love, loss & redemption:

...perhaps part of it was learning to see the separation between the us, the him and the me. It was a joint journey but also one that belonged sacredly to me. They were the the lessons, perhaps the afterthoughts that I had not seen at the time, but my sacred lessons of learning to feel, to become, to hold close what it means to love. How it feels to love and be vulnerable. 

Like the rainy days with the smell of spring creeping in through the sunlight in the British veranda with signs of hope of a new season ahead. Like my lonely prayers in the darksome night with God, praying to Him for answers of whether he was the one. Of packing my life into a luggage and moving across the sea to take a leap of faith of my future not knowing the outcome. Of trusting and believing in God, of praying to Him and leaning to Him. Of fighting back to protect what was mine and who I was. Of trusting myself and making the decision to throw away all that I knew and had built, to deconstruct in order to reconstruct and having the courage to walk away knowingly that I was swallowing a bitter pill of a life with no guarantees.  Those were the moments intertwined but so sacredly mine.

the ones that shaped me, made me braver, stronger, more resilient.

I used to have like 25,000 unread emails in my inbox (not kidding). Then it went down to the thousands a few years ago when I unsubscribed from all the junk emails. Today I cleared it all out (as my google storage was up to 89%) and it went down to zero. All emails read, dissected, filtered, removed, cleared, deleted. 

It was painful to go through all the details of my life, the specific and intimate parts of each moment, so painfully recorded in such clear detail. snippets of memories lagged onto each of these emails. did you know that, in this digital age, how much life, love, loss and life tapestries you can uncover from one’s email account?

...flight tickets across the continent to reunite with your (now ex) boyfriend. tutorial schedules of university classes that you took. invitations to seminars and conferences with all sorts of topics that reminded you of your passion that once was. email verification of wifi connections of airports (and coffee shops) filled with so much memories and adventures in places and countries that you will probably never return to. emailing the loss & found office for items that once held dear to you. bills of apartments you used to live in. reminders of cleaning schedules, returning keys, electrician visits. passwords and email verifications to accounts you no longer own. backup copies of essays and PPT slides. notification of facebook tags. a google calendar invite to a Skype interview of the first job that you eventually landed. the list goes on...each bringing back a specific point of my life and a vivid reminder of my past self. 

these deleted emails, some seemingly mundane, represented the hopes, dreams and moments of life that once was. how did we go from there to here today? how many emails and life events do we whizz through day by day? how many friends and life companions have we met and are no longer in touch with? how we wish - even if it’s through the snapshot of an email - we can go back to what once was.

...but perhaps it also made me realize how far I have gone. How much life has done to me day by day and how much new perspective I have gained along the way. There is no good or bad, right or wrong. It was a matter of soldiering on. Years down the road, I’m still trying to be a good person. But perhaps , after tasting the bitterness and being ripped apart from heartbreaks and being forced to surrender to this pain that just wouldn’t go away no matter how hard you try, I realize that I have gone far. Life may not be where I thought it would be, because to be honest at that time I didn’t even know where life will lead me. I had all these questions that I was stressed about because I was confused. But gradually, I am living into the answer. It may not be rainbows and butterflies and happy families that I had naiively envisioned, but it is a form of being grounded. the pain never goes away but I’m grateful that I made it. 

I’m clearing the old and making way for the new. I’m learning to put the burden behind me, email by email, day by day.

I go back to one of my favourite quotes that I’ve referred to and held close to my heart at so many different stages of my life throughout all these years. The depths of these words never fail me and I see a new light in these words each time: 

“Be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves, like locked rooms and like books that are now written in a very foreign tongue. Do not now seek the answers, which cannot be given you because you would not be able to live them. And the point is, to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps you will then gradually, without noticing it, live along some distant day into the answer.”

Been trying to articulate what is going on inside my head and what I am going through, but been struggling to find the right words and words beautiful enough to fully capture the extent of it all. The love, loss, redemption, regret, pain. Learning that life never turns out the way we have planned but into more nuanced versions of our life decisions. That life makes your heart both more tender but also more numb and wounded. That real strength doesn’t come from toughening up and proving to yourself that you can ‘do it all’; but from the bravery and courage to be vulnerable, from admitting that you made mistakes but forgiving yourself because there was once a youthful version of yourself and life is learnt by moving forward.

These words struck a chord:

“You come home to yourself when you have a thing or two to tell your past, when you see with crystal clarity, the things you need to keep and those you should discard. You see the multitude of paths you could have taken, the things you could have seen. And you close your eyes, relieved and grateful that you ended up as you - out of all the people you could have been” 

- Lang Leav

These words recognize and honour the journey. We are often so focused on the outcome that we blame ourselves for making the wrong decisions when we fall short - or wondering whether we made the right decision - and on dwelling how we lived our lives. But the important part is to live everything.

My early 20s has been a story about my geographical trek around the world as a youth. But it turned out to be so much more. It was a personal and mental test and a spiritual journey. Of life, work, religion, friendships and relationships - you come home with a deeper sense of what is home, where is home, how is home...how to make yourself your ‘home’. Of knowing who you are, what you stand for, what is important to you. 

Coming back was admitting defeat to the loss of a dream, but it was also about looking into the future to write a new chapter. When certain chapters end abruptly and change course, it doesn’t mean life is over or that you are no longer youthful or that there is a limit to this youth. Even when life hits you with new challenges and feeds you pain that you had not known, it was still a journey and is still your journey to make. 

You come home to yourself stronger, wiser, more cautious about love but somehow find your heart perhaps more tender and open to the possibilities of life. R’s story was so intertwined with the story of my youth, of exploring and striving and testing my abilities and building my career but also struggling to balance it with the relationship.

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