I Feel

Well hello hello. Another piece of writing within ``a day''. Unexpected, ain't it?

I feel. That's something that I can say unequivocally now. I think I have much more empathy now than I have had a long time ago.

Or rather, I have relearnt how it is to have great empathy once again, having had that burnt out of me some twenty-two years ago when I was in a bad place.

But before I go all nostalgia, allow me to share the triggering event for this piece of writing. I finally got to meet up with some more church folk (while respecting the safe distancing rules!), and what some of them were experiencing hit me in ways that I would never have thought to be possible. I understood what she meant when she said that despite the advancedness of her cancer, she was ready to let the Lord lead the way. I understood that feeling of peace, a type of hopefulness in spite of the apparent hopelessness.

And I looked at my pissant nearly self-inflicted reactions to the most recently failed relationship, and I feel pathetic. I'm not in a life and death circumstance, despite how my heart feels---at least I know that tomorrow will not be snatched away from me as readily as in her case. Yet she wasn't going all ``woe be to me'' and being depressed about it---she trusted in the Lord to lead her along the way, and to carry her burdens. This is not to say that my feelings are invalid---it's just that it is important that I put things into perspective.

To be fair, I am and have been putting things into perspective. So yes, I do have some aspects of suicidal ideation, but they remain only as intrusive thoughts that will not be acted upon, because despite all the pangs of sadness that hit me, a deeper part of me knows that there is light ahead, that it is not the end, that it is merely an end.

It is rather hard to explain this, but if you are reading all the recent entries and feeling rather alarmed about it all, please don't be. I really am in a safe place, physically, mentally, and spiritually.

I found my rock, and will be fine. There's a time for everything, after all, and the Lord knows when it is the best time for certain things for me.

Like how today was the right day to be hearing her story and testimony, despite me having not known her before today, and really not contributing much to the conversation, and she being all apologetic about it all.

I see today as the start of a new set of relationships that I will be making with a group of people whom I am going to be living with for the rest of my life, and in many ways, I am looking forward to it. In many ways, my life has gone rather stagnant, and there are certain aspects of it that can be improved through this newer direction.

Okay, present-ness aside, time to tell a story about the Bad Old Days where I had my empathy burned the heck out of me.

When I was young (think younger than twelve years old), I used to be a much more empathetic person. Yes, I was still a nerd (you can't get rid of the nerdiness), but I was happy to help people, or in the Christian context, to serve. But when I reached my teens and was in secondary school, the change of environment was drastic. You see, I was from a neighbourhood primary school, where everyone was mostly just trying to do their thing---yes, we tried not to fail our examinations and what-not, but it wasn't a place that practised any form of elitism because there was simply no reason to. Secondary school was different, for one it was a ``prestigious school'' (no irony, it is really among the top ranked secondary schools of the day), and for two it was something akin to the ``aristocratic Chinese school''. I'm calling it ``aristocratic Chinese school'' only because the feeder schools to the place were largely elite primary schools (whatever that means), and those who ended up there had their established cliques as a result. And they were of the stereotypical conservative Chinese mentality---clannish to a fault, and never tolerating anything that isn't conforming.

For a neighbourhood primary school kid, who didn't buy into clannish behaviour, it was a culture shock. It didn't help that I had bad skin. But anyway, along the way, all these ``beat downs'' from the culture made it such that by the time I was done with secondary school, the last thing I wanted to be doing was to help people without any expectation of returns, i.e. out went the altruism that I had back in the day. One incident that stood out really strongly in my mind was one afternoon when I heard that a classmate didn't have enough money to take the bus, and I ran down a slope to pass him some that I had, but didn't stop in time, smashing my forearm against the metal railing, thus fracturing it. Said classmate didn't even thank me, and he didn't even cared that I fractured my arm.

I took the bus to the hospital on my own to have it looked at and placed in a cast.

I don't think I'm bitter now. It's just a story about the time when I started to learn about how the world works. It was just one story out of a slow increase of many, and it slowly became something that just gnawed at me for so long that I developed a new perspective---to be ``an equal opportunity hater of people in general'' because people, as a whole, are dicks.

To be fair, it is not that I didn't learn how to feel. I did learn how to feel---it can be seen through my steady improvement in how I interpreted music as I was playing on my 笛子---it's just that along the way, I learnt how to just repress the general empathetic feeling I had. Because it was something that people would take one to be a sucker for and just abuse the crap out of it.

The astute reader might be asking me now, why bring this up now?

Because one of the cutting reasons on why she chose to broke up with me was the apparent dissimilarity of values, as claimed by a third party, and as acknowledged by her as one of the reasons to let it all go. I could feel anger at the third party for causing a schism, unintentionally perhaps, I could also feel maligned that she didn't even try to see that I was finding some middle ground to work things out with her, but I'm not going to.

Because it isn't productive. I cannot change how they thought/think, and how they felt/feel. But I can change how I react to things, since I am in control of my own emotions.

At the risk of sounding vindictive, let them say and believe what they want. I just want to move on and not look back at the things that made me feel all sorts of bad. Everyone makes mistakes---it is not my place to judge them. God will sort it all out at the end, not me.

It's cathartic to just write these down here. Anyway, that's all for now.

Till the next update.