Month: February 2015

This kind of piggy backs on some of my earlier posts, but in my last relationship I never felt enough.

I was never pretty enough, good enough, talented enough, smart enough, funny enough, cool enough. Never ever enough of anything. I was called chubby, that I didn’t sing well, that I was too clingy, anything and lots of everything.

I’ve tried to rewind myself and stop thinking a lot of these things about myself, but it’s hard. Five years of my life, I just felt pretty lousy and I let that fuel me into being mistreated and not thinking clearly.

I’m at a different state in my life, but I did still kind of feel a bit of this sentiment.

No I didn’t feel that fat, and I felt like my singing was nice. I felt I was pretty witty and dry kind of funny in a way my dad gets perfectly, but strangers think I’m serious. I now acknowledge, in a not arrogant way, how intelligent I am. And cool? I think I’m pretty cool. I mean I have a blog now, isn’t that supposed to be trendy?

But what really haunted me about my last relationship was, why aren’t I enough? And what left me afterwards, was that somehow it ending was a confirmation of that fact. That it did end, so I wasn’t enough. It somehow made that feel even realer to me.

Now I know that it never would have worked out, but on nights where I feel pretty lousy about myself for many reasons whether they be an assignment, stress, or my skin, it seems to come back and haunt me. It kind of sits on my shoulder and reminds me, well maybe you aren’t. It’s like that inner voice that whispers into your ear all the things you fear when you’re alone at night.

I’m not really sure how to make it shut up for good.

But this didn’t start with my ex. I think I used to just feel not enough. I wasn’t pretty enough or smart enough for lots of people to like me, I wasn’t funny enough to be cool. I wasn’t relaxed enough to be perceived as not nerdy. It was a million things all resulting in me not being enough.

And I’m trying really hard to change it.

I take a lot of pictures of myself, a ton. And I take them mostly of me, whether it be funny or silly or me with my face. I do. And a lot of people think they’re narcissistic. Well, no one sees them, but that’s what that inner voice keeps telling me.

But for me, they’re a way to tell my inner self, I see you. I think you’re pretty, I think you’re funny, I think you’re goofy. I see you, and I like it enough to take a picture. I think you look fabulous, I think you look cooky, I think you look like you. What I see, I like.

It may seem silly now that selfies are a thing and what not. But no one else sees them, only me. It’s something that’s only for me, and a way for me to acknowledge myself and to truly see me.

Chinese New Year just passed and I thought I would take the time to reflect on what I’ve done since the non-lunar new years. Ultimately, I’m still working on my goals, and there’s nothing wrong with them.

I recognize it takes time to change and it takes time to form new habits and change mindsets. That’s something I learned with my monthly goals, were that some of them weren’t that viable. I learned that it takes 21 days for a new habit to take hold, which probably explains why I’ve totally fallen down on almost every weekly goal I had…But I won’t let that get me down.

I thought I would use this time to make some goals I’ve been recently thinking about.

Goals for this new (lunar or not) year:

I would like to find a part time job teaching English. I feel I could be good at this and I want to find a job that I could do well, not just some mindless job. Obviously, if I still can’t find one, perhaps this would change.

Receive my TEFL certification. I just gotta get into gear for this one, it’ll take time and work and I will start in March.

I want to do more research on grad schools, look at the programs and see what they’ve published and find some recommendations. I want to get a better sense if further graduate school is for me.

Additionally, I want to decide if I want to take the GRE, the grad school entrance exam.

I want to become way better at German. This will really be good when I can go back to Munich and start speaking more German.

That’s it. I think they’re pretty good, pretty manageable. I feel good about them. It’s where a lot of my stress comes from now, and if I can get them resolved in this year, that would be great. So we’ll see how this goes!

Guilt is a crazy monster. It’s consuming and it can make you act in all sorts of ways.

When I was younger, I didn’t come to terms with my own guilt and instead it made me act angrily at other people.

It still happens occasionally that when I feel guilty, I act out angrily towards other people. It’s just one of those matters of projection. I wish I could say it doesn’t happen now and that I deal well with my guilt, but that’s not always true. Sometimes it’s better to just feel sad and upset about my guilt and not take it out on other people.

In comparison, I think that’s a lot better, there’s no need to hurt or get angry at others for my own guilt.

It’s something I hope to be a lot better at in the future.

I suppose it’s always best to just deal with the guilt and try to resolve or make peace with it. But as we all know, that’s quite difficult to do. I’m sure many people have been hurt or angry and taken it out on other people. If we were all perfect people we wouldn’t do that, but we’re not. I’m certainly not, but would like to be better!

I really dislike games sometimes. Not because I don’t like to play or not because I don’t have fun, but because of the competitiveness. It’s that floodgate, that door I don’t want to open. I can get really competitive.

I really have only two switches here, on and off, either full on or none at all. I’ve just lived with none at all, and it’s been okay. I don’t miss being competitive. But I wondered why I didn’t like being competitive and games and what not.

They’re not fair. They’re about luck, manipulation, and an always loser. There are so many instances where no matter how well you play, you lose, just because the luck is against you. They’re about trying to trick people and get them to do something that’s better or lying.

And no matter what, they’re always about finding a loser.

It’s fine to say you love games. I just don’t. I don’t like any of those. I like to think if I play my cards right, I’ll be okay. I like to not have to manipulate people. And I like a world in which it doesn’t matter who is a loser, or if there is one.

So it’s fine, and probably right, to say I can’t handle competitive games. And it’s absolutely true.

I don’t judge people who love them. Just different strokes for different folks. I don’t think they’re worse people at all, they just like the strategy, the chase, the invisible crown.

I just don’t want it.

Closure. That’s what everyone wants. They always want to know what went wrong, which is totally understandable, how do you improve if you never know what to improve on?

And what always irks, bothers, and keeps people up at night is when they don’t know. When they don’t know what went wrong. It’s morphs from wanting to be better to obsession, wondering what they did wrong, was it me, was it my habits, what happened! It becomes something you can’t close the book on, because when your next relationship similar things happen, you can’t help bringing it back in your mind, “maybe this will be what ends us”.

I never got closure on the end of my relationship. For a while I struggled with that, I wondered, “What did I do wrong? What about me wasn’t right? What should I or did I say?” and it kept me up at night. I wondered what wasn’t right about me. I moved on, but it irked me. It nagged and I wondered, why.

And today, I know why. It was him. It wasn’t me, because I tried the best I could and maybe so did he (although I doubt it). You may say, well isn’t “it’s the other person” the oldest excuse in the book? But I won’t get into my particular situation.

The whole relationship I would take the blame for things I had no blame in, just so I could fix it. If it was my fault, at least I could fix it and work on it. But it never fixed, no matter how long I tried, because, get ready for it, it wasn’t my fault.

In the end, we just didn’t work, not because I didn’t try, but because we were never going to work. From the position I live in now, I know that. It wasn’t about what I did wrong, it was that it would never have worked.

It’s not really closure. I didn’t get to break up first, never got to tell someone how bad they were, never got to say goodbye, but I think it’s the best I’ll ever get.

I have never been a really polite person. With my family I never said excuse me for burping and with my partner now I didn’t. Until he said it really bothered him, for him it was a respect thing. And I got really mad, mad that I had to change my behavior, but then I realized why I was really mad.

I was really mad because I had to literally excuse myself for my behavior, something that was totally natural and necessary, because I could explode if I didn’t. Plus when I am really sick and nauseous, burping helps me the most.

Yeah yeah, I know I’m a rude person. I can live with that, but what I couldn’t live with was that people were telling me I had to apologize, excuse myself, for something I felt should have been fine. Historically, belching and bodily functions were more accepted than it is today. Society and history has changed a lot and made it more regulated with manners and eating practices to disallow certain bodily behaviors and expressions. It was about creating a more rigid order about not only what was normal and abnormal, but what was allowed and disallowed. Burping was excluded and deemed rude and inappropriate. But let’s just remember, it wasn’t always that way.

I’m not trying to excuse it, if people feel it is rude, that’s okay, I can respect that. But just the idea behind it irks me and makes my skin crawl.

I never want to feel ashamed or have to apologize for me and what I do or am. I don’t think it’s a particular deal to burp, it doesn’t bother me or when people do it, I don’t think it’s gross, that doesn’t bother me. But being forced to say “excuse me” every day while feeling like I’m going to throw up and literally doing the only thing that made me feel less sick sickened me. It’s not like I burp for fun or try to burp my ABC’s. It sickened me because I don’t think anyone should need to say something like that. I can’t think of a behavior like burping where I feel people should have to say excuse me.

Maybe urinating in public. But let’s be real, they shouldn’t need to say excuse me, they should just be able to find a bathroom. That was a horrible tangent….

Anyway, I dislike being made and needed to verbally excuse myself for something I don’t think there’s anything wrong with.

But let’s also be real, I will still say it. Because I love and respect people who might feel it is disrespectful. Ultimately, while I hate myself doing it, I care about people that I love more. And in public.

Which is pretty sad I guess, because beliefs and principles be damned, societal pressure can get pretty heavy isn’t it? Because if I walked around and burped and what not, how fast do you think I’d be called rude and disrespectful?

(Which is how it has to function, you have to feel like you’ll be an outsiders, disrespected, and taboo if you don’t follow societal conventions….or have really no care for what people think of you, which (sadly) I don’t have)

Stronger people than I would stand up for what they believe in, unapologetic expression.

And I’m not doing it to be rude, and if you can’t stomach that, then just take the abstract notion I’m talking about. Because it’s not just about burping, it’s about feeling like I’ve always lived in a position in life where I need to excuse myself, for being ‘bossy’, for ‘taking control’, for asking questions, for being somewhere I wasn’t supposed to. I have always felt that I’ve needed to apologize because of the gender I occupy and the position in life I occupy.

I want to be unapologetic about who I am.

I have missed so much about the US, but mostly food, let’s be real. Isn’t that what feels the most comfy about home that you miss?

Food: Bagels, Donuts, Chipotle, Delis and Deli Sandwiches, Swiss Miss Hot Coco, Pull and Peel Twizzlers (not because I used to eat this that much, but because they occupy a special nostalgic place in my heart and I was on a roll)

Baking wise: VANILLA EXTRACT!

General: How easy everything is, Shopping centers (one stop for all shopping needs), Forever21, Drugstore’s (although here you can test the products and colors which is a HUGE plus, but still I miss the range available in the US), more ‘natural’ type of products (it hasn’t really caught on here).

Obviously all of this besides my friends and family <3

WAIT< and obviously LIBRARIES! I miss those a ton, being able to get out any book I wanted and keep them. You can keep them a month here, but the selection for English books isn’t as good.

In the past, I have had a very on-off caring method. It was really hard for me to move somewhere in the middle, it was either I gave it my all or I backed off a lot. This happened a lot when people were in trouble and wouldn’t open up to me or accept my help. It became really painful for me to continue pouring my heart towards a stone wall and so I just switched off.

I don’t think this was the right thing to do at all. But I just got so caught up, so invested in caring, that when they couldn’t or wouldn’t, it hurt me (maybe wrongly so). People have limits and when I was younger, it was hard for me to stand by and support people despite them, especially if they got in the way of what they wanted to change.

I think this was a pretty horrible way to do things. And I wonder if I do it today, actually I don’t really anymore. I’ve matured and gotten a lot better at it, but still I feel myself sometimes wanting to slip back in.

Lately I’ve gotten into the mindset of be the friend I want to have. So all the qualities I want in a friend, I want to be. It’s made me change a lot of things about myself and made me grow, I think. It’s harder now that a lot of my closest friends are so far away and we don’t talk as much as we did, but I am trying really hard.

Doesn’t the title say it all?

Last year I did a lot to try to slowly make more progress in this area. And while I don’t feel these are new years resolutions, I do feel like this are lifetime goals maybe?

But I am going to write a list of things I want to do to make me a ‘better’ person and then try to do one more of these every week. Some are small, some are large. Maybe I won’t succeed, but I will try, and I think that’s enough. Hopefully, they will just become habit and I’ll truly change. That’s my goal if anything, to change. If this process changes me, even if I don’t, for example brush my teeth twice a day, I will have changed and that truly is enough.

So for my list:

1) Brush my teeth everyday

2) Take my vitamins regularly (usually I have streaks where I do, then stop, etc)

3) Reduce my nervous habits

4) Doing yoga everyday for not only exercise, but also peace of mind

This is what I am going to try to do. If I fall off the bandwagon, I’ll put them back on for the next week until they stick. I am confident it will happen. And of course because we live in the world we do, they are reminders on my google calender. I’ll put them in my real calender too, but since I won’t be looking everyday for school, I won’t check it as often. We shall see how many of these stick.

I did a presentation on cannibalism in fairy tales, I could talk about that for a while, but it made me think of fairy tale justice instead.

When I was a kid, and even now, I got this idea in my head that the good people would always triumph in the end, that no matter how hard it got for them, their goodness would prevail. Furthermore, I thought that no matter how many victories the bad guys would win, they would ultimately lose the war. That good would always triumph and bad would fall.

This is something that is in a lot of fairy tales, think Snow White for example. They present justice in a black and white sense. No matter how many times Snow White opens the door for the Step Mother Witch and lets her con her, in the end she survives and the Step Mother Witch doesn’t. Despite falling into a coma, her goodness (illustrated by her natural affinity to nature and the animals) prevails.

And if you think closely, it’s in a lot of books and tales.

And so I thought that this was the way the world worked in real life, that no matter how good I was, or how much I was hurt or suffered, in the end I would be okay, that my goodness would prevail. I thought all you needed to be was good, but that is pretty far from the truth isn’t it? Because really horrible bad things happen to great people, they’re wronged, killed, oppressed, hurt, and sometime, maybe more than that, the bad guy gets away. There is no justice, the wrong isn’t punished and the right isn’t rewarded. Maybe this is super cynical, but I think I had this jaded illusion in the past. So maybe it’s just more realistic.

I’m not saying that the bad always will win and that why bother being good because it ultimately means nothing, I am merely saying, that being good isn’t enough. There is basic injustice, different backgrounds, different reasons why you can’t achieve what you want no matter how hard you work.

I’m not saying don’t try, it’s important to try because that’s what stops you from slipping downwards, but maybe be realistic. Well at least that’s what I’ve gotten from it.

Because I’ve had moments where all I think is, “This isn’t fair, I have done literally everything right, so why is this happening to me?” and at this moment, depending on the person you are, you may say, well God gives us challenges, or it’s fate, or we’re never given anything we can’t handle, or anything like that. But since I’m not sure where I stand in that department, I was just left with a sense of profound hurt, not because I was hurt, but because I felt the world had wronged me. That they had taken something I believed in with my whole heart and showed me that it was a sham. And it was really hard to admit to myself, that no it isn’t fair, but it is what it is. Life isn’t fair.

I know that’s something so many people say, but I always kind of thought, maybe it’s not, but shouldn’t it be?

So maybe that’s why I feel the way I do, or do the work I’ve done in the past.

But this presentation has certainly taught me a lot about myself and how I feel about the world.