But ditch it when you are already gaining the strength that you need to get back up. Go travel instead. Explore new things, try new food, learn new culture, meet new people, and talk to strangers.

Be open with vulnerability, and yes, be alone. It will feel lonely for sure, to be alone somewhere else while aching, and you will need that. That loneliness will make you squirm and your whole body will beg you to find someone, or even just something, to distract you and make you feel less alone. Your body and mind will plead you to do something.

And that's exactly why you won't.

You will just sit calmly with yourself, manage your breath, and let whatever your mind screams at you or your heart tries to make you feel, you will just sit still there, until they are tired and learn how to behave with you.

And that's how you tame your own beast and train it how to sit calmly with you.

That's how you train your mind and heart, and come back stronger than before. To own your mistakes, your sadness, your pain, and let them shape you into a much better person.

That's how you really heal; to acknowledge what you feel, to accept the validity of your emotions, to know that you are in control of whatever you think or feel and to really act on changing your circumstance.

And finally, to put an expire date on your past experiences.

• Sky, March 2018

#thoughts #alone #stronger #life

Before this, I tought it was about managing my emotions better. Or about finding a better thing to say, managing my tone, curating my words and such. I thought it was about not letting my energy to be wasted by being angry.

I was partly wrong though. It is actually okay to feel angry. Sometimes, at some cases, it is even important for me to feel angry. However, just because I feel angry doesn't mean I have to be angry. It is important for me to find another way to express that anger, that could be understood by the other person as well.

So, my dad has diabet and enlarging heart problems, and he was being hospitalized again last month. Obviously, we were trying to limit his food intake and change his menu, but he is one heavy food lover, that it would take some fights just to change one menu.

The whole big family and his friends have tried to remind him. Telling him this and that, but he didn't seem to understand and didn't wanna change. Many of them even adding useless pressure by thinkinh that we, as his children, didn't do our best to take care of him.

At one point, I was so frustrated that I ask him in anger with raised tone, “Dad, are you actually planning to heal or to die? I am doing my best to make you heal and keep you alive with us, but looking at the way you act now, it seems like you are actually planning to die. If you really wanna die, I will buy the whole damn cartons of soda drinks and whole damn food you want, and you can eat them till you die. I won't stop you.”

Of course it created tensions between us and we didn't spoke for few days. I know it was kinda bold move from me, for him to take, but I also know it was necessary (I believe hurting words are still needed to create an alert in retrospective manners within ourselves). Yet, I still found that he couldn't really understand or processed it.

What he understood from that event was; – I was mad and worried about him – His eating pattern and habit was bad (not that he didn't know this from his early age, and he thought he still survive up to now, anyway) – He has to change to be healthy (but didn't really understand the why)

The next week, I came and sat with him. I was still angry, but instead of arguing, I showed him the calorie counter apps. I added all of the food that he took in a day and showed how many sugar and calories he had in a day VS how many that he was alowed to have for daily intake. I showed him the value of each food, compared to instant noodle pack, and how long he should walk to burn that calorie of one food. I also showed him what will happen within how many months should he plan to keep his current lifestyle.

Then we agreed to have blood tests in two weeks span to compare the results of every changes on his eating pattern. We will let the result to speak, instead of me and him arguing.

It turns out to work pretty well. He agreed to make some changes and he tried to limit his intake by himself. Small steps, but it is a good sign.

I learnt that it really is best to be angry without really be. Or in other words, to be angry with different and more constructive ways, without the need of explosive anger itself.

I found that expressing my anger by listing the written facts, showing the problems, and addressing the anger created by the situation or issue, works better than being angry.

I also found that showing the numbers or results from neutral third party, do much better result of changing behaviours from the other person, more than my anger does.

Me being angry only shows that I care of them, but it doesn't help them to change, doesn't help them to understand why do they have to change, let alone to be the reason of their changes. While what makes me feel angry was my frustration to the fact that they didn't change to better situations for them. So, should the thing that solve my frustration and make them change for better; is the WHY, then being angry is clearly not the answer.

I am not one of them who advocate on eliminating anger. For me, every emotion and feeling has its' own purpose, use, and place in my life. It's just I have to learn to understand each of them, to be able to use them better in my life. They made me understand myself better in many ways.

So, I still think feeling angry is important, yet I need to make sure it comes out in a constructive ways for all of the parties involved.

#thoughts #honesty #angry #emotions

And you were right; all the things that you mentioned, were. But then I have no right answers to your questions.

Can't a situation change? Shouldn't people change? Doesn't time come and go? Isn't life keeps on living?

Should an opinion could never be wrong, and feelings could never be predicted, then what's the point of reasoning for something we know we can't agree with?”

Let it be left hanging on read. Oct, 2021.

#thoughts #love #life #honesty

Everything is a result of what I choose to do or not do. Nothing and no one could make me do things better (or worse), more than what I believe I can do.

If self love is about embracing what I deserve and feeling good about myself, then self respect is about growing and allowing myself to build the right attitude while shaping the right mindset, firmly and faithfully.

Just like self love, self respect is earned by keep showing up and not failing myself or betraying my decisions for whatever the reason might be.

A self reminder.

#life #honesty #selfrespect #selflove #thoughts

And the real question is never “How much?”. Instead, it is almost always; “Am I willing to pay for it?”

One of my close friends is a CFO at a multinational company. Few of our other friends are kind of envying her, saying of how lucky she is.

I then asked them, whether they are willing to wear double eyelashes extention everyday and touch them up every two weeks just to maintain a professional look? (For you who don't know anything about eyelashes extention, it does make the eyelashes look longer and make your eyes look bigger and prettier, but they are very uncomfortable, and could be itchy plus annoying at most times. Wearing a single layer is already a torture for me that I could only stand it for a week, let alone wearing two layers. Most women wear them to save some make up time and look presentable professionally almost instantly.)

They all said no almost instantly and complained of how uncomfortable that will be. And I said, “Well, too bad. Cause that so happen is only a very tiny price that she pays to maintain a small part of her performance. Just the professional look part. Imagine what she should pay for her overall brainy decisions and bold performance in the company.”

You may have heard this many times, “We all know the only way to go to heaven is to die, but how many of us are willing to die?”

The price of freedom is ego. As long as you could maintain your ego low, freedom is almost always attainable and available for you. But how low are you willing to push your ego?

Some people said ego is align with the numbers you have, but I disagree with that. Ego has nothing to do with numbers and money. It has to do with self-value only. No matter how small or big the number you have, if your self-value is on minus, you will never have a taste of freedom, at all.

Ironically, the price of everything is actually for us to determine, yet we and we alone, are the ones who made it so unattainable for us.

Self note.

#life #honesty #thoughts #freedom

Little did I know, I wasn't at peace with myself at that time. I felt lost, depressed, and I haven't understood the grief that I had, yet.

I put myself on their mercy, that I need someone to make me feel at peace with whoever I was and wasn't. That I need to feel belong and complete.

It took few years for me to finally be able to get a grip of my own self. To understand myself, to manage my emotions, and to stand firmly on my ground again.

It took few strangers and friends to be in and out of my life, for me to be able to see, the kind of life that I actually want now.

The life before the emotional hurricane was a life that designed for me. It was a projection of what I've learnt from the people and society around me.

Yet, the life after the hurricane is solely mine. I built myself from the ground, I planned and took each and every decision by myself. I ignore the social standard and arranged my very own standard of life.

And at that moment I know I do need to be challenged to grow. I need to not be accepted the way I am. I need changes. I need to achieve the things that are important to me. I need to see myself, the people around me, and my surrounding to grow.

And none of that could be achieved by just being the same person as I was, and doing the same things that I did. No change and grow could happen from something that stays the same from time to time.

I learnt that it doesn't even matter; to be accepted and understood by others. What really matters is for me to understand and accept my situations, no matter at what chapter I currently am, and how messed up my situation could be, and to always know that I am working on myself.

#thoughts #life

With stress, we usually already know what the problem was. We just don't know how to deal or to find the solution yet. What causes stress, mostly are things that we can't control. A solid problem.

But with fear, we usually haven't even got any problem yet. Everything mostly are still vague and based on our assumptions of the past, or the small information that we gathered. Nothing solid. It causes us discomforts, and most of us dislike that, so we tend to avoid that feeling.

That's why the first reaction that we had when facing fear, was to avoid it. While with stress, what we did was pushing ourselves to find the solution to control it.

The difference between the reaction that we give between the two of them was only about; how solid the problem is.

I'm not saying that any of them is a better state than the other. What I wanna say is, do acknowledge that fear is a sign of the lack of solid problem. So, instead of avoiding it, we actually should explore it.

Why do I feel it? What is that fear about? What are the possibilities and what I can do about it? What options do I have towards those possibilities?

I used to have many fears, I actually still have some now. But instead of avoiding them, I sit and make a list of what and how will I deal with them all.

I used to fear of how if my income would not be enough to support my life? But then I learnt about alternative lifestyle, sustainable lifestyle, earthship, sustainable home, nomad living, hydroponic garden, minimalism, and many more, that I know, I have so many options before I would die of not being able to survive or to support myself.

That, without mentioning that I know a lot of ways to actually create income, and the fact that I have many skills in my belt that I should be able to use to support my life.

And after all of the knowledges and options that I got, it was time to let myself experience a bit of how to face those fears in real. That's when I decided to be a minimalist, and slowly shrinking and clearing my lifestyle into one that I see fit.

I learnt about hydroponic garden, learnt how to drill the walls and build up furnitures, moved from a three story house to a studio apartment in two years, with less and less items. I tried nomad living for four months in Bali. I keep testing myself to see my bottom line, but until now, I haven't even seen it yet lol. My life is still so much (even much more) enjoyable with less things that I have, than when I started this. And it eliminates almost all of my fears about surviving life in general.

Will I be able to live alone? Will I be able to live anywhere, anyhow, anyway? Will I know how to do business? And so many more of fears that I used to have, being eliminated one by one this way; just by listing them, made them solid, then face them one by one with the options I have.

I found that almost every (if not all) fear that I have, always have the solution to be applied. For me, it is much harder to deal with stress, since most of the stress comes from things that I can't control, no matter how good my solution is.

With fears, at least I know that they all are in my control and I have the power to overcome them.

A reminder to myself from last year, and still valid till now.

#life #honesty #thoughts #fears

But boy, how I hate small joy and small happiness, nor that I have the patience to play the small games. I'd rather tackle the biggest problem, kill the annoyance, and get what I deserve.

Fuck small happiness. I want the epic shit.

. . .

#life #honesty #thoughts

To me, it is more about how deep the impression or memories that one left me with. Sometimes a single line, a sincere smile, or a glance of warmness, feels deeper to me than an hour of casual talk.

I met her around three weeks ago. It was the second time I noticed her small satay barrow on the corner of the street. I decided to pull over and ordered a plate of chicken satay and lontong. She helped her husband to prepare the satay, they both are pretty old actually, around 50s to 60s I think. And since then, I've been visiting them every week, sometimes twice a week, just to have their satay.

I went there today, only to found them nowhere. The other seller told me that the lady passed away this morning.

I never really talked much with them, actually. Just casual talks when they brought my orders. But she always smiled so warmly and made me feel at home.

I honestly don't even know why I feel this way; slightly sad and heavy on my chest.

I guess, we all affect and give impact to everyone that life made us encounter with, no matter how short it was, somehow, some ways.

And maybe what matters in life is never about the distance, nor the time.

#life #honesty #thoughts #memories

That it left only one question; why did we even listen to the song in the beginning?

We were there because we were lonely. We were dying to find just one soul to talk and share everything honestly with. One soul that could understand, don't judge, and we feel at ease to be with, no matter how far the distance was, in real.

One soul to whom we could rest a little part of ourselves to. One that could make the complicated world makes sense a little bit, and will stay even when there is nothing left to be shared anymore. One that we share the love with, without the needs to define it.

But then, after we have found each other, all we did was just pushing each other away, trying to make ourselves believe that we are better without each other. We stubbornly believe that we could only do our own way, that we don't want what we have.

We hold on tightly to our fears, refuse to let go or change, and would rather to lose each other than to lose our comfort zone.

We forget about that night, when we were lonely and dying just to find one soul, and that one soul actually responded and stayed.

How complicated we, human, are. Or maybe, it's just love doesn't conquer all.

#life #honesty #thoughts #strangers #soulmates #love #lonely