la dolce vita

Hi! I'm J ₍^. .^₎⟆ ❤︎ I’ve been on “appstinence” again since December last year, trying to chill on social media. Less scrolling, less random checking, less disappearing into the endless black hole of reels and photos, and yes, “Why are you here then?” 😅

This isn’t new to me. Every now and then, I log out and go quiet. I don't hate social media, but I know how easily it can take over my headspace.

This is probably the longest appstinence I’ve done so far 😅 and will I ever go back? Probably yes. Hahaha. I also tried to recover the other account (delights-in-jesus) but it is no longer possible.

So what am I doing if I'm not checking my apps all the time? Real talk, you can actually do a lot.

I’ve been more physically active: pilates, running, badminton. I went back to my loves-painting, drawing, editing videos (okay fine… I might be active again on my YT soon 👀). I started learning how to play the piano. I’m also back to my language lessons, i.e., Turkish and Japanese. I volunteered in a community, too, and connecting with people with great minds is indeed fascinating. I’m even thinking that maybe one day, I’d love to become a mentor (cross-fingers). I am also an active supporter of a missionary abroad (and if you ever feel led to be part of that in any way, drop me a message).

Now you might say, “How did you even do all that?” or maybe you’re thinking I’m just bluffing or lowkey bragging. Actually, no. The majority of the things I’m doing now are not new. They were already part of my life when I was a teen and in my early 20s and I just stopped. Life got busy, priorities changed, work got heavier. If I’m being honest, I let my career consume me for a while, partly to stay busy and partly to avoid sitting with pieces of my past. It was easier to bury myself in deadlines than to process things. But somewhere along the way, I realized I wasn’t living as purposefully as I wanted to. I was productive, somehow yes and no, but not fully present, not fully me.

Actually, my appstinence sort of helped me with that. It created space, and in that space, I found old versions of myself waiting, the girl who loved to create, move, learn, and explore. This is not a glow-up story but that girl felt familiar, almost like someone I had not seen in years. Maybe that’s what this season is about, not becoming someone new (new year resolutions never work anyway), but rather reconnecting with who I’ve always been.

How good the Lord is. Shalom, shalom (˶ᵔ ᵕ ᵔ˶) I've lost track of exactly how long I've been writing, but it all began with a WordPress blog about 11-12 years ago that has since been lost to the internet

I pulled on my wetsuit boots, adjusted my cap, and stepped onto the tidal flat, holding a repurposed paint bucket—it was my first time gleaning. The water was barely ankle-deep, warm from a full Friday of sun, and the bottom shifted underfoot in a way that made each step feel like walking on something alive, which it was. The flat stretched wide and exposed before me, carpeted with seagrass (nearly 80% coverage, as I would learn later) and scattered with marine life. In Poblacion, Kauswagan, Lanao del Norte, the seagrass was thicker than I expected. Welcome to gleaning, I teased myself.

There were perhaps twenty-one people already out there, spread across the vast intertidal expanse in loose clusters, bent low, heads down, searching and collecting something in the shallow water, while some constantly thrust gleaning tools into the substrate with their dark silhouettes framed against the dimming sky. Fingers found nothing, then something small and quick, then nothing again. Your eyes had to be sharp and faster than you think, and even your hearing had to be tuned in.

Two young kids, perhaps the same age, worked near each other. As they waded through the seagrass, one holding a plastic bag asked the other, "Isa ra imong nakita nga kinason? Akoa duha na". I thought he was happy to be keeping score in a game, while the other kid, unbothered, replied, "Oo, isa ra," and kept wading. Their voices were innocent and bright; they were having an uncomplicated, tilted-toward-the-sun kind of fun, you know the way children do when they have not yet been told which parts of their lives are supposed to be hard.

Walking back across the flat as the last light left the water, I realized something about this community: they had probably been doing this for years, or a lifetime, and would keep doing it, tide after tide, regardless of whether anyone was watching. Perhaps there's a tendency, especially in stories about communities like this, for the words resilient, strong, and ingenious to come quickly, stacked like praise. But they can also become a way of admiring people for enduring conditions they didn't choose. The families aren't there because they're admirably tough, but because they need to eat, and this is how survival is negotiated, day by day.

In the midst of days when it feels like your world has fallen apart, have you ever doubted you’d get through it? Have you wondered if life would ever be good or normal again? I’ll be honest. In some of my darkest trials, there have been moments when I had those doubts. There weren’t even any pinpricks of light at the end of the tunnel, just day after day of darkness. But dark times in our lives are necessary, dear friend. It takes dark nights to bring us to bright days. It takes the dark of night for plants to germinate and grow. It takes the dark of night for us to see the stars shine. And it takes the dark nights (our difficult times) for us to grow as a person.

Hope today feels a bit lighter for you, dear friend!

Two years passed before my low-maintenance-but high-maintenance-when-we-finally-meet friend and I saw each other again. These are the relationships where you can go for years without a single phone call, but the moment you sit across from one another, you skip the weather and the "how are yous" to go straight into the deep end of the soul. Perhaps it is because we are both eldest daughters, accustomed to carrying responsibilities, but silently longing for spaces where we can be vulnerable without explanation. She was my go-to person during a season of heartbreak, and a companion in crazy-adrenaline-rush-and-sponty mountain and side trips.

It wasn’t exactly a planned encounter. I had already booked a flight that I could no longer rebook because of the unforgiving reality of expensive airfares nowadays, which are crazy high, so I decided to follow through and endure the 6-hour wait haha.