I don’t know of anyone so obsessively unapologetic…

After five years, you want me to take a plane ticket and ask that question… 

We have taken multiple, too many plane tickets to see one another… 

This. This. This. Makes me cry in happiness. 

I never thought of asking. I don’t even need to know the answer. 

But they are all rooting for you. And I don’t even know what to do anymore. 

Can you please please please smile when I ask?

You have always been the disciplinarian between the two of us. In fact I never thought myself more wise than you to even discipline you. And even so, there are few times that you have had to do it to me – however young wild and free I maybe. 

Most of the time you will make a joke out of my misbehaviour, get everyone to laugh at me, and I laugh at myself sheepishly. 

And there was one time, only one time in these five years, that you had to take the stick a little, and even so, you were so calm about it and all you uttered to me, yet firmly was, “Megan, I don’t think that is a good idea.” 

For the uninstructed, you never call me Megan. So when you do, it is serious. You definitely get my attention. And you never force it down my throat on what to do, you simply tell me your thoughts , and your finest thoughts was that it isn’t a good idea. And that got me to think hard and not misbehave. 

I don’t think there is anyone that has that kind of love, yet soft power over me, and yet can let me grow up to be a fine young lady I should be. 

Did I tell you, I always, always feel like a lady around you. Respected, loved, pampered and lifted as one. 

Thank you and Happy Birthday to you for always always always bringing out the best in me. 

“And I have seen the way he looks at her, and that said it all to me. Cos I can tell that he does cherish her, and that is what she deserves.”

🙂

So apparently he was incredibly attracted to my accidental haughtiness during our first impression meet up. 

He came up to say Hi during our first match together. And he was exchanging words of courtesy and introducing himself as the captain of his team. 

I smiled and he claimed that I said the following to him, “Oh, that is your team. That is great. That will give my team a breather.”

Which in other words, I was saying their team was a small feat and my team could relax playing against them. 

He was shocked and he went back to his team and exclaimed “That girl over there, thinks we are easy to beat. We must win this!” 

At the end of that match, (and despite their incredible efforts to uphold their vehemence), my team emerged the winner. 

He walked away, ego bruised a little but deeply remembered my sheer haughtiness on the field. 

I don’t remember my exchange of words with him.  

A year later, he came up to me and confessed how much he always admired me on the field and never stopped noticing me then. As a female player and as a female captain.

I smiled, unknowing of that funny first impression, and wondered how many of such accidental statements I have made. 

As Joan Didon says, I don’t know what I think until I write about it. 

This trip – this 2.5 weeks long- pack my bags at the very last minute after the heart was torn and ripped apart by Love; and after the heart was gripped with Fear from a new career venture. I had to pack my bags and just go. Sprint and go and find some form of answers. Or maybe no answers at all, just go away and escape. I don’t know – whichever outcome is better than lying in bed with anxiety and nightmares.

The trip gave me epiphany for two things.

1) For the very first time in my life, I had time, and I mean ample time, to talk and deal with Fear. I was always told perfect love casts out fear. Which I misunderstood that fear is evil but should not exist in life. But alas, fear is always there. Love exists alongside fear, it is simply the main driver, but it doesn’t mean we elude fear. 

In fact, the whole trip, I made all the space for fear. Heaps of space. Fear of being walked out on, fear that I am never good enough, fear that my decisions or my judgement is never right, fear that I am unworthy, fear that I will never be happy. I gave fear all the space it needs. I talked about it, I allowed fear to live, breathe, stretch out its legs comfortably. Because if I cannot learn to live comfortably with fear, I will never be able to do anything vicariously or do anything.

It became clear that for me to live life creatively (and that I don’t mean in the world of arts, but to live a rich life, a life of curiousity and then passion), then I need to build an expansive enough interior life that my fear and my creativity would peacefully coexist, since it appeared that they would always be together.

2) There was another big wave that hit me. To distinguish between The Story and The Fact. 

What is your story and what is your fact. For example, the Fact is that one day you came home past your curfew and your parents yelled you.

The Story in your head is that your parents are mean and they don’t trust you and that is why they yelled at you, and you go on the rest of your life with that story as the truth. but for someone else, their story is that they can’t believe they worried their parents so much, and their parents  love them so much and that is why they yelled at them. And they gone on the rest of their lives leading quite a different life.. What happens is that the stories that we create actually affects us for the rest of our lives.

With every event that happened, there is a fact and literally what happened. And the story is what we interpret it in our minds.

And the story I created for myself, is that I need to do something to be loved or be happy. I don’t know how or when I created that. I think it is from childhood that my siblings are always competing for attention or love, and they will do great many things – get full scores grades and show it off and Mum will give gratification for that. And as a middle child, I don’t do that, and of course I don’t get the gratification or attention or even love. And I grew up with the story that in order to be loved or be happy or even be gratified or appreciated or noticed, I must do something. I must work at it. I stopped looking inwardly or never did, and I felt I must do so many things just to get love or happiness. 

And I just need to have one little time to feel slightly rejected to tell myself that, see, I told you I must have not done enough or I have done something wrong , that is why you don’t love me or I am not happy. And that becomes my story. 

But the fact and truth is, my happiness and the love I deserve, isn’t what I have done or not done. I can’t demand or force happiness or love. 

And then this crazy thing happened, “Megan, you don’t have to do something amazing to be happy. You already are.” 

Every time I ate something, every time I talked to someone, every time I worked on something, my story is that , I must do something amazing to be happy. And that affected me. And when I realized it was just a story; and to cast that aside, it felt so free, and I’m shedding the story. And I’m opening up the opportunity of fully feeling love and happiness without that story, without the sense of having to do something amazing to deserve that.

I remembered I called my person up and said sorry and that I allowed my story to affect my relationship and it is a story I created and it is not fact. And I am gonna be free and not have any limitations that I created for myself.

Every time I had that story, everything becomes evidence, and every thing that Happened I will be like “See, I told you I wasn’t good enough and I didn’t do enough.” And to finally be able to distinguish that it is a story and not fact, and I don’t have to do something or work on anything amazing to receive love and happiness, was just so freeing. It felt so free.

 
I cannot imagine and explain how amazing and freeing it felt.

So yes, the trip is a combination of those two epiphanies.

I am back stronger with fear within me and I respect Fear’s existence and will coexist with it while living a creative life. And I am freed of a story I created for myself all these many years, and I am receiving and looking at love and happiness more beautifully than ever and never at my own efforts or at the expense of my own self worth or esteem. 

I hope this story will help someone out there. I don’t know how, but I hope it will… 🙂

I have endured for you 🙂 

I think this is happening again. Familiar grounds… if God allows, let’s do this to get over… counting down. 

I don’t know if I would take this down eventually, it is quite a personal thing for me to write, but I wanted to just document it down, in fear it will get worse, and in hope it can only get better. I had anxiety a long time ago, so long ago, that I don’t remember what it takes for it to occur, much less reoccur… 

The recent series of events and the INABILITY to talk to anyone about it, has probably stretched it a little too thinly for me. The amount of times the past weeks, I stood outside at my balcony, crying and struggling to breathe and not being able to step back inside (let alone other people). I wanted so desperately to rest at proper night timings, but every bone in my body and my mind wouldn’t let me. Oh, the nightmares too that comes along. Night after night. 

I know what it takes to have to work on not having anxiety rule 85% of my brain. It is a lengthy process, and I know this time what triggered it, and I now have to work bloody hard to overcome it. It is so hard. 

Some afternoons the past weeks, it was so bad, I had to take time off work. Well, in the past, when it comes to being in an anxious state, I am unable to have control over it. Now, I actually know what being nervous feels like, and I can more or less cope with it, and not allow it to escalate. 

I thought I will never have to go through all of this again. I did not expect to feel this way. I don’t often cry or am non-positive – or almost never, but this gripping anxiety is nothing related to mood. I do not want to feel anxious, and it is not something I want. 

It is so hard to breathe. And everytime I can almost feel my chest beating out of my skin. Only a squeeze machine might help. 

But it goes go away. It does. Eventually. Sometimes after 10 minutes. Sometimes in between waking up and feeling it gripping, and falling back asleep and it goes away. Sometimes in the broad daylight, it doesn’t go away fast enough, and that gets scary. It seems like the day is wasted and the INABILITY to be functional and present for those around me, kills me. It feels like I cannot control it. I can’t and yet I can. It is just lengthy and it takes time to not let it occupy all of me. Sometimes it takes second to recalibrate, sometimes it takes minutes. 

This is simply gripping. 

After an attack, I feel so upset but it is mostly anger. Angry at myself for not having any control and angry that I don’t know how to make it stop. Then I feel angry because I feel like nobody understands- or rather, I can’t say it. 
First attack was 28 Feb night 11pm. 2nd attack was 14 Mar or 15 Mar 3am. 

I wish all of this goes away.  
“Do not let the fear of fighting the old overwhelm, but build the new. And smell the flowers along the way. Flowers at my feet…” 

I told him at this point, I don’t have a track record of successful relationships. I am not sitting on my armchair by the fireplace with my grandkids sitting next to me, and telling them, I know what it takes for a relationship, a marriage to last.

Fact is, I am right here right now tried before, failed before, and I still don’t know what it takes to make this work.

“Do you think the fact that I love him, at least for my part, and maybe he is too, or maybe not, or maybe he is close to; do you think love is enough to make a relationship last?”

“Love is not enough. You have to be willing to give up, to sacrifice. It is commitment, it is selflessness.”

And that was such a father-daughter moment that made my heart warm again.

It is crazy vulnerable to tell him I love him, but I know full well too, that Love is not everything it takes to make two people work.