Thanks for visiting my writing page.
This blog holds space for the things that happen to me inside or outside my mind, or somewhere in between reality and fantasy. Here I try share my dreams, my struggles, temptations or anything else that the universe throws my way. Most of this writing is written as a stream-of-consciousness and quite abruptly, so be warned – grammar rules may be broken.
Photo by Žygimantas Dukauskas on Unsplash
Days feel long when you’re dealing with chronic back pain. You wake up in the morning hoping today will be different – today will be a low pain day, a barely noticeable pain day. After walking over a few feet toward the bathroom, you realize it’s not so. It’s another cranky hell of a shitty back pain day.
You decide you’re going to move your best foot forward by going for a walk.. a short walk around the block, heck a medium walk around several blocks, then settle on walking around two blocks. Walking sometimes pushes the pain way, squashes it down for a while, or just distracts you from it.
After getting back home, it’s time to sit at your desk for eight hours and there’s your trusted back cushion nestled into your back, supporting your bones and muscles. This doesn’t feel so bad, not bad at all. It almost seems like.. the pain is gone.. Was it swallowed up by the pillow? Never mind, it comes back after an hour or two.
Breathe! Breathe deep, it will push the fascia, the discs, the ligaments into their assigned places. Yes, slow, deep breaths.. easy does it… breathe… straighten your posture, lift up those shoulders, you can do this! Lunchtime rolls around. Thank God! Should you relax on the bed for the hour? No, it will only tell the muscles that their workday is over, and who is going to get you up? No… take another walk hoping for relief.
The walk helps somewhat, and a tasty soy matcha latte is supposed to make everything better anyway, so you froth up the milk and add a heaping teaspoon of the bright green powder and hiyah!!! back to your desk for another round. Two o’clock, three o’clock, the back feels like its being compressed, it is starting to complain loudly now… I’m cracking it here and twisting it there and relief… nope, nope that made it hurt more.
I bring the laptop to bed for the final round. It is 3:30pm, I CAN do this! The muscles unclench and my breathing becomes more shallow. My neck and shoulders will take the blunt of the pressure now… working to get us through this day to get us to 5pm.. we push through.. the laptop slides off my thighs onto the bed sheets. I lie on my back.
Maybe humanity doesn’t need to be saved. Maybe most of humanity is already dead. They were given the choice between the red and blue pill, and guess what, both of them were just poison. It was just poison that closed your mind from anyone else’s point of view.
And now, all of your feelings and reactions are not even your own, they are just handed to you on a paper plate. You’re just continually at the same BBQ with the same people, that have the same beliefs as you and just wait around for someone to serve you what you’re supposed to think.
Then when someone disagrees with you, you get triggered, because the poison you consumed starts attacking your nervous system, and you can’t handle anyone else’s opinion. The poison is strong, I felt it many times myself. It really knocks the love out of your heart, and you start attacking – even people you care about.
People turn against each other, wanting to prove each other wrong, but they don’t see the human behind the mask. Yes, we are all wearing our political masks, designed in the fear factories we choose to subscribe to. We filter all of our information through these masks and simply can’t allow anything new to penetrate.
When things get tough, and I need clarity I turn to nature. I like to go outside just before sunset, which helps me reflect about my day or what’s really important in life. I try to trust my intuition, even when it’s hard, or I feel uncomfortable.
I don’t trust the mainstream media, since they have failed me after the September 11th attacks. I remember watching the news every night, feeling the fear from the Red and Orange alerts being injected into my body, being afraid to go to the mall, or to a concert. Months of this and none of the predictions from the media ever came true, but here I am, almost 20 years later, still feeling uncomfortable in large crowds.
I haven’t been posting on social media much lately, because I’m seeing everyone being judged for expressing themselves. People are shaming others for being too negative, or for posting too much fluff. People are posting misinformation just to prove others to be wrong, and not doing any research to actually make sure the information they are using to wage their attacks is realistic.
These are crazy times. Things that seem normal, may not be normal at all, but things that sound like they are out of this world could actually be true. Things are not just black and white, red or blue, we have to use our critical thinking, and tap into our instincts, tap into our human nature. We don’t want to act like we are already dead, repeating stories that we are fed by the media. Lets listen to each other and try to understand when other people are coming from. Lets not be robots that repeat the same phrases over and over without giving them any thought.
If it’s just me, it’s hard to see the details, and hard to zoom out my own lens outside myself. It’s hard to stand outside of me and watch me feel the things I feel inside. It’s hard to see my face in selfies that I take and to see my true expression in the smiles that I fake when I am trying to trick myself that I am not upset; that I can’t even get mad; that the reality is that I don’t feel anything and I make myself believe that this is true.
When I see someone else in pain, especially in a group or a community setting, their pain overwhelms me. I find myself swimming in it, in their collective woe, I am drenched in emotion, uncertain where I end and where others begin. I want to fight for them. I am angry to the depths of my bones. My bone-marrow boils inside of me, because someone else is being mistreated now, and I – I can see it with my eyes. It’s like a film, and I am connecting with the characters. The people are beautiful and weak like little shrubs blowing in the wind and I want to save them from their pain.
Their pain, it makes me so uncomfortable, and I want it to stop. But my own personal anguish, it is asleep somewhere; it is nowhere to be seen. It is not under my desk or in my jacket pocket, no, that is not where it is. I am numb to my own pain, perhaps is for self-preservation. Perhaps, the pain is having a very explosive reaction right inside; right behind some secret door. And it’s waiting for me to slow down enough to find this door, to find this door and break it down so the pain can come out and be seen. The pain would fly out and settle in the room around me like every feeling I ever tried to hide from had a face. Their faces would now be visible to me and could get acquainted with them. Each expression would tell me a story about when I pretended not to see it; why I pretended not to notice the event that happened.
Everything would become clear if each feeling had a face that’s tangible, a face separate from my own. And I can see these inner faces and love them; love them like I love the painful faces of other people. For now, I know the only way inside is from within. It’s frightening to close your eyes and look away from everyone else’s story; everyone else’s movie. But how can I meet all these invisible faces, if I won’t even let myself in.
Sometimes when you have to have a difficult conversation with someone, the whole thing feels like a test. You want to share something with someone you care about, something that has the potential to change the dynamic of your relationship and you wonder how it will turn out on the other side.
Was your explanation clear enough, or did you get too emotional and sounded a mess? It’s hard to make eye contact sometimes when you have a hard time being vulnerable. You might keep going in circles, making u-turns around your point, and what if the other person doesn’t understand.
The person tells you that it’s alright and that they understand. They even share a similar story of their own, either because they now feel more comfortable with you or just want to make you feel better. They even tell you, you’re being silly being so nervous about sharing “this”.
You say goodbye for the moment and go home analyzing the images in your mind. Could this have really been this easy or is there something that actually went wrong that I could not see? He said it was ok but what if he thinks about it some more and changes his mind. You feel nervous again bouncing between negative and positive emotions. You feel forever trapped in the unknown, in the unattainable mystery of other people’s thoughts and perceptions.
What if I get blindsided by today’s positive reaction, but he still ends up rejecting me tomorrow. Being open and honest felt so freeing, like taking off a layer of dead skin that was pushing down on me. I looked up at him and saw his smile of relief; his eyes smiled, and I saw that he thought I was about to tell him something worse. So at least I felt like I wasn’t something worse, like I wasn’t something worse at all. I was still myself for now, just a little lighter, just a little emptier. I thought about all the beauty that could fit inside now.
Gym was always a class I dreaded as a kid. Not only was I clumsy and not very good at sports, but I was forced to participate in team sports; forced to be on teams that didn’t want me there.
Yes, picking teams was the worst part of the day. It was usually for kickball or volleyball. Each day, it was me or Anna that got picked last, and it was worse when Anna was absent. I stood there, feeling shamed, staring down at my black sneakers, hoping that this day would be different from the rest; that maybe this classmate choosing people would finally notice me. I kept waiting and waiting to be seen. But it would always be the same. Sometimes there was an odd number of students and the teacher was forced to make the choice on their behalf. I stood there as he decided my fate and as the selected team sighed heavily when I was sent over to join them.
Those days, they didn’t want me because I was weak and I was different. I wasn’t good at kicking the ball and the opposing team would usually catch it right away. Sometimes, this made me relieved, because I didn’t have to run. Nowadays, I often feel relief when I don’t have to do something risky either.
Nowadays, I am still weak and different as I was back then, but I choose to label myself as vulnerable and creative instead. Now when someone does not want to choose me, I take a deep breath and choose myself instead.
I embrace my weakness, knowing that my vulnerability creates space for others to be vulnerable with me too. I’m shy and because of my shyness, others don’t have to be afraid of feeling shy too. My shyness flows and blend with other parts of me; like watercolor or emotions it comes on thick and then washes out into a translucent tint. Because I am different, I am okay with trying different things. I already labeled as different, so I might as well be creative about it. This otherness has opened a different world for me, a world that I had to create in order to fit in somewhere. It is an imaginary world, but I love it and tap into it when I feel like creating something new. I draw and write from this space.
Different and weak were once flows that I felt ashamed of, but now I know that that shame is not me. The world breathes in beauty now, and I am no longer afraid to choose myself even if someone else cannot see me.
It’s sometimes hard to notice that the person you’re trying your best to hide from is actually yourself. You know, that face you briefly notice in the mirror in the morning before work; the skin you judge for looking a little too dry or just too tired. This is often the only part of you that makes the cut into the all of the scenes of the day.
You run around worrying about everybody else to the point that you forget they you are not even feeling fulfilled. You are so full of experiences and tasks to be completed that you don’t even realize that inside you are starving. And you wonder: how can I be so hungry with such a full plate?
You are in such a need of fulfillment that you constantly look for little things to solve. There are easy wins like giving a friend advice or doing a chore for a parent that temporarily satiate this desire, but what creates a constant infusion of energy is dealing with situations that are simply unsolvable. These kinds of food for thought sort of entanglements are always eager to feed your mind with new ways to create thinking patterns that can keep you distracted for days at a time.
One way you can avoid looking at yourself is by constantly analyzing other people in your life. This is especially potent with romantic relationships where you are constantly worried about controlling the feelings of your partners. You just really want to know what their world is like and how you actually fit into that world. It can be puzzling when the situations are unclear, and so a lot of our insecurities get automatically triggered.
Instead of diving deeper into our own insecurities and figuring ourselves out, we tend to focus on how we are perceived by the other people. This is a story we can easily get lost in, as it consumes us and eats away at time. It’s almost like being behind the blurry lens of a dream, and this array of racing thoughts is strangely comforting, so potent that we prefer it over taking the time to see what is real here in front of us.
Anyway, if we get lucky and find ourselves in a moment of stillness, let us focus our energy on what really matters most. Let us try to see what it is that really has the potential to bring us sustainable fulfillment, so we no longer have to feel the need to escape from ourselves.
It feels like butterflies, but it’s in a different area of your abdomen. Lower down, shame tickles you as you are about to cross your own boundaries again and make a fool of yourself. It feels obvious that the decision you are about to make does not hold your best interest at heart, but alas you say this will be the last time. And so you send that text asking for clarity from a person who obviously does not care about you.
You have already been ghosted days ago, and you have seen him on social media practically every time you go on. Obviously this person does not want to interact with you, and you should just use your energy to focus on yourself. Yet, instead, you decide to feed this person’s ego by sending another DM.
It’s like, your intuition has already got you convinced that he is not going to respond, but you want to challenge yourself – just in case. It’s kind of like a drug to go against the known in hopes of a different kind of high.
Being ignored is a difficult job to handle. You want to quit after a few hours and move on to something better. It’s the hardest thing to see the bigger picture sometimes. The next time the shame starts teasing you, close your eyes and zoom out into the vast landscape around you. The person who decided to try to reduce your value will start to get smaller and smaller, until finally you will see how insignificant their actions are.
There are so many to choose from: salad dressings. Fancy disguises for tasteless situations they make life a little bit better than it actually is. Or do they? French or Italian, but maybe Ranch is the choice of the evening. We dress up our salads to please those overactive taste buds. What else do we dress up to please a part of us that’s been overactive?
Maybe we dress up our language, so that no one gets offended. What if we say the wrong thing, and the listener has to process that data when we are long gone; home in bed perhaps. Do we drench our words with paint to make them prettier. I guess it is hard being honest all the time when you end up worrying about how someone else is going to feel.
Sometimes it gets worse. Comedy can end in tragedy. You attempt to make light of a complicated situation by making some jokes. This totally backfires, because of your overly dark sense of humor, and you are the one who ends up feeling like an ass.
Ha, and what about the times when you are speaking to your boss in a meeting. That calls for some language modification. This is when you have to reach up your sleeve for those horrible adjectives you hate so much. Show, don’t tell, you remember your 10th grade English teacher explain, but you still go ahead and embellish.
We all are most likely guilty of these faux pas, especially when we’re drinking. And I wonder if it’s even more difficult to be direct for someone with an English degree. I mean we read all of those gentile writings for a reason. There is so much that must be said that we forget there are some things better left unsaid.
Sometimes a stare into the eyes of another says everything. You can just dwell in that moment as long as you can; until the person blinks I mean – at least. Just stand there in silence without all of those embellishments and maybe listen to the raw sound of life just presenting itself to you.
A neighboring office building has been vacant for the last several months and some noisy construction surrounding it has been more than just a nuisance for a while now. The penetrating sound felt like hundreds of small earthquakes shattering through my body as I wondered what those construction workers were really up to.
It has been about two weeks now that I have watched the building slowly disappear. First it looked like all the windows have been broken, and then suddenly the walls were gone too. Today or was it yesterday that I realized that the roof was now also missing. The building stood in front of me naked; what was left of it was just a rusty skeleton. It was just a bunch of metal beams now with the wind swiftly passing through them, blowing away all of those stories that accumulated within.
Demolition is the word used for this type of death. The word also means destruction, flattening, leveling, or being defeated or torn down. Who were the faces that used to work in this building? What kinds of memories have they left behind? Were they happy tales of office banter or perhaps some unpleasant stories of abuse or of people feeling stuck or getting laid off?
Well, it was just a building, and I must admit not a very attractive one. The word demolition still kind of strikes a chord in me though. Maybe it’s because it reminds me of the word demon. A demon is supposedly a malevolent spirit that possesses a person. Could an old, useless building could also have been full of malevolent energies that needed to be set free?
To me, most people are possessed by some kinds of demon. It may not necessarily be an evil spirit, but a bad memory or a feeling that is keeping them stuck. There is so much baggage that accumulates over the years, that it makes it really difficult for the breath to pass through so we can dislodge it. In order to remove the debris that is keeping us stuck, we have to work hard to deconstruct the container.
We have to take off the shades from our windows, so that we may be able to see the clear picture. Then, slowly take down our walls one at a time, in order to make space for those memories and feelings. These emotions were trapped within those four walls for years, and so when the walls have been removed, they can finally expand to their true size. The heavy roof then needs to be lifted, to let the sun light everything up. This is when we become aware of the demons, and we give them the attention they were longing for.
We stand there, just these skeletons of our former selves and let the wind sweep between our bones. With deep breaths the demolition begins to take shape, and all of those stories begin to collapse, to get brushed away. And when it’s finally over, we are again open to experience life again, and we surrender what remains until we are totally empty ready to build again.
The skeleton of the office building is still around today, but my coworkers and I don’t expect it to be around much longer. We may come to work next week only to be greeted by the vacant lot. Then any new onlookers would not even be able to tell that once there stood a building full of human life being spent.
So, you’re feeling lonely, and you decide that you can help yourself feel better while helping someone else find a home. I’m talking about adopting a pet. You put on your favorite scarf, lace up your boots and drive over to the local shelter or animal rescue. There you make an instant connection with a certain cat or dog, and soon you are watching Game of Thrones together on the sofa. You feel like a piece of your incomplete puzzle has been rescued, and you both feel a sense of belonging. You accept each other, even with all your flaws. Life is good!
If only the process was the same when it came to adopting a human, well I mean, a mate of your very own. Imagine visiting the local pub, and there you see a group of guys or gals waiting to be adopted by you. You spend, let’s say, forty-five minutes, nursing a glass of Merlot and suddenly you meet the warm brown eyes of the perfect stranger. In that instant, you both make up your minds that you would be willing to share the sofa, maybe even the front porch while you drink your morning coffee.
Wait a second, no, adopting a human seems like so much more of a commitment. For one, humans typically live to around 75 at least. Dogs or cats usually make it until somewhere in the teens. Sure a typical pet wants to be nurtured, taken out for walks maybe, and might enjoy an expensive grain-free diet, but a human has needs. The family dog may require some scratching behind the ears, but a human needs to be held and caressed.
So yes, Joe from the pub looks just right. You take him home, and he tests out your sofa. To his surprise, the sofa is nothing like what he imagined it would be. It is quite small and a bit too soft. His bottom sinks into it, as he tries to make himself comfortable, while you’re in the kitchen microwaving some nachos for the welcome party. You hop onto the sofa, and your hips gently nudge Joe’s. He grabs a cheesy chip and the cheese gets under his fingernails. He licks his fingers.
It’s almost midnight, and you end up watching some shitty indie film about a middle-aged woman who has a hard time falling in love. Joe develops a backache from your overused sofa, and decides to call it a night. He does not want to finalize the adoption just yet, says he needs to explore his options. He apologizes for wiping his cheesy hands on one of the accent pillows. You sigh wishing you had an open bottle of wine, or something to make yourself a little giddy before bed, then end up laying down on the sofa making plans to visit the local animal shelter in the morning.
Reflections on Fantasy and Reality 