Not another "love" story

It’s odd how every year seems to go faster as you get older. Here I am, almost a year later feeling blind sighted by the entire 12 months, 52 weeks, 365 days, 8765 hours, 525,600 minutes, and 31,556 seconds that made up this year. Amazing how you become a blip in someones life after they meant the world to you.

Sometimes I consider myself a bridge. I’ll meet a new guy and sometimes the very first time we’ll speak I’ll hear the sentence “you’re different than any other girl I’ve talked to before”. Something along those lines always seems to arise often in the course of the friendship, relationship, or simply conversation. It’s something I should be thankful for, a compliment, as some would say. But I’m tired of hearing it.

It’s not that I want someone to tell me that I’m exactly the same as the last girl they were with, or all my tendencies and quirks are that of similar people’s personalities. It’s that my ''relationships'', if I can even call them that, end for the same reason, not on bad terms, but simply general relationship problems. The reason for calling myself a bridge is because after they tell me for their first time that “I’m different than any other girl they’ve ever dated”, very soon after they find another girl, so similar to me in so many ways, and then stay with her for what feels like forever. I’m tired of that, when does someone lead me to a guy who stays with me?

After seeing this happen to me for the third time I sat and thought for hours, I thought about love and hate, and how they are indeed the strongest emotions, but they really are more similar than they are different.

I keep teetering between hate and love for the situation. They can be mistaken so often, but I never thought about it in that way before. I hate love, sometimes I wish I never fell in love, because I feel it’s an emotion that gives the human race something to strive for. The ultimate euphoria. It feels good only for a little, but takes work to keep up. So what’s the point? We work hard to get this feeling that everyone is dying to have and some people don’t even achieve. Even if you do it bites you in the ass on the way out. A final “goodbye” or what have you. Hate, on the other hand doesn’t do that. No one wants it and it doesn’t hurt you as much as love does. Hate burns people’s faces, love burns away dignity, pride, respect, trust. Hate doesn’t forgive, but it can forget. Love doesn’t forget, so it’s always there hurting you, tearing you apart, but love forgives.

I just needed to get this out there, I was then thinking about breaking up. How you’re never really fully over someone. When one person drops out of a ''relationship'' for whatever reason, the other is left out to dry. You’re out of sunlight, the wind isn’t blowing, and you’re on the ground. It’ll take forever to dry. So you don’t let go until someone else picks you up, pins you on the clothesline to feel the breeze and the sunlight.

I’m young, and just recently realize that I am also awful at getting over people. But I’m tired of dwelling. He’s my friend, a very good one at that. We liked each other, a lot. He has other girls now, but I'm sure he still likes me. He likes me as a friend, and cares about me. He's not the first one and he won't be the last one.

 I’m young, I’m flirty, I’m spontaneous, I’m goofy, I’m passionate, I’m determined, I’m strong, I surround myself with amazing friends, I have opinions, beliefs, ideas, thoughts, dreams, hates, loves, but for the past 3 years I’ve lost parts of myself every time I’m a bridge. This time I’m tired. No matter how many times I cry, how many times I scream and yell, how many times I don’t talk to people, it will still be there. It happened. I knew it was coming. So I guess it’s my turn to live.

As I rushed out of the house this morning trying to get to lab on time before I get in trouble, a tiny snow flake landed on my scarf. And that was all it took for me to pause. When is it almost winter already? In the midst of crazy life and millions other things, I have totally let autumn go by unnoticed.

I remember walking through the cemetery to work every other morning, thinking how beautiful all the leaves were, and made a mental note to myself to either bring my camera, or come here during the weekend and sketch. Those things never happened. Just like many other plans that I told myself I would finish and never did. Since when have I started a life of all talk, and no action ...?

My life has been mediocre. Classes, work, homework, all-nighters, exams, papers, Sigmas, meetings, occasional drunken nights, and more than occasional drunken encounters with various guys. When I look back on the past 2 months, I recall nothing. My life has been so unmemorable and uneventful that I can't even remember anything significant. And here I thought senior year of college was supposed to be the best year of your life. It is no different than my previous years, if not more sressful having to constantly carry the thought of graduation on my shoulders. Everything that my friends and I talk about are how we are so lost in life we have no idea we want to do after graduation. Midnight conversations, early morning conversations, odd-hour conversations, it's all about life, and choices. I feel like I'm wasting my time but then I have no idea what else I could do to make my life more meaningful.

I feel like I'm just floating aimlessly in this universe, without a sense of where I am, or even what I am. I m being influenced by all these forces that I lose all control. More than often, I wonder what I am doing amd what the purpose of my existence is.

I am lost, and alone. Thus, I try to not feel lost, and alone. I am even more of an attention-seeker than I have ever been. I contant look for reassurance that people acknolwedge my existence, and that they need to pay attention to it. That's why my life is such a mess. Honestly, I feel like I know the reason behind all of these lunatic moments and behaviors. Although I may just be in denial.

I don't think I ever get over it. And it left such a huge impact in my life that I am struggling and trying so many things trying to get back to my old self, and to gain back the control I used to have. I would be doing really well, before I slip. And everytime I slip, it takes me twice the effort to get back up again. I try to grab on anything on my way, but nothing is sturdy enough. It is so frustrating that I don't even want to think about it anymore.

"If a guy treat you like crap, genuinely he means to treat you like crap" - He's not that into you
I wish that I can just blindly believe this.

I just want to make another escape to some place new in the world. I miss South Africa. I miss Vietnam. I need to get away to somewhere to get rid of this suffocating feeling.

Christmas is coming. Maybe by the time New Year comes, everything will be better.

Moving on?

When things end, the first thing you hear is all of this really inspirational talk about “moving on.” Everyone suddenly becomes a walking motivational poster, telling you all about how you need to learn to forgive and forget, how time goes forwards and not backwards, and how we have to keep our heads up. Time passes relentlessly, and we are supposed to imitate it in our persistance. Things happen, and then they end, and we accept it.

But in practice, few things are harder to execute. The world continues spinning, yes, and those around you may forget about what happened, but that doesn’t mean it suddenly disappears from your rear-view mirror. Everything around us — every restaurant we eat in, every street we walk down, every movie we watch — becomes marked with the person we were when we did those things. Each relationship can be a sort of fingerprint, completely unique in its detail and entirely constructed of mutual memories and experiences. Sure, things end and you go back to being alone, but it’s not as though you suddenly become the person you were beforehand. Things have changed, you have changed, and there is no amount of forced forgetting that is going to make things be exactly as they were before.

I have often felt as though so much of my emotional life has been spent trying to “move on” from things that seem no more escapable than my own skin. Sure, I can ignore them, I can stop giving them the life that they need to occupy significant amounts of space in my daily routine, but I can’t just pretend they didn’t happen. And it has started to feel as though “move on” is in and of itself a misnomer. There is no moment at which you leave the things that happened to you and the people you love in a small pile on the side of the road and continue on without them. It is more a slow acceptance, if anything. One day, the presence of your past is like a thousand needles pricking you over every inch of your skin; the next, you have become so acquainted with the sting that you hardly notice the needles at all.

But we are still being touched by that past, all over, constantly. We are taught that this is a bad thing, that the parts of our lives we no longer acknowledge can just be shed like a heavy winter coat and moved on from. It’s hard not to feel like a failure when you find yourself incapable of simply packing up an old love and storing it away in the attic, never to consider outside of the occasional, wistful half-smile. People don’t work like that. Time may move in a completely linear fashion, but our lives are spread around it like a spider web, wrapping around each other and intersecting at inconvenient and difficult moments. There are people from whom you will never fully untangle yourself, but you will learn to live with their memory.

The challenge, it seems, should be just that — to accept our past, and integrate it into our lives in a constructive way. We are all full of ghosts, people and cities we no longer visit but within whom we felt incredibly alive, and there is no reason to pretend they never existed. I wish I could hold those ghosts closer even, telling them that I forgive them for any indiscretion I may have at one point tried to scrub away with a ball of steel wool. Because trying to erase someone completely only makes their presence in your life more pointed — they are an intruder, they are violating your emotional restraining order and reminding you you cannot escape them.

I don’t want to move on. I don’t want to leave my past in small increments behind me. I want to take something from every experience, good or bad, and find it useful in some tiny way. I don’t want the process of recovery from an ending to feel like a hill I have to climb, one that has a distinct beginning and end. I don’t need a thousand voices telling me to “get over it,” as though I could even if I wanted to. Most of all, I don’t want to fear every new love and every new adventure because I imagine that, if it doesn’t work out how I wanted it to, I will have to pretend it never happened at all. 

Read more at http://thoughtcatalog.com/2012/how-do-you-move-on/#iY2stsTaj1gSPGIK.99 

   When I get really annoyed at life (and when I'm bored in class), I go on Thought Catalog, and find a mind that is just as sarcastic and cynical as mine, and connect on that level.
    It is a good feeling to think (even just during a 50-min lecture) that there is someone out there who can relate to you, and your oh-so-insignificant problems that you are afraid to tell your friends (because they already heard it 50 million times)
    So here goes another Thought Catalog post that makes my day a bit more cynical, and a bit better

How To Be My Ex-Boyfriend

MAY. 3, 2012

By JANUARY NELSON 

Be a lovable asshole. Have your insensitivity be mostly brought on by your profound inability to lie about anything. Tell me the truth when a dress makes my body look kind of lumpy. Don’t be afraid to reject me when you’re too tired. Don’t hesitate to tell me to take a shower. Say all of these things with a certain level of obliviousness that makes it difficult for me to actually get mad at you. There’s no venom in your voice. It’s treated with a casual matter-of-factness. You’re just tElLiNg iT lIkE iT Is! I never wished I could date a liar until I met you.

Be 30% cuter than me. Have the inequity in our attractiveness hover over us like a cloud of doom, bringing all of my insecurities to the surface. Get hit on by beautiful women wherever we go and have it made clear that I’m not seen as a threat. The audacity of these women—to treat me like I’m totally invisible! I never felt ugly until I was with someone so beautiful. I never thought of the different values of attractiveness until I was with a permanent comparison. Despite seeing other women flirt with you though, you never made me feel anything less than beautiful. This makes it hard to get angry and punish you for simply being a babe who’s universally desirable.

Be the one who loves less. It’s clear from the beginning that this will be the dynamic of our relationship; these are the roles we’re destined to play. It will always be me trying to extract things from you that you’re ultimately incapable of giving me. You resist and then occasionally give in which will foster hope for a period of time but eventually we’ll be right back where we started. It’s unclear as to why you can’t love me. Even after all this time, I’m left with a lot of unanswered questions. It’s not like you’re a cold person. As much as I want to, I can’t paint you as a villain. That would make everything so much easier and offer me a solid explanation as to why things didn’t work out, but the reality is that you aren’t a cold man. There are frosty bits to your personality but as a whole you exude warmth. Warmth that wasn’t enough to keep me warm.

Be a coward. Fail to break up with me. Instead, push me away so badly that you’ve given me no choice but to do it myself. Rude. If you fall out of love with me, you can at least have the decency to be the one to break it off. Do you know how hard it is to break up with someone you still love because you’ve been backed into a corner? You made me clean up your mess and I still resent you for it.

Be someone who’s hard to let go of. For the brief moments we’ve interacted after the break up, I’ve felt myself being brought back to life and it’s pathetic. I didn’t cry for a year but when I ran into you on the street, it was the first thing I did. I went home and sobbed in bed like a sad cliche. For a second, I thought all my insides were dead, but you proved that they’re still working. They still work but only for someone like you—which means that they’re positively useless.

Try to erase me. Unfollow me on Twitter, hide my feed on Facebook. Try to forget I ever existed. I wish it was that easy for me but I guess some people are just easier to erase than others. 

Read more at http://thoughtcatalog.com/2012/how-to-be-my-ex-boyfriend/#lseLpzBUYUgd2Sxt.99 

Be a dream catcher.

At some point along the way of classes, organizations and ten million other things in mind, I has forgotten how to dream.

Truth is, I have been slapped in the face so many time by reality and I have been looking up to so many people that are better than me, that I forgot about myself and my own ability. I forgot that it didn't matter if people who were better than me could not make it very far in life. I forgot that it didn't matter what you were born with, it is what you really work for that counts. I have been trying hard to accomplish lots of things, but they are all because "If others can do it, so do it." It is not because, "I want to do i, because I can."

I have been shadowing other people's dreams.

Thus, for the next two years, my most critical point of my career, I will try harder and harder, to find out about myself and what I really want to do and to show people what I can really do.

My dream: John Hopkins University. I will make it there somehow.
It will happen.

For the strangers of my life.

When you're young, you tend to exaggerate everything. Everything is either forever, or never.

When you find a girl friend that you can hang out with, go shopping with, study with, and talk about guys with, you call her your best friend, forever. When you enter college and pick a major, you sincerely believe that that will be your career for the rest of your life. And when you meet a guy and start liking him, you think that that happiness will last, for a very long time.

After a while, your "bff" finds a new group of friends, and you two start drifting apart. Or she will move to another city and you will cry and miss her, and text her like crazy for about a month, then you two move on with life. You find out that after all you don't like any of the classes in your major, and you pick up another field and start over. The guy you like no longer reciprocates your feelings. You start to have fights and eventually, you hardly talk to each other.

And before you move on to another chapter in your life, you feel the pain, and shed the tears. You are scared. You are afraid of the unknown. What if you can no longer go back to the stage where you were before? What if the future is even more painful than what you have to go through right now? However, whether you want to or not, life will push you through.

Sometimes, when you think about it, things are not everlasting. Moving on shouldn't be such a scary feeling. It should be like, hunger. When you are hungry, it is uncomfortable and irritating. You find your favorite food to eat and you feel happy. You feel like that amazing feeling will last forever. Obviously, it won't. And you will be hungry again, you will have to go and put some efforts into finding food again, and you will be forever searching for something new to spice up your appetite. It is a never ending cycle. Yet, no one complains about having to feed themselves. They are more than happy to work to satisfy their hunger.

Then, what is the difference between food, and relationships? We should come into a relationship knowing that eventually, things will go away, and we will have to work hard to find something that will make us happy again. If that is the case, people wouldn't be afraid of letting go. People will not need to try to hang on to each other. They will not be afraid of having to expedite time and efforts into a new relationship. They will not be scared because they should know that no matter what, they will find something, or someone, to make them happy again.

I have been through many of these "hungry" moments. I am scared of letting go because I don't like the feeling of being left with nothing. Yet, I realize that as much as it takes to move on, it is also quite a good feeling when I find something new. That newly generated source of happiness, the tingling of feeling of being cared for, and being the sole attention of someone. To be loved.

I think I need to teach myself to be more brave and courageous, and teach myself to believe that after all, "tomorrow is another day."

I do not know how long this happiness will last nor whether I will have to go through all the sadness again. But I believe that whatever I go through, the memories are worth cherishing.

Thank you for coming into my life when I thought I could not be stronger. Thank you for letting me finding the strength, and letting me believe in myself again. Thank you for making me happy. Thank you for allowing me to believe that there will always be something better for me out there.

It is because of you that I can always let go and keep moving forward.