on our 107th month anniversary I’m just really grateful and glad to have a partner who really enjoys doing things with me. it is quite uncanny that we have similar strange tastes — like we both love to eat hotpot with lots of vinegar and cilantro. today she managed to find a rare outdoor hotpot restaurant for our dinner which we haven’t had in years. it isn’t easy to exist as a covid cautious couple but i think despite all the precautions and restrictions we still try our best to have fun together. it is also isn’t easy to have a partner who is on the same page in terms of how much we cherish our health, it helps that she’s always telling me she doesn’t feel like she’s missing out on anything by being covid cautious — it is more important for her to be able to do the things she loves. feels like we have been growing up together for the past almost 9 years, and it is just so wonderful to have each other for company in both difficult and joyous times. love, is simply being able to be utterly ourselves with each other, and that same love incubates a space for the other to become. as i become more of my self, the more i understand how much of her love plays a part in my becoming, the deeper my love for her goes. i would be so much less of a person without her, because she sees and knows who i am, before i can recognise it in myself.
I remember reading somewhere that just few decades ago we lived in small communities, unconnected by the internet. We would only need to cope with the happenings of this small community, and the occasional news we read on the newspaper. Nowadays we are bombarded non-stop with all the terrible things happening in this world. Now of all people I really hate escapism and denialism, but I can also recognise that our psychological and neurological capacities are not meant to cope with this non-stop deluge of events.
I am a lot more affected by this bombardment by the average person. Most people have a natural filter, but I don’t. I am saddened and pained by anything and everything. I have spent days, weeks, months, years in perpetual grief because of all the sadness and terror that exist in this world, and that did nothing except make me want to quit living in it. Is there a way my existence can feel sustainable to me?
I found it helpful to visualise my self being protected by some form of a barrier that acts as a filter for my life. I have to ask myself repeatedly what do I truly want to get out of this life, and how can I sustain my existence with some level of integrity? This makes it much clearer what are the things that I should keep within my sphere of existence, what I should regard as noise.
This is not easy for me at all because I have no filter by default. To artificially construct this virtual barrier, I have to maintain a consistent practice with my mind. Each time my mind veers too far out of this sphere, I have to consciously bring it back. Refocus it on the things that truly matter to me. I think this is only possible at this point because of the cumulative effect of the daily practices I have in my life for the past decade or so. Admittedly this is probably not a state I can maintain in times of fatigue and stress. A lot of things in my life have to be in place before I can be in a mental state focused enough to do this.
But I sense a change in my inner state in the past few weeks, which probably coincided with the time I decided to quit browsing reddit in the day. I was tired of being tired, of living in a certain way, of feeling totally helpless in a world determined to bombard our senses, and I kept thinking that I wish to be more intentional with my life, but I just couldn’t till then. I cannot really explain why I couldn’t, and then suddenly I could. I can only say that that once we set an intention there is a lot of unconscious work that happens, and the brain does respond to repetition. Summoning the will to quit browsing reddit gave me the inkling that I could probably try doing more, and it also recovered the mental energy I had lost because of doomscrolling.
There is a huge amount of psychological noise that exists in this world. There is too much of what other people are saying, what they are judging, what we perceive people to be thinking, all the chatter about trending events, all the rush to do something because everyone else is doing it. It is very easy to get swept into these tides without a strong sense of self and a strong sense of how we truly want to live. Everyone is using AI, so we all should – without giving any thought to whether we truly want to or not. What do we want, versus what are we conditioned to want? Do we know the difference?
When I was younger I had a very weak sense of self, if at all. I too would get swept into these things, even though I tend to be a little more rebellious than the average person. But it is much clearer to me now when I know something is not worth my attention.
Still it is not easy overcoming a lifetime history of being a doormat. But I have learnt in life that almost everything is a muscle and can be practiced. I get swayed and lost frequently like everyone else, but what matters is how long it takes for me to refocus my self, can I shorten the gap that exists between my negative spiralling and the realisation that I can break out of most of these spirals by reminding myself what is truly important?
This website is a time capsule of all ups and downs I have gone through. Sometimes the tone of my writing is extremely negative, other times I seem to have these inner-breakthroughs out of nowhere. I feel like in general the development of the personality is not a linear process, but I have this suspicion that as long as we have the courage to grow, we will always face periods of spirals because once we get a breakthrough we are again preparing to face a deeper, darker part of our selves. Or it is just part of life to get distracted and lost, especially the world is designed to press on us to conform. The journey of coming back to our selves never ends.
I wrote and rewrote this post several times because the concept I am trying to express feels very abstract to me and it was difficult to articulate in words. In this society we are either conditioned to have narcissistic and materialistic desires or we are pressured to give up our selves for the “greater good”. Then, there is this other end where people pursue spirituality so much that they unknowingly venture into a dimension that is not grounded into this reality, or they enter a dissociative state.
I personally think knowing what we truly want out of our lives, constantly asking our selves the same question because we will change as we age, then refocusing our present and priorities to match that – will go a long way into providing clarity and stability to our sense of self. Everything we perceive, think and decide is based on this sense of self. If our selves are all over the place, our lives will also inevitably feel all over the place. Our relationships will be fragile, because people are interacting with this unstable self too. What can the outcomes possibly be when all parties of the relationships are unstable?
People think that such focus on our selves is narcissistic. I argue that we seem self-absorbed precisely because we have no sense of self, so we are misled to pursue societal achievements and peer recognition thinking that they will prop up our sense of self. We are vain only because we believe we will only be recognised through our external performances.
I offer a suggestion that there is a sense of self that exists that doesn’t require an external gaze to feel more whole. It is possible to cherish our selves so much that we seek to protect our selves from external forces instead. To wish to maintain that integrity so much that external measurements cease to matter, because what matters more is living a life congruent to our inner-selves.
I have had glimpses of that, hence I wrote this post.
