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Tuesday, July 31, 2012
Sometimes I wish I still retained half the apathy I had earlier in the year, because I realised that I've indeed become too dependent on people over the past few months; I'm too used to having their presence in my vicinity, too used to having someone to turn to whenever I'm down and in need of human comfort...too used to being distracted and capable of forgetting myself anytime in the day. Well, a large part of myself that is. Not too long ago I've finally come to the dismal conclusion that I can't live with myself at all, and I'm tired...I'm just so tired nowadays, and I don't have a clue as to the reason for this crippling mental fatigue. There seems to be a rather disconcerting lack of interest in past passions (though I really hope that they're merely lying dormant somewhere) and an inability to do what I used to love - not art, not lit, not playing the piano or writing stories or taking strolls at night or letting myself get carried away by the adrenaline of gaming. My academics are crashing all around me. My friendships and relations are confusing me. My family is suffocating me. Worse still is the fact that I have begun to rapidly lose touch with my alternate realities and spiritual connections, the invisible reserves of faith and mystery that had once propelled me to find meaning in even the most insignificant of things.
Now, all of a sudden, I can't seem to feel them anymore.
Where are they? Where are all those things I used to love? Where have they gone, where am I now, and just who have I become?
Sometimes I feel as if I'm barely keeping myself above the surface, because now that I've regained the ability to truly care for others and love someone, I'm making myself extremely vulnerable by accepting these external ties and in the interim opening my heart to the rawest of brutalities. It drains me to care, but I want to - need to, because it's the last thing I can cling unto before I lose myself completely in the fracas of my own self-induced crises. Being able to say "I love you" is one of the strongest reassurances I've ever had; it lifts me from the deepest of ditches I've thrown myself into, and in those moments I'd feel as if my existence is just a little worthy because of what I'm able and willing to give.
I need you. I need to love you.
And that's why I can never...never stop being hurt.
***
~~~*Left with the Winds at 8.09pm*~~~
Monday, July 30, 2012
...it's not sad, just a little saddening.
Anyway, I've been feeling rather sick the whole day and now I've got a mild headache and a bit of a temperature, and yet I can't bring myself to rest because there's just so much shit to clear in my backlog. I'm tired, so...so tired. Nowadays whenever I look at the great expanse of unlived years rolling out before my eyes, I feel this immense, crushing pressure and for a good while it becomes inexplicably hard to breathe, during which I'd find myself wishing fervently that I could just dissipate into blissful nothingness. No need to live or die or love or hate. No need to care. No need to be cared for, either, or be loved.
Just a little...nothing. Yeah. That'd be nice.
***
~~~*Left with the Winds at 9.08pm*~~~
Thursday, July 26, 2012
'If you are going to have a myth of New Being, then ... you have to use this myth as a call to the highest and most difficult effort - and not to simple joy. A creative myth is not simply a relapse into comfortable illusion; it has to be as bold as possible in order to be truly generative.'
- The Denial of Death: What is the Heroic Individual? - The Limits of Human Nature (P 278 - 279)
' ... man has to have the "courage to be" himself, to stand on his own feet, to face up to the eternal contradictions of the real world. The bold goal of this kind of courage is to absorb into one's own being the maximum amount of nonbeing. As a being, as an extension of all of Being, man has an organismic impulsion: to take into his own organization the maximum amount of the problematic of life. His daily life, then, becomes truly a duty of cosmic proportions, and his courage to face the anxiety of meaninglessness becomes a true cosmic heroism. No longer does one do as God wills, set over against some imaginary figure in heaven. Rather, in one's own person he tries to achieve what the creative powers of emergent Being have themselves so far achieved with lower forms of life: the overcoming of that which would negate life. The problem of meaninglessness is the form in which nonbeing poses itself in our time ... the task of conscious beings at the height of their evolutionary destiny is to meet and vanquish this new emergent obstacle to sentient life. In this kind of ontology of immanence of the New Being, what we are describing is not a creature who is transformed and who transforms the world in turn in some miraculous ways, but rather a creature who takes more of the world into himself and develops new forms of courage and endurance.'
- The Denial of Death: What is the Heroic Individual? - The Limits of Human Nature (P 279)
' ... mystical experience seems to be near to perfect faith but is not. Mysticism lacks precisely the element of skepticism, and skepticism is a more radical experience, a more manly confrontation of potential meaninglessness. Even more, we must not forget that much of the time, mysticism as popularly practised is fused with a sense of magical omnipotence: it is actually a manic defense and a denial of creatureliness.'
- The Denial of Death: What is the Heroic Individual? - The Limits of Human Nature (P 280)
'Even with numerous groups of really liberated people, at their best, we can't imagine that the world will be any pleasanter or less tragic a place. It may even be worse in still unknown ways. ... New Being, under the conditions and limitations of existence, will only bring into play new and sharper paradoxes, new tensions, and more painful disharmonies - a "more intense demonism". Reality is remorseless because gods do not walk upon the earth; and if men could become noble repositories of great gulfs of nonbeing, they would have even less peace than we oblivious and driven madmen have today.'
- The Denial of Death: What is the Heroic Individual? - The Limits of Human Nature (P 281)
'The problem with all the scientific manipulators is that somehow they don't take life seriously enough ... taking life seriously means something such as this: that whatever man does on this planet has to be done in the lived truth of the terror of creation, of the grotesque, of the rumble of panic underneath everything. Otherwise it is false. Whatever is achieved must be achieved from within the subjective energies of creatures, without deadening, with the full exercise of passion, of vision, of pain, of fear, and of Sorrow. How do we know ... that our part of the meaning of the universe might not be a rhythm in sorrow? Manipulative, utopian science, by deadening human sensitivity, would also deprive men of the heroic in their urge to victory. And we know that in some very important way this falsifies our struggle by emptying us, by preventing us from incorporating the maximum of experience. It means the end of the distinctively human - or even, we must say, the distinctively organismic.'
- The Denial of Death: What is the Heroic Individual? - The Fusion of Science and Religion (P 284)
I finished the book. Yay.
***
~~~Left with the Winds at 8.45pm*~~~
I was reading the first couple of articles from the GP science and religion package during lunch today and there was a section on human experimentation, so I ended up - don't ask me - reading about it on the net. At first it was just casual googling and browsing through random lists and compilations of specific cases, but then it proceeded on to the Nazi experiments, North Korean camps, Unit 731 and, y'know...all that grisly crap. Wiki mentioned some related movies as well, so I watched about an hour of "Men Behind the Sun", and three clips or so from "Philosophy of the Knife".
I regretted it tremendously.
After two clips from "Philosophy of the Knife" I was already close to doubling over with the urge to puke. You see, I like to think of myself as someone who isn't easily disturbed by gore and morbidity, but this is...an...entirely new level altogether, and by that I mean a level where I would actually be vaguely aware of the tightness of my clenched fists and the cessation of my breathing for a good ten seconds. If you ever feel strangely inclined to be an utter fool like me with an almost masochistic tendency to make yourself depressed (actually that's not very hard to imagine, considering what you're doing to your knee), at the very least, DON'T watch the clip on the vivisection - that's the fucking quintessence of violence. Or the threshold of pain experiment. Or the X-Ray Radiation experiment. Come to think of it, you probably shouldn't watch a single damn thing from that movie. Now I'm absolutely scared of sleeping because all the images and sounds are whirling in my head and I can't seem to get rid of the screams even remotely well enough; it's as if I'm just waiting for them to manifest in some bloody horrific nightmare tonight, and, well I don't quite know what to do with myself as I sit here typing away, trying to make myself forget what I've read and watched even though it's most certainly a vain attempt.
This reminds me of the time I challenged myself to sit through the entire first sequence of The Human Centipede and a couple of clips from the second sequence. While kind of on par with the aforementioned movies in terms of gore, It wasn't that bad actually, probably because I knew it's perfectly fictional and I was watching events happen to individuals who don't and have never existed before (even as a representation of someone else or a particular community). Okay, maybe not the part about sewing the victims together, considering what the Nazis did to all those twins unfortunate enough to fall into their hands. But at least the plot wasn't a direct depiction of true stories and didn't bear overwhelming resemblance to historical events, and you don't have to keep thinking throughout the show about the kind of terror and pain and desperation and every single damn thing that can screw up the mind beyond any semblance of sanity. It's precisely the kind of thing I cannot stand for long, because my inclination to empathise with practically everything will most definitely kill me with the weight of the victims' experiences.
Sigh. Alright, I should go to sleep now. Let's hope I get a fairly peaceful night.
***
~~~*Left with the Winds at 1.03am*~~~
Sunday, July 22, 2012
'...pain calls the body to the forefront of experience. It puts the person back into the center of things forcefully as a feeling animal. It is thus a natural complement to sadism. Both are techniques for experiencing forceful self-feeling, now in outer-directed action, now in passive suffering. Both give intensity in the place of vagueness and emptiness. Furthermore, to experience pain is to "use" it with the possibility of controlling it and triumphing over it. ... the masochist doesn't "want" pain, he wants to be able to identify its source, localize it, and so control it. Masochism is thus a way of taking the anxiety of life and death and the overwhelming terror of existence and congealing them into a small dosage. One then experiences pain from the terrifying power and yet lives through it without experiencing the ultimate threat of annihilation and death. ... the sado-masochistic combination is the perfect formula for transmuting the fear of death. ... this is a way of taking self-administered, homeopathic doses; the ego controls total pain, total defeat, and total humiliation by experiencing them in small doses as a sort of vaccination. ... we see the fascinating ingenuity of the perversions: the turning of pain, the symbol of death, into ecstasy and the experience of more-life.'
- The Denial of Death: A General View of Mental Health - The Naturalness of Sado-Masochism (P. 247)
'...the mentally ill all have a basic problem of courage. They cannot assume responsibility for their own independent lives; they are hyper-fearful of life and death. From this vantage point the theory of mental illness is really a general theory of the failures of death-transcendence. The avoidance of life and the terror of death become enmashed in the personality to such an extent that it is crippled - unable to exercise the "normal cultural heroism" of other members of the society. The result is that the person cannot permit himself the routine heroic self-expansion nor the easy yielding to the superordinate cultural world-view that other members can. This is why he becomes a burden on others in some way. Mental illness, then, is also a way of talking about those people who burden others with their hyperfears of life and death, their own failed heroics.'
- The Denial of Death: A General View of Mental Health - Mental Illness as Failed Heroics (P. 248)
'...the depressed person is one who has embedded himself so comfortably in the powers and protection of others that he has forfeited his own life. ... the people around the depressed person have to pay for it. Guilt, self-torture, and accusations are also ways of coercing others.'
- The Denial of Death: A General View of Mental Health - Mental Illness as Failed Heroics (P. 248)
'...the problem of mental illness is one of not knowing what kind of heroics one is practising or not being able - once one does know - to broaden one's heroics from their crippling narrowness. Paradoxical as it may sound, mental illness is thus a matter of weakness and stupidity. It reflects ignorance about how one is going about satisfying his twin ontological motives. The desire to affirm oneself and to yield oneself are, after all, very neutral: we can choose any path for them, any object, any level of heroics. The suffering and the evil that stems from these motives are not a consequence of the nature of the motives themselves, but of our stupidity about satisfying them."
- The Denial of Death: A General View of Mental Health - Mental Illness as Failed Heroics (P. 251)
'...the perversions of "private religions" are not "false" in comparison to "true religions". They are simply less expansive, less humanly noble and responsible. All living organisms are condemned to perversity, to the narrowness of being mere fragments of a larger totality that overwhelms them, which they cannot understand or truly cope with - yet must still live and struggle in.'
- The Denial of Death: A General View of Mental Health - Mental Illness as Failed Heroics (P. 252)
'Each person thinks that he has the formula for triumphing over life's limitations and knows with authority what it means to be a man, and he usually tries to win a following for his particular patent. Today we know that people try so hard to win converts for their point of view because it is more than merely an outlook on life: it is an immortality formula.'
- The Denial of Death: Psychology and Religion: What is the Heroic Individual? (P. 255)
'[The knight of faith] is the man who lives in faith, who has given over the meaning of life to his Creator, and who lives centered on the energies of his Maker. He accepts whatever happens in this visible dimension without complaint, lives his life as a duty, faces his death without a qualm. No pettiness is so petty that it threatens his meanings; no task is too frightening to be beyond his courage. He is fully in the world on its terms and wholly beyond the world in his trust in the invisible dimension. It is very much the old Pietistic ideal that was lived by Kant's parents. The great strength of such an ideal is that it allows one to be open, generous, courageous, to touch each other's lives and enrich them and open them in turn. As the knight of faith has no fear-of-life-and-death trip to lay onto others, he does not cause them to shrink back upon themselves, he does not coerce or manipulate them. The knight of faith, then, represents what we might call an ideal of mental health, the continuing openness of life out of the death throes of dread.'
- The Denial of Death: Psychology and Religion: What is the Heroic Individual? (P. 258)
'...each person sums up a whole range of very personal experiences so that his life is a very unique problem needing very individual kinds of solutions.'
- The Denial of Death: Psychology and Religion: What is the Heroic Individual? (P. 259, James)
***
~~~*Left with the Winds at 1.20am*~~~
Wednesday, July 18, 2012
Sometimes I feel such a strange desire to walk away from a person and vanish quietly from existence such that someone else may take my place and receive what he is able to give. But this 'desire' is perhaps not so much of desire as the resigned recognition of a self-imposed perception of need; the need to make someone else happy, the need to feel selfless, the need to free myself from my crippling existential guilt by convincing myself so thoroughly of my own worthlessness, of the fact that I'm not entitled to anything to begin with, that this very feeling of guilt saves me from falling into the abyss of my own collapsed value systems. What I give is recompense, and giving is merely an act of returning something I do not deserve to its rightful owner. I give to right a wrong. I give to efface myself.
Perhaps Heroism is applicable here after all, because even when I attempt so ruthlessly with such morbid (and maybe even masochistic) vigor to eliminate myself, I do so with the thought of bettering someone else's life in the process. At some subconscious level, I am unable to rid my mind of the idea that I matter - that no matter how much I prostrate myself, how derogatory my self-perceptions are, my existence still affects the world around me regardless of the smallness of magnitude. If I were gone, a worthier soul would have been born. If I were gone, the world wouldn't have had to waste resources on a sluice. If I were gone, my friends would have found better persons to love, to spend time with, to live more fulfilling lives with. If I were gone, if I were gone, if I were gone. But I'm not gone, and I most definitely won't be for a while. The world I come into contact with would be influenced whether I like it or not. The past is set in a certain way, the present is as it is now, the future is heading in some direction, all because I've been born, and am still existing, living, breathing and moving on this plane. Things have happened because I'm here. Things would have happened if I'm not. I am unable to completely erase myself.
And so I beat myself to the ground, minute by minute, second by excruciating second, over and over and over and over again.
***
~~~*Left with the Winds at 1.05am*~~~
Sunday, July 15, 2012
Yesterday I dreamt of finding a rusty old coin that was jagged around the edges with one half bent slightly upwards, and I remember turning it over and over in my hand, noticing how the reddish-brown color was unevenly distributed across the surface and revealed tiny patches of nearly unblemished silver underneath. At that point in time I was standing on the edge of a cliff with my back turned to the massive, gaping entrance of some age-old cave, watching a procession of plain wooden chariots wind through the expanse of valleys that spread to the far end of the horizon. The air was dusty and the cloudless sky was mellowed with a sort of soft, golden light. Everything felt timeless; forgotten, untouched, abandoned...preserved, and all I remember from that scene is how the ancient warmth flooded the place but left as little impression as a fleeting breath, because somehow, somehow...I had the notion that it was a dimension I did not belong to.
The next scene was ridiculously unrelated, and it's pretty much a blur in my mind, but I sort of recall wandering back and forth between two convenience stores because I was indecisive about what to buy for a drink. I think there was blueberry, grape, plum, peach, and some other random fruit thingamajigs, can't remember what I settled on in the end. And then there was something about tree-climbing at night...I think I climbed a tree that grew in the middle of something akin to a school amphitheater and got off on the second floor, lugging a bag of drinks I bought from the convenience store before that. I can vaguely remember that I was supposed to deliver those drinks to someone - a guy in some computer lab - but I'm not sure for what reason. Meh.
And then there was a scene change, and it was night again, but this time round I was some...wealthy merchant or something, a middle-aged Chinese man. Don't ask me why, I have no idea myself. I slip quite easily into these completely irrelevant roles from time to time. But anyway, I was standing at the entrance to my house, and I remember talking to a taller guy dressed in some kind of black traditional costume, who handed me...the very same coin I had found in the first scene at the start of the dream. For a moment I slipped right back into my actual self, and I noticed - to my horror - that the coin had changed; most of the rust was gone, and although the metal was still bent in the right place, the surface shone with a silvery-golden light, as if it had been rigorously washed and cleaned and dutifully polished. Of course I asked, and the man replied that it had been a rare spell of sorts that changed that ancient coin so drastically. He thought I'd be pleased. But I wasn't. For some inexplicable reason I was clutching the coin very tightly with an almost heart-wrenching sadness, and all that was on my mind was how the coin had lost its value, or rather the value I saw in it from the start. I can't quite explain. I just know that I lost something I loved so dearly I almost couldn't take it anymore...I allowed it to be changed without my knowledge and consent, and it was devastating. Terrifying. Traumatizing. I don't know what I saw in that coin, but its absence shook my world.
Anyway after that I was back to being that middle-aged Chinese man, but this time round I was strangely scared of the man. Everything he said seemed like some form of threat. He told me of two rooms near the entrance of my house with walls made of gold, and as he spoke, the door to my right (we had been standing beside it all along) creaked open and let through a beam of cold, golden light that faltered against the darkness but ended as abruptly as a truncated rod. He told me I would lose all of it if I didn't promise him something. I don't know why the two rooms of golden walls were so important to me, or what kind of power I perceived in him that made me convince myself that he would go through with his threats, but I was desperate, I was frightened, and I agreed almost immediately. And then the door opened fully, and I stepped into a room that had three walls, with the fourth side open to a dark, blackish sea to my right that was calm and peaceful against a cloudy evening sky. Everything inside was bathed in an almost magical golden light. There were lots of intricate ornamentations and decorative carvings in the three gold walls, which held no meaning to me but were mesmerizing all the same. The second gold room was a little ways ahead, in a separate part of the house, which was connected to my side by a corridor that ran over the dark sea. I remember wanting to see the room, but I never did.
The last scene was so weird I find it extremely hard to describe. I don't even know what I was doing, except that it was a foggy, rainy day and I was fooling around somewhere near my estate. Everything was endowed with this white, misty quality that the whole place seemed almost ethereal. There was a plank or something like that on the roof of one of the lower buildings, and I was with a friend, leaping and flying around (yes it was another flying dream), going all the way up to the 12th floor of some taller buildings and jumping right down so that we could propel ourselves off the plank - how does that even work - and go for another round, on and on and on. I don't know. It was so weird. I really have no idea what that was for.
So yeah, that kind of sums up my most recent dreamscape experience.
***
~~~*Left with the Winds at 9.39pm*~~~
Friday, July 13, 2012
'[The neurotic] perceives himself as unreal and reality as unbearable, because with him the mechanisms of illusion are known and destroyed by self consciousness. He can no longer deceive himself about himself and disillusions even his own ideal of personality. He perceives himself as bad, guilt laden, inferior, as a small, weak, helpless creature, which is the truth about mankind, as Oedipus also discovered in the crash of his heroic fate. All other is illusion, deception, but necessary deception in order to be able to bear one's self and thereby life.'
- The Denial of Death: The Present Outcome of Psychoanalysis - The Problem of Illusion (P.188, Rank)
' ... the question of human life is: on what level of illusion does one live? This question poses an absolutely new question for the science of mental health, namely: What is the "best" illusion under which to live? Or, what is the most legitimate foolishness? If you are going to talk about life-enhancing illusion, then you can truly try to answer the question of which is "best". You will have to define "best" in terms that are directly meaningful to man, related to his basic condition and his needs. I think the whole question should be answered in terms of how much freedom, dignity and hope a given illusion provides. These three things absorb the problem of natural neurosis and turn it to creative living.'
- The Denial of Death: The Present Outcome of Psychoanalysis - Health as an Ideal (P. 202)
'It is always the whole existence of the melancholic patient which has failed to take over openly and responsibly all those possibilities of relating to the world which actually would constitute his own genuine self. Consequently, such an existence has no independent standing of its own but continually falls prey to the demands, wishes and expectations of others. Such patients try to live up to these foreign expectations as best they can, in order not to lose the protection and love of their surroundings. [But they go more deeply into debt.] Hence the terrible guilt feelings of the melancholic ... derive from his existential guilt.'
-The Denial of Death, A General View of Mental Illness - Depression (P. 211, Medard Boss)
'Dependency is the basic survival mechanism of the human organism. ... When the adult gives up hope in his ability to cope and sees himself incapable of either fleeing or fighting, he is "reduced" to a state of depression. This very reduction with its parallel to the helplessness of infancy becomes ... a plea for a solution to the problem of survival dependency. The very stripping of one's defenses becomes a form of defensive maneuver.'
- The Denial of Death: A General View of Mental Illness - Depression (P. 213, Gaylin)
'...the terrible guilt feelings of the depressed person are existential, that is, they represent the failure to live one's own life, to fulfill one's own potential because of the twisting and turning to be "good" in the eyes of the other. The other calls the tune to one's eligibility for immortality, and so the other takes up one's unlived life. Relationship is thus always slavery of a kind, which leaves a residue of guilt ... hardly sum up all the guilt that the patient feels, or at least accuses himself of. To judge by his own self-accusations of worthlessness, the patient feels an immense burden of guilt. We have to understand this self-accusation not only as a reflection of guilt over unlived life but also as a language for making sense out of one's situation. In short, even if one is a very guilty hero he is at least a hero in the same hero-system. The depressed person uses guilt to hold onto his objects and to keep his situation unchanged. Otherwise he would have to analyse it or be able to move out of it and transcend it. Better guilt than the terrible burden of freedom and responsibility, especially when the choice comes too late in life for one to be able to start over again. Better guilt and self-punishment when you cannot punish the other - when you cannot even dare to accuse him, as he represents the immortality ideology with which you have identified. If your god is discredited, you yourself die; the evil must be in yourself and not in your god, so that you may live. With guilt you lose some of your life but avoid the greater evil of death. The depressed person exaggerates his guilt because it unblocks his dilemma in the safest and easiest way.'
- The Denial of Death: A General View of Mental Illness - Depression (P. 214)
***
~~~*Left with the Winds at 8.28pm*~~~
Thursday, July 12, 2012
I'm not sure if you received the sms I sent about a couple of hours ago, but I've decided to go ahead and give you a full account of my take on this situation, since it's quite difficult to convey everything clearly in a running dialogue and I seem to be rather bad at communicating my thoughts very well face-to-face. You see, Ahmad told me on the train about what transpired in the art room yesterday, and after a pretty long and immersive discussion we agreed that we have now reached the point where something has to be done. I'm sure you know what that something entails. This limbo state that has persisted for the past few weeks cannot be allowed to drag on anymore.
There is more than enough reason to take action, to tell her, to let the truth out instead of trying desperately (and vainly) to hide everything.
1) I know you care deeply for her and I believe you understand perfectly that this friendship between you two matter as much to her as it does to you. You're afraid of losing this friendship, which is why you prefer to retreat to the safety of stagnancy and give things so much time that you can numb yourself into believing that they will just work out on their own, or that overtime your perceptions will amount to a clearer vision of the big picture and you'd be able to forge much more adequate plans. While I can't say I fully approve, I understand that perfectly. But what about her? At some level, she's probably convinced herself that she's already lost your friendship, that you've left her, that you don't care for her anymore, and I don't think we can deny that at least some of our actions over the past few weeks must have made her feel alienated whether we're conscious of it or not. Like I told you not too long ago, she has gotten so sensitive that even the simplest and most innocent of actions (such as us sitting together during class) would trigger much suspicion and over-interpretation on her part. If you take the effort to really observe, it's not difficult to see. We've already tried hiding. We've succeeded at times, and failed on some occasions, but you've got to see that we don't have unlimited chances or 'trials'; there's only so much we can hide, and we can't do it forever. Small things, little things, are going to leak whether we like it or not. We're trying to hem in water with a fence. It's futile.
2) Don't forget the original objective of our decision to hide everything from her in the first place: to protect her feelings. This limbo state is doing anything but that. We're hurting her, Yu Xuan. We both know all too well how much the truth hurts, and I can imagine just how much pressure one would have to bear to tell her everything from start to finish, to dash someone else's hopes especially when you know that you're partly - if not wholly - responsible for it. The thing is, the longer you keep it from her, the more it's going to hurt when she finally finds out. It's going to be worse if she finds out not from your mouth but from the grapevine, because then her perceptions of you would be adversely affected; it's highly possible that she would interpret your kindly intentions as something akin to nonchalance, disloyalty or even spitefulness. When that happens, the exact manifestation of our goodwill - our constant hiding and deliberate shielding of the truth - is merely going to add salt to the wound, because the better we hide our relationship and act as if nothing's going on (and we're both very used to hiding, fairly competent too), the more abrupt and unreasonable your 'change of heart' would seem to her, and the more fickle she would perceive you to be. It's possible that she would think of your take on friendships and relationships as superficial and insincere, when it's the exact opposite of that. Don't forget that before all this the two of you were extremely close and spent a lot of time together. Don't forget that you were the one person who paid the most attention to her in New York. Don't forget that you've once expressed to her similar if not the same notions of dedication and support as you now do to me. With all these in your common past, don't you think it would be extremely perplexing and painful for her to feel neglected and yet nonplussed for a long period of time, to be perplexed at the sudden great disparity between the signals you used to send her and the ones you do now, only to find out that you've been keeping her in the dark all this while without 'bothering' to release her from her confusion?
3) You wonder why she appears so cold and aloof, why she's pointedly ignoring you, why she appears so pissed and dejected lately. On one hand, I shall very honestly say that I do not approve of the way she's being so possessive and rather unreasonable; it's perfectly understandable if she's hurt and doesn't hesitate to make it known, but expressing it in the form of hostility and acting as if you're obliged to devote all your time and energy to her is another thing altogether. Because you aren't. If someone tells you that he'll always be there whenever you need a shoulder to cry on, it is only naive, selfish and unjustified, and perhaps to some extent blindly desperate, if you bind him to such a promise and fervently believe that he would keep it. If you really do love a person in any way, one of your chief concerns should be about respecting his own freedom, time and space, and I don't think she's doing it. But on the other hand, I believe that she may be adopting this hostile attitude towards you precisely because she's confused and frustrated. Remember all that bullshit between YanYong and Ahmad? Just as I thought, it was all a massive misunderstanding stemming from a lack of communication between the two of them, drawn out by uncertainty, suspicion and hesitation on both sides. This is something similar...or at least it's going to be. What I know about Yunteng right now is, of course, far too little to make any well-informed judgment, but at least I think it is clear that for all her defensive set of cold stares, hard silences and ostensible evasion, what lies underneath is most likely a mixture of unspoken desire, hurt feelings, confusion, frustration, doubt, insecurity, hopelessness, and desperation. The way she feels entitled to your time and attention could even bespeak a desperate attempt to convince herself that you'll go back to her after what she believes is a temporary diversion. Like what I mentioned before, she thinks you've left her for something she doesn't know, but she doesn't want to believe in the prospect of you really having done so. She tries to hold on to you but you unknowingly shake her off, like that time in art room this Monday when you left her to sit beside me (even if it may be because your pencil-case was beside mine). This prolonged limbo is just making it worse.
4) I'm not sure if you realised, but this no longer just concerns the three of us (you, yunteng and me). The whole art class is starting to get dragged in bit by bit over the past few weeks, starting from people like Batara, Yanyong and Eugene etc. People aren't obtuse, and they most definitely aren't oblivious. Anyone can tell a feeling of tension apart from an air of complete ease, not to mention it's even more palpable when two people who used to be so close together are now appearing so distant from each other. What Ahmad was worried about is the fact that Yunteng, while rapidly beginning to warm up to 'new' people who have been friendly and caring towards her lately (like Batara and Ahmad), may be unconsciously drawing sides in the art class...something which could aggravate the sense of division that is already growing in the art class as of late. And I agree with him on this. The art class is so small. We can't afford to split up any further.
Ahmad and Yanyong said they thought you were selfish, jeopardising the harmony of the art class by not wanting to tell the truth and let things out into the open for 'personal preference', but I know that your hesitation right now is not owing to selfishness because I understand your reasons. I know you're scared. I know it's not easy. I know it's hard to make a decision and go for it when it's something so exasperatingly delicate. But please, Yu Xuan, please. There isn't time anymore. There's no time at all. We've already deliberated enough and lost that window of opportunity to tell her when she was in a good mood, which was some time last week. Now your friendship is very visibly strained...and we're really worried for the two of you. I'm not talking about my happiness here. I'm talking about yours, Yunteng's, everyone else's, and subsequently mine.
You told me earlier in the year that you prefer to deal with things when they're out in the open. You told me you want people to stop hiding things from one another.
What are you so scared of? What's holding you back?
There's nothing that can't be solved even if you screw up; at least you can pick up the pieces, rearrange everything, and we'd be getting somewhere. But one thing that's certain is that this will never be resolved if you don't do anything. It will just get worse. Worse, worse, worse and worse.
Tell her, Yu Xuan. Tell her. Not one day, not someday, not soon, but now. Don't delay it anymore, please, for the sake of both of you and the art class. I'm here. I'll support you. I'll be there when you take the next step as well.
...because I love you, and because I love you, I want you to muster the courage and find the strength to resolve this and make things better for yourself.
***
~~~*Left with the Winds at 10.20pm*~~~
Wednesday, July 11, 2012
Help.
Help.
Help.
Help.
Help.
Help.
Help.
Help.
Help.
Help.
I don't. I can't. I can't. I can't. I can't anymore. Please make it stop make it stop make it stop make it stop make it stop make it stop make it stop make it stop make it stop make it stop please please please please PLEASE
make it stop
make it stop
make it stop
make it stop
make it stop
make it stop
MAKE IT STOP!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
I want to die I want to die I want to die I want to die just let me die why can't I goddamn die already why why why why why why why why why why why whyw yhwy hwyh wyw hy hhwhyhwyhwyhy yyy whywh y why wyh whyw hywhy wy wy hwyw hyw yhwy why someone please please why
...
I don't want to cut anymore. The pain won't go away.
***
~~~*Left with the Winds at 7.26pm*~~~
Tuesday, July 10, 2012
The rubber band broke.
***
~~~*Left with the Winds at 9.39pm*~~~
Sunday, July 8, 2012
What I said:
"Hi, sorry it seems like my phone screwed up again and didn't send the message I sent a few days ago, I think. For the designs, I'm afraid your extra info came in a bit too late because I've gotten the club to design some drafts on wed already, as previously agreed, and we're unable to do it again next week due to other plans. They are brief pencil drafts, but if you would like to have them all the same I can email them to you. Otherwise I think you might have to make do with your fellow councillors' designs, like yunteng's and bj's, sorry about that."
What I really meant to say:
"Fuck you."
I would like very much to kill this CCAD right now.
Anyway that aside, Art Club's doing pretty well lately, or rather things are coming along quite steadily. We're having an outing next wednesday to visit one of two exhibitions that Miss Tan suggested, since Mrs Toh still hasn't found a digital painting instructor yet, and it appears that Miss Poh and Dr Gooi will also be tagging along. Not quite sure about their intentions for coming along, though. It will be our first self-organised outing this year, so I guess I'm feeling a bit of pressure, but nothing I can't handle.
Right now I'm just a little worried about what to plan for Art Club after next week because Mrs Toh said she'll take at least a few weeks to find a proper instructor, so I'll have to make do with alternate plans to fill up the gap. I'll probably get Thuy to source for some CIP projects, and meanwhile I should get started on contacting either Film or Com Science and forge plans for prospects of collaboration. I've already gotten the club to throw in some ideas for a big(ger) project next year, but so far there's nothing concrete...still thinking, haha. Not much time left though. Hm.
Oh well. Back to PW.
***
~~~*Left with the Winds at 9.36pm*~~~
Saturday, July 7, 2012
I realised that I do have a lot of things to say after all but because I'm feeling rather helplessly drained now I'm going to type everything I wish to articulate in a mindless and very nearly unpunctuated rant that will hopefully make it a lot harder to read and save myself from horrible embarrassment but I want you to know that I love you so much and the fact that lately we can no longer spend so much time together makes me realise the almost excruciating strength of this love and sometimes I wish so badly to be able to go to your side whenever I want and hold your hand even if the whole exchange is in absolute silence but then when I look up and think of approaching you I see yunteng sitting near you and I stop myself at the sight of her contented smile or blissfully blank countenance because I don't want to be the one to intrude and wipe it all away for her and so I turn around and look down at my painting as if nothing happened and that everything is just fine the way it is and I want you to know that because I love you I want you to be happy and because I love you I try my best to make things better for you even if it's through insignificant little things like buying you lunch by the way sorry for the bitter-ass shit coffee today I was ignorant about your dislike for such beverages but I really hope I'm not overdoing things and I really hope I'm not doing things wrong because I love you so much I don't want this to end and I don't want you to leave me and I shamefully admit that sometimes when I see yunteng beside you looking so much like a better and more positive match I really wonder what you ever saw in me past all my flaws and despicable qualities and my inability to give you anything you might be proud of and I'm scared that one day you'll no longer need me and now that you're able to open up to people unlike last time you may find someone else with more to give and a better personality and yes I know it's probably all self-induced as a result of all my stupid insecurities but I'm trying to shake it off and I think I'll need heck loads of time but anyway even so I also want you to know that because I love you I will be giving you all the freedom you want and I want you to make more fulfilling friendships such that our relationship doesn't feed off an unhealthy need so I'll respect your decisions when reasonably made and by that I specifically mean the whole yunteng issue because I can sense that yunteng's good mood over the past couple of days may make you cease to perceive any point in telling her about us but if that removes most of the stress and makes you happy then go ahead I'll deal so don't worry I'm not going to bind you to me so please be free to do whatever because I love you and I trust that you'll be able to handle things well on your own and not hurt yourself like you used to
because
I love you because I love you because I love you because I love you because I love you because
***
~~~*Left with the Winds at 12.46am*~~~
Thanks to all the blogs the designer referred to (countless) for html code help :) (esp. cyn' and sixseven)
Adobe Photoshop Elements for supernatural abilities
