no one wanted to eat you, you miserable lump, and you got tossed in the sink)
into this deep dark square of constant running water

And with every drop of water,
You only get bigger
Bolder
Braver

finally you're back to your grape self

Hi there, not-so stranger

I saw you today in your speckled cardigan that clashed with the floral tips of your Topman shirt and was even more disagreeable with your brick-orange bag. (You only brought it in case I needed to put something in your bag, as I always do.)

I saw you today wearing that smile I know so well. The smile of utter happiness to see me again. The one that is filled with anticipation, excitement and slight fear. (You probably couldn't get this from my stone cold smile but in that moment, my heart leapt from the same anticipation, excitement and fear of seeing you again for the first time after 2 weeks. Also, relief and a wave of love.)

I saw you today looking at me, your eyes glossy in the way lovers gaze into each others' eyes. I might have gazed back once or twice under the pretence of being confused as to what your expression meant. I saw you today, at the corner of my eye, sneaking in furtive glances. Not so furtive, in fact. (You thought I didn't know but I did.)

I saw you today. Naked and bare. All your layers of politeness stripped away. Down to the very core of who you are and what you felt for me. Love, as plain as you show it.

I am not an unfeeling monster

I do feel these overwhelming urges to cry
to bawl my eyes out and weep right into the deep recesses of my pillow
to let my raw unadulterated emotions erupt through the anguish in my sobs and the downpour of my tears

They come in waves
as rhythmic as the pulsing of a heart
as conflicted as my own
They come unexpectedly
when I'm thinking about anything or nothing at all
They can be as strong as a typhoon
a brief onslaught followed quickly by heavy rains and floods
or weak like frothy seawater caressing the shoreline

But most of the time, I suppress these urges
Not because I can but because I must

Wisdom for a new year

The Difference Between Being Lonely and Being Alone

The funny thing about loneliness is how very little it has to do with actually being alone.

The saddest, truest kind of loneliness seeps in when you least expect it. It arrives silently: while lying in the arms of your lover, measuring the frequency of their hand as it runs back and forth, up and down, caressing the dimple of your thigh. It's noticing the way their touch occasionally slows, falters – the way they've grown so easily distracted by the static, violent movements of their video game, the one you bought them for their birthday.

It's remembering the way your body once commanded their pulse to quicken, their heart to race. It's how your touch once brought light to their eyes and tiny, dancing goose-bumps to the skin of their neck. Loneliness is is the pull-back to your lean-in, the hug to your kiss, the question to your certainty; it's the time between replies, as you sit, staring at your phone — wishing death upon all those who dare message in their silence.

Loneliness isn't measurable by numbers or bodies or answers to a questionnaire; loneliness is the perpetual state of seeking that which you so crave, that which you so need. Loneliness comes with settling for less than you deserve just as surely as it comes with reaching for that which you cannot attain. It's incurable by company, it swells in the presence of friends; it grips you unforgivingly, from within.

Loneliness is the isolation that comes with nursing a feeling unreturned — an expectation unmet.

Aloneness is different. Aloneness is finding freedom in this very same isolation; it's the strange state of bliss that comes with being truly, honestly, unapologetically content in your own company.

Being alone is buying a single ticket to a foreign film you know absolutely nothing about. It's sitting in the back row, tearing open the wrapper to your favorite chocolate bar, immersing yourself so completely in the fictional love of fictional characters that you all but forget the to-and-fros of your own trivial existence. You forget about that person you met at the bar last week, the one you gave your number to but never heard back from. You forget about the photo that your ex just uploaded on Facebook; the one with their new love interest, laughing carelessly behind designer glasses. You forget because, in that moment, nothing matters more than the sweet crunch of your chocolate bar and the eventual union of Character A with Character B.

Aloneness is a Saturday night when your best friend is on a date and you forgot to make other plans. It's walking to the wine shop while listening to that song you love and buying the second-cheapest bottle of wine — because even though you have no money, you deserve to be treated. It's building a fort in your bedroom, one with high-speed WiFi, walls of pillows, and a moat of old DVD cases. It's drinking your cheap wine in your cheap castle and understanding that nobody's coming to save you. Because you don't want them to. Because you don't need to be saved.

Loneliness and aloneness stand as the two pillars to the one, emotional pendulum. There will be days when you're so physically alone, so abandoned in your own company that you find yourselves smiling, laughing without reason. Then there will be the days spent by the ocean with the one you love, when you find yourselves suddenly, inconceivably, on the verge of tears.

We can't allow ourselves to be defined by the people we surround ourselves with. We can't allow ourselves to be defined by our relationship status or our weekend plans or the screaming silence of our mobile phone. If you're single, please understand that a relationship isn't the ticket to happiness. If you're in a relationship, please know that being single isn't a sentence to sorrow. We're all just swinging on that same, rickety pendulum — forever in flux between being alone and being lonely. We're all just trying to find our balance, wondering how or why or what we're doing there — wherever there is.

Just know that, whichever you happen to be or feel at this exact moment, the power to maintain or change it will always be in your own hands — not in theirs, or in anyone else's.

And sometimes the best cure to loneliness is, in fact, to be alone. 

via Thought Catalog

If life comprised of a series of bad choices held together on a string of false hope and coincidence, we would be terribly happy and unhappy creatures. But we are. We don't know what we want and more than anything, we fail to thread the line of being good while being happy. This line, shown to us by teachers and parents, may seem like a vast valley at first but soon we find out that traversing between finding happiness and finding our morals is like trying to walk on a tightrope.

If hell existed

If he'll existed, there would be a special place reserved for me. And autocorrect.

Let me impress into you

"Because to influence a person is to give him one's own soul. He does not think his natural thoughts, or burn with his natural passions. His virtues are not real to him. His sins, if there are such things as sins, are borrowed. He becomes an echo of some one else's music, an actor of a part that has not been written for him."
The Picture of Dorian Gray

hairassment

I did something pretty crazy with my hair at the end of last year when I went to KL with a couple of classmates. I dyed my sides and a little tail at my nape a platinum blonde. In case you need a reference point, think Draco, Narcissa and Lucius Malfoy.

I was inspired by British songstress Kate Nash, with her super cool stripes coupled with vintage make-up but she isn't known by many so when people ask about my hair I have to tell them Narcissa Malfoy. (I would take Narcissa any day. The number of people who have called me Rogue from X-Men……)

The dye job is pretty unique and meant to look rather skunk-like. I'm really glad the hairdresser got it right!

When I sent my sisters this picture, they completely freaked out, thinking I went all blonde.

I get a lot of strange looks. Looks of shock, of disgust, of intrigue. But I don't mind those. It's when people STARE, that's when it becomes so annoying because frankly, it is plain rude to stare. But I've learnt to ignore them.

At the cafe I'm working at, however, there are some customers who like to give their two cents worth. Some are cute, like this middle-aged who asked me if we would like to trade because he'd do anything to rid himself of white hair. Then I got an ah lek who first asked me how old I am, and then proceeded to make a jab at how I look old cos of my stripes. Didn't your mother ever tell you if you have nothing nice to say, don't say anything at all?

But at the end of the day, I really love my hair. I've always wanted to do something crazy and never really had the chance being cooped up and controlled by the rules in school for the past 12 years of my life. Truth be told, I love it even more because a lot of people don't like it. And I think it's here to stay. Even if it will blow various holes in my already ruined pockets.