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Tuesday, July 26, 2011
I'm tired, so so tired. Why can't I get anything right? Why am I never able to get anything right, by myself, with myself, for myself?
I can't help but think I've become horribly retarded over the years. There's got to be a problem when you stare at a math question and your brain just won't BUDGE no matter how much you will it to; it's like walking in a quagmire and every step you take sinks into the mush and pulls you down, and time ticks away, and the remaining questions in the paper stare at you blankly, oppressively, imposing their aching incompletion upon you, until you feel like you're about to lose your mind. And you sink further, further and further, and no one but yourself laughs hauntingly at you. What IS the problem? What IS my problem??
I didn't come into this school as the brightest kid, I was pretty much below average when I started off at a mere one mark above the aggregate score. I ask myself many times, so many times, what the hell am I doing here? The moment I came here the only thing I did for myself was to have my parents' expectations raised and my own confidence and self-respect thrown to the floor in rags and stamped upon. Now I don't even know who I am anymore. What I'm good at, what I'm born to do, what I wish to achieve. It's all gone, like someone had blown it away while I wasn't looking, like blowing off a candle flame, blowing away my life.
I hate typing "I". It's such a shame, such a despairing thing, to be me.
I've given up on using the rubber bands. Even if I deliver the pain with the excuse of punishing myself, what I'm doing in the end is just relieving stress and nothing good comes out of it. I'm just giving myself a chance to evade like the coward I am. And yet I crave it, I feel as if somehow that stinging pain has become a float of sorts that can carry me back up to the surface when I'm about to drown; short, sharp stinging pain, better and more refreshing than the dull lifeless and timeless throb when you remain under the surface for too long and lose the will to breathe. But I'm too much of a coward to use a knife anyways. I wonder how those people do it...maybe I will too, one day, when my condition continues and I can no longer hold it anymore. It's just a matter of time.
I hate myself. Now I'm scared of people too, because they won't care, they are so faraway even under the pretense of being near. They give you fake smiles and fake hugs and those are to deal with obligations and expectations. Nothing you get is real...they're all a means of dealing with things! These people laugh, they laugh because they don't care, they laugh because inside they're all poor souls who are too desperate to belong that they laugh all the same! I hate myself, I hate being in this fucking crowd of entities wearing masks. I can't wait to get away from people now. I eat lunches alone, watching them fool around, watching their blissful countenances, all the while listening to Linkin Park's "Numb" in my head like some kind of haunting background music - because that's the way it is, isn't it? We all know of a sorrow within, but we numb it, we're numbed by it.
There must be something wrong with me. I don't get just what the problem is, because sometimes I can be social, sometimes I just withdraw away from people altogether. I don't fucking get it because I'm neither here nor there; I'm neither autistic nor social and outgoing, and it sticks me in this hard position that makes me deal with expectations from both sides.
Why can't I just be who I am, whether I hate it or not? If I hate being myself already, why do you want to make me hate myself more by allowing myself to be changed by others??
Saturday, July 23, 2011
The poor. Such an encompassing word, not just implying monetary concerns, but is rather a category of all deficits in all aspects. I was just walking along the road back home sometime ago and while I was waiting by the traffic lights, I had the chance to observe a particular Chinese lady whom I often see by the MRT station, settled in a makeshift chair with a brown worn-down wooden box, a set of loudspeakers and a microphone in her hand as she sang songs that hopefully appeal to the masses that pass her by. She was a blind street artist. Occasionally her voice would quiver a little, the kind of quiver that renders you unable to tell if she was really tired or really absorbed in the song. And once in a while, she would reach out, tentatively yet with a little bit of desperation and a little bit of fear, and run her fingers across the wooden box, just to check, just to check...if it was still there.
There was a sour feeling that travelled up the bridge of my nose at this point. I wonder if others in that crowd milling around me felt the same, if they saw it at all, or whether it was just me being over-sensitive again. I felt this strange horrible sadness like a pain that isn't quite there but still exists all the same, a pain that isn't quite mine but still exists because it belongs to some other existence. Now if my friends were to know they'd probably tell me to stop being so sensitive, or in worst cases hypocritically pretentious. But I really did feel it. The way she was so hesitant yet anxious to ensure that all her hard-earned money was still there...to think that anyone would even be so heartless as to steal it. Isn't it such a miserable, miserable thing?
Az is right about what she said you know, her implication that if I start caring unduly I'd become bothered by things that the people in question don't even feel themselves. In other words, caring about things that aren't there, worrying about things that haven't come, sympathising with people who probably didn't want or didn't care about sympathy. Yet something in me always makes me care too much. It's like a voice inside my head, or perhaps outside, whose owner I do not know but which compels me to feel things beyond my own plane of emotions, and I follow it dutifully and experience these new, strange emotions that flood into me at specific times. It's as if there's a floodgate on the watershed between the outer world and my own sanctuary, and that floodgate opens and everything flows...and then it would close again, and things would be back to normal.
I no longer care so fervently about things like "empaths" and other spiritual connotations as much as I used to when I was small. At the end of the day, what good will these names do? What good does knowing that you're an empath do? What good does categorising things do? If you truly are an empath, you will set out doing what you need to do; things will come to you and you will receive things as you were meant to anyway, and if you are a true empath, things will still be the same whether you know your identity or not. The self exists without the need for specific knowledge of what the self constitutes. Regardless of how fruitless philosophical discussions about Personal Identity may have been through the millenia, haven't we still existed, as a whole, as one human race, as ourselves and all by ourselves?
It is perhaps this very indefinition of Self that paves the way to the final stage of universal consciousness. Well, let's not use such a melodramatic word; Awareness as a whole would do. Awareness of the self as something that constitutes individuality in unity, diversity in collectiveness, the overall knowledge of existence that presides in every being, everything, every building block of the world as we see it. Imagine if one day we find the definite answer to self, be it Soul Theory, Body Theory, Memory Theory, or Illusion Theory, say, Soul Theory, and we would suddenly become worlds apart due to a strong sense of possession over this thing that belongs solely to us and constitutes us as individuals. Let's say Body Theory, which would serve to pronounce prejudices even more, or Memory Theory, which doesn't quite work in the first place because of existing controversies like Amnesia. But if it were to work, we'd all be separated by our pasts and things would be carved into stone without the lubricative indefinition of the future. That isn't quite good considering how most of the earthly conflicts are with regards to disparities that carried on from history: religion and faith, race and ethnicity, hierarchies after hierarchies of social classes and categories...things that push us apart, separate us further and further, until we can no longer perceive the others but rather as annoying black blotches against our horizons.
The Illusion Theory is a little more unique, in the sense that it advocates a lack of Self, claiming that everything you think constitutes the self is an illusion. But there is a self. There is a self, just universal, one that encompasses all disaparities and differences to make a whole. And to gain knowledge of this Self is to change our perspective from a microscopic observation of human conditions to a telescopic acknowledgement of the big picture: existence, existence in itself, existence that is One and All at the same time. When Man finally achieves this one day, he will review his turbulent past and laugh amusedly as he would at a child's play, because he will realise just how easy it would have been to end conflicts if only he saw, earlier, that there was no point battling with himself.
Widely explored ideas such as National Pride and Cultural Identity, whether you realise it or not, are little steps to the wider consciousness. They are in a way little "Selves", miniature models of the final big united individual which in these immature stages only pertain to particular groups of people. It's the rush of collective support while watching your school compete in a national tournament. It is the united exhuberance you feel on National Day when colours of the country's flag in the wind remind you of how long you've all come.
And most definitely, it is that little twinge of pride and joy the 20th century's population experienced as it huddled around TVs and watched the video of Armstrong's landing on the moon, for as much as he was the first of mankind to step beyond home, in that split second, he was also Man as a whole himself.
Now as I think of that poor lady by the MRT Station, I think it's alright after all to feel the sadness, whether she wishes me to feel it, be it pretentious or not. She is after all not just my sister but also a part of me. She is myself.
***~~~*Played with the winds at 12.36pm*~~~
Saturday, July 16, 2011
I've been reminiscing a lot lately, one of those little things one likes to do with the mind when it is not preoccupied with worldly affairs. When you stop thinking, your mind seems to open up to a whole new world of imagery, sounds, smells, tastes, stranger senses even, that don't exist in reality; the impossible comes when reality stands by, because when the hard facts are pushed aside, we suddenly realise that the impossible is also a possibility. You chance upon new things that will lead you to greater discoveries.
In my case, I've been lounging a lot along the lane of memory. Things small and big, loud and soft, bright and dull, all forms of comparisons you can think of...they would somehow fish out little pieces of my past whose existence I had sometimes forgotten. I would see a woman playing a harmonica and remember my childhood self being fascinated with the creation of a new timbre. I would see falling leaves and see an autumn I may have lived through but never remembered. I would buy soyabean ice-cream and taste that nostalgic twinge of China's yam ice-cream I used to eat with my friend when I was three, and along with it all those sweet memories of a faraway childhood, which now flows back like an exhuberant child running up the lane with a bundle of colourful balloons as if flying a kite. My child self proudly presents to me its experiences and wishes me to acknowledge them. Is it strange, then, if I say that when I look at that little beamy child self, I suddenly feel very much like a mother?
I have grown, and I now take care of my past self as if its a child in need of nurturing. It's ironic how the past seems fragile somehow, even though it's pretty much the only thing that's set in stone; when I behold my past self, what I see is a glass being, something that needs recognition, needs acknowledgement, or it would shatter, lie upon the ground in pieces and cease to exist. Sometimes I wish to walk to the future and never look back. The past is a painful thing, because even the happiness is never purely happy - it is tinged bittersweet. And yet, when I try to turn my back upon that fragile small child with those fanciful balloons, I see misery upon its face, a kind of heart-wrenching disappointment at having been rejected and deemed unworthy. My motherly instincts would take over, not quite fully, but still sufficient to keep me in check. I would remain where I was, watching it, our gazes interlocking as if each trying to explore the other's intentions and feelings that lie underneath that face.
Yet, yet, I can't tell just what that child is feeling.
When I enter a reverie of reminiscence, I hear the child speak, and let it speak as I take a seat and listen to that voice of innocence I have grown detached from over the years. It's not a sweet voice, nothing like honeysuckle or lollipop or strawberry jam and sugar. Yet it reminds me of all those sweet things I've missed: purple yam ice-cream at Chinese street stalls, fruit popsicles from my friend's fridge, large watery peaches and fresh watermelons in summer, white-rabbit milk candies, or those small bottles of yoghurt drinks whose name I never knew but didn't care anyway. These were icons of my childhood. They have the value of nostalgia, and the memories themselves make them sweeter, because they are no longer here. And as I listen to my own story, I watch my life flash past me, those little snippets that I subconsciously treasured close to myself. As much as I grew to dislike China in many aspects now, I guess it still has a place in my life which I can never bear to fill with something else.
Halcyon Days
I've always wished there was winter in the country I live, winter makes a lot of things very precious. The sun is warmer because of the cold, trees greener because of the white, shapes clearer because of the fogginess of everything else. Winter reminds us that you don't necessarily have to obtain better to enjoy more, you just have to unearth their true value.
Perhaps my childhood was like Seiran in this picture, and when I drew him, I might have been drawing my child self in a different body. I was never a very sociable kid; I lulled myself to sleep by telling myself little bedtime stories, observed rocks and pebbles when my family brought me to famous landmarks, climbed trees to catch cats, conquered the highest spots in the playground, and fooled under pine trees to pluck golden amber. I didn't have a lot of friends, but I had really good ones whose company I sincerely enjoy. I didn't love sports but fell in love with the art of creation. In those days, I was able to appreciate beauty for what it truly is, not what it's stipulated to be.
Maybe that's why I can't feel what my past self is feeling when we observe each other. I'm gazing at all the things I've lost, standing there, waiting to be retrieved, or to retrieve me.
***~~~*Played with the winds at 1.31pm*~~~
Thursday, July 7, 2011
I'm a failure. I've always been, haven't I? I screw up in everything I do, not just almost, but everything, because I just can't find one thing I did with which people weren't disappointed. Everyone's disappointed in me. My parents have long since had hearts for better and more honourable children, and my teachers have never had faith in me...or at least whatever faith they may have used to have in me is now gone.
I feel betrayed, but I think what really betrayed myself is me. I'm the traitor all this while. I haven't been able to fulfill that unspoken promise to myself to be as good as possible, even if it's to meet others' expectations, because most of the time they can be my own too. I failed others, I failed myself. There's nothing more hated in the world than useless people who leech off the meagre resources only to produce nothing in return. I don't deserve half the love I'm given, and because I don't deserve it, I don't feel it.
But I want to be loved. I wish so vehemently for that day when I can finally be embraced without being told what I have to do just so I can deserve that embrace. And yet I cringe away when people embrace me, not because I'm particularly uncomfortable with intimate contact, but rather because I didn't do anything to deserve them. My mind screams, "why are they being so nice to me? Why are they loving me? Can't they see that I can't give them anything in return?" when my heart screams, "love me, love me, love me, love me, and don't ever abandon me!" I'm so confused, you know. I wasn't born to be accustomed to two separate voices in my head, each distinct in tone and eager to make their presence and intentions known. I hate them. I hate them so much.
I hate myself.
When I was painting my coursework today, there was a moment when I thought I had finally lost it. It was something akin to the yellow wallpaper...all those menacing faces, they started laughing at me, they were mocking at my frustration while I desperately tried to fill up those omnipresent white spaces that signify uncompletion. They're teasing me, all of them! They hate me, I hate them, they hate themselves, I hate myself, just who are we teasing and what for?! The world, the world, it hates me doesn't it? I don't know what I'm doing but they do. And they're laughing at me for it, for my oblivion, for thinking that they are the ones being blind, when I myself am the one who's blind!
I'm painting my own failure. Those words sound so final and yet so befitting. I felt so betrayed when he told me that I won't be able to submit for UOB - I'm sure he doesn't have negative intentions, but it hurts so much all the same, my whole heart just crumpled like someone crushed a piece of paper between his palms. I'm not good enough. I'm goddamn not good enough, regardless of how hard I tried, how many months I toiled, how many worrying nights I've spent in bed, how many tears I've shed, at the end of the day I've still failed just like with all other things. But I'm not pissed at him for saying that. He's just stating the truth, he's a nice guy even if brutally honest. I'm the one who's trying to deceive myself. I'm the one who's trying to tell myself that hey, I can actually be good enough, that there really is a place in this world if I tried. There isn't.
Those glorious days that used to be are now history. They feel like a distant life I've lived, perhaps not even my own...they've become so alien ever since I became this wretched new person. I don't even know what happened, how it happened, but something seems to be eating away inside me and I know that my remaining days with sanity are most likely numbered. I felt so desperate and disorientated in Art Club today. All the voices, all the happiness; they worked hard, they worked hard and they deserved what they got. Voices. Voices. Teasing me, teasing me, laughing, crying...anger, anger, sadness, joy, misery and pain...I'm listening, I'm listening...there's no need to repeat. I get the point. There's no need to repeat, there really isn't!!
I'm too tired to call for help now. What a coward I am anyway. I shall give myself what I truly deserve and attempt to get back on track in a few days. Even if the remaining journey is going to be a failure, because nobody will show me a way out.
***~~~*Played with the winds at 7.50pm*~~~
Thanks to all the blogs the designer referred to (countless) for html code help :) (esp. cyn' and sixseven)
Adobe Photoshop Elements for supernatural abilities
