In transition

Beyond

I was born into Christianity, but the Universe keeps telling me to move beyond it, closer to real God.

God is everywhere, even in the secular world.

Breakthrough

Ever since I can call, it’s always been like that.

A lonely life driven by guilt- guilt from mistakes, guilt from possible failings, guilt from not being the person she wanted me to be, guilt from not being who I should be, guilt from being imperfect, guilt from doing good only temporarily…and sadly the list goes on and on.

One might wonder, just what leads you to feel such immense amount of guilt? For what, for whom and for what end?  As strange as this sounds, I don’t know.  Maybe it was during a time when I was too new to fully comprehend what I was capable of and incapable of doing and feeling; a time so fragile yet invaluable, a time when life was a faint outline of incomprehensible matters and events, when consciousness was so translucent that it wrapped itself around anything and everything you threw her way.

Now I realize it wasn’t you, but your pain.  You were so sick and broken that you didn’t know how to connect- and without connection, our hearts have nowhere to go but to slowly wither away and die. Looking back, all this have either been told or acted upon in one way or another. Poor you, poor me. Who can ever say stories and memories are inferior to present, that memories have no place to reside in tomorrow…

It doesn’t matter. Now, it really doesn’t matter.  A child never forgives or forgets but simply learns to deal with it in the best way she knows how. Who can blame her? Who shall ever blame her?

I’ve played both roles, it’s now time to make a choice. I can either stay in the battle not knowing I’m too weak to win in the first place or pave another road and move on. You should’ve paved another road before getting lost too deep.  You smile because it’s now my turn to find another road, right?

But there’s a difference, between you and me. I’m not broken like you, which means I’m strong enough to win the battle.

Only connect

This is my family.

As much as I cry out about my sacrificial duties, these are the three people in my life who remind me everyday that life is worth living. They keep me grounded on earth despite my hidden desires to fly away and disappear into the thin air.

Only connect…

I can’t be exactly sure what connection meant for E.M Forster but for me, the most important connection is between my fascade and desire.

As I pressed the shutter to capture this moment, my heart was aching to fly away into the pale distance.

RIP J.D. Salinger

Trying to write a teaching philosophy after years of changing dirty diapers is no easy task. I’m forced to jump from theory to tantrum, from philosophical inquiry to two-minute time outs.

Both teaching and writing are like going to the gym. They require a significant amount of patience and efforts to gain momentum, just to get right back to where you left off-right before you gave it up to live for someone else.

I don’t have a problem with sacrificing my dreams for my family. But my body and energy slowly deteriorate as my brain remains idle. And let’s not even get started about the stiff neck, the achy shoulders. Thank God my husband was just prescribed vicodin.

My daughter is crying out for me in her sleep, it’s 1:36 in the morning. She’s been acting out, throwing horrible tantrums in ways I’ve never seen before. My maternal instincts tell me this is her little way of telling me how sad she was that I left last weekend and that she missed me painfully.

So how exactly do I tell her I can’t wait to leave this life, that I want to go back to pursuing my selfish dreams? As a mom I probably never can. But as a woman, I must.

One day I must.

I think too much, therefore I am.

When do I become truly ME? When do I stop playing the role of a daughter, wife, mother, sister and friend and start being just ME? Nowadays, the answer seems to be never. At this point, someone always tells me that I ‘think too much.’ So at what point does a healthy dose of thinking become ‘too much’? Just like Descartes, ‘I think therefore I am.’ Maybe for me, it’s more like ‘I think too much, therefore I am.’ Whatever. It doesn’t matter. I’ve always been an introverted wanna-be philosopher/thinker/writer pretending to be a happy-go-lucky extrovert.

Ok. So I’m a little weird. I like to read things that people usually hate, like Derrida. And I think Aristotle is totally overrated. There. I FINALLY said it. and now I feel a thousand times lighter. So I’m still in the process of finding myself. I’ve sketched several versions of blueprints until now, delineating what I want to do and have accomplished by the time I’m 30, 40, then 60, but like everything else in the world, none of these so-called plans are set in stone- especially since past years have been filled with detours and roadblocks than anything else. Of course, this is not to say that I lived long enough to truly understand and be prepared for life. All I know at this point is that life is difficult, has a mind and plan of its own, and that one minute it can be our friend and next, our worst enemy. So knowing the frailty of human nature, the limits of our knowledge and reason, it’s difficult to complain to anyone, really. Who am I to blame when everything I’ve worked for in the past 20-something years turns out to hold much less significance then I had hoped –when it was I who made these choices and I who came up with the original draft thinking life’s plan coincides with my own?

This is how a medical intern must feel when he realizes only after 10+ years of schooling (along with thousands of dollars in debt) that he’s in the wrong field. Or a successful female executive who, after years of hard work and dedication, gets replaced by another male colleague when she FINALLY decides to have a child and takes the long dreaded maternity leave. As I wake up every morning to dedicate another day to my children, I can’t help but to wonder where my dream will lie when it’s time for me to leave this role.

When that day comes, what will remain? Would it be fragments of my childhood dreams or something entirely different?

Love Affair with Jean Rhys (Part I)

I recently came across an old copy of Jean Rhys: The Complete Novels on Amazon.com and couldn’t resist purchasing it. It arrived today in good condition and I’m so excited to start reading it.   Well, perhaps ecstatic is a better word because her raw language and brutally honest observations do something funny to me, like imagining her as my distant lover. I connect with her on a level that I never knew existed in a profound and very female way.  She brings me pleasure that no male language can bring, and embraces my soul like no man ever can. I’ve read countless books in my lifetime and no one can touch and move my soul the way Jean Rhys does. If Virginia Woolf can be considered as the Mother of English modern sensibility, Jean Rhys is like her broken child who gleams so brightly despite her madness.

This book contains four novels: Voyage in the Dark, Quartet, After Leaving Mr. Mackenzie, Good Morning, Midnight and Wide Sargasso Sea. Its funny, because I’m so excited to jump into the reading, yet a part of me wishes to keep this book in my hands forever, just anticipating and imagining all the beauty, darkness and passionate chaos it contains.

If I can be born again in any place at any time, I’d choose to be born at the turn of 20th century in England, just so I can relive the passion, pain and madness of this troubled, yet beautiful era.

I usually like my things brand new (comes from my OCD inclinations), but this gently used book is surprisingly nice to have. It has a distant smell that is so intriguing and comforting that I can’t stop sniffing its pages.

Intermission

I’ve been out of writing juices for some time now. 

I guess a part of me was deprived but another part of me was frantically running towards that next goal. In the end, I just wish my internal and external desires weren’t so paradoxical so I can obtain some peace and balance in my life.

I’m done with the easier half of my objectives. My dream hovers above faintly enabling me to vaguely observe, but all I can do is look down and let out a timid sigh.

Yet, tomorrow is another day.

Tomorrow, I will begin another journey into the interior castle- wherever that may be.