Month: July 2019

Last week I finally received the painting I bought almost two months ago. It’s a painting I bought in the name of “birthday present to myself”. It’s also the first time I bought some serious art, serious as in, it’s not exactly a small amount purchase.

Since it’s a first time, it’s more or less a symbolic event for me. As one grows old, one would realize the “first-times” in life happens less and less. What made me make the decision of purchase? I guess there’re two very important reasons. The first is, I can afford it. The second is, the moment I saw this painting on the social network of the artist, I felt a real connection and I knew I wanted it, I wanted to own it. I guess those are the two most important conditions if anyone is to buy any art, or at least to people with very limited budget as me.

The process of buying this painting, though, is more dramatic than I expected. When I approached the gallery at the beginning of June, the painting was on an exhibition in Berlin. The gallery owner at first told me he could ship the painting from Berlin, which would be cheaper than if he brought it back to US. After two weeks’ wait, I asked about the shipping and he said he had to bring the painting back for some documentation’s purpose, which made sense. After some more wait, the gallery owner told me he’d finally wrapped it up and built a box crate for it and it’s ready to be shipped to me! We talked about the options of insurance level of shipping and stuff and I thought, finally, it’s happening. Except that it wasn’t.

Two days later the bad news arrived, the gallery guy’s car was smashed and the painting package he left in his car was stolen. MY PAINTING WAS STOLEN. It took me a while to register this information, like, what on earth are the odds of that? Is this some kind of joke? Why is this happening to me? I was seriously upset by this unexpected turn of event for a few days and was ready to get refunded for my 50% deposit.

Three days later, in mid-July, when I was on a business trip in Shanghai and woke up one morning feeling I have nothing good to expect on that day, I saw a message on my phone saying that the painting WAS FOUND. The fliers that the gallery guy posted and handed out actually worked. It took me another while to register this information, like, what on earth are the odds of that? It better not be some kind of joke! I was so happy instantly and rolled on the huge hotel bed for 3 rounds.

It took another two week’s wait for it to be shipped to me but I didn’t mind waiting anymore, not at all. It’s funny how we only learn to truly appreciate the simplest things that we usually take for granted after it’s almost taken away from us. In this case, I simply couldn’t be more grateful that the painting was found and I really got to own it at some point. And my gratitude was at its maximum the night I received the package, opened the package, met the painting for real for the first time, held the wooden frame on my thighs, and walked around with it in my apartment trying to find a nest for it.

There’s a Chinese saying “好事多磨”, which means good things would take more setbacks to realize. I guess this is one of those cases. And thanks to the whole series of events, this painting is now officially a painting with a story behind.

So there it is, my story of buying art. I guess people buy art for many different reasons. Some buy art with a clear investment thinking. Some buy art more for the emotional and aesthetic value of it. Some buy art simply becoz the buying itself is an act that brings them satisfaction. I only started to have the intention of buying art in recent years (since I started to have a little saving), and I’m happy I finally acted on it. If there’s anything that my story reveals, I hope it reveals that buying art is not only a rich people thing.

I don’t know if it counts as a rough start for a first-timer in the art market. As volatile as it turned out to be, I guess it means my art karma is not that bad after all. I wish I can afford to buy myself a piece of art that I really appreciate every year. And more importantly, I wish I can always appreciate art as art is.

P.S. I’ve been running 20 mins for more than 30 days now (not everyday, like every other day). As expected, my body doesn’t really want more, and it’s not really getting easier. I’m going to extend this experiment to 100 days.

I started going to a therapist more than two years ago. I have never been secretive about that, while I also have never really talked about this experience in details with people, even with those who are/have been close.

I’m not going to disclose the details of my therapies here, for apparent reasons, but after two and half years, I do feel like sharing two cents of why I feel it necessary to go to therapy and what can be expected from it.

Being an oversensitive kind of person all my life, I’ve always been very drawn to the act of psychological analysis of people and their behavior as I need to rationalize things to counter-balance the “too-muchness” constantly felt. And out of all the human beings, the most puzzling piece for me is, inevitably, myself.

I remember planting the seed of wanting to see a therapist when I watched Annie Hall by Woody Allen decades ago, in which Woody Allen’s character was mumbling about his therapist anecdote in his signature bourgeois self-mockery fashion. I must be in my early 20s when I first watched it and I thought, “wow, what a dream it is to be able to start a sentence with ‘my therapist said…’ one day.” (Yes, I fancied being one of the bourgeoisie and Woody Allen certainly contributed to it.) But back then, seeing a therapist feels more like an immature fantasy, something intriguing and might even be “fun” to try. It came from a curiosity about my undiscovered self, instead of an urgency to deal with real pressing issues.

When I started to seek for professional help more than two years ago, the most straightforward reason was, I guess, the relationship of that time wasn’t going well. And it agonized me a great deal. But I know clearly, deep down, that this was just a symptom, the agony that I was experiencing from that failing relationship. It was the symptom of about 30 years’ accumulation of unanswered questions, uncleared emotions and unearned experiences. I felt that I was drowning in my 30 years of life and I couldn’t resurface by myself anymore, not without a firm pull from another hand. And I felt that that I couldn’t go on anymore if I don’t pause to make sense of my pain, my anger, my sadness, my edges, my misplaced love, my destructive behaviours and my incompatibility with the outside world. That was the real reason why I started to see my therapist, Julia.

It’s been quite a ride over the past two years. In front of Julia, I’ve shed tears a million times, I’ve lost my temper, I’ve argued aggressively, I’ve been triggered badly, I’ve told stories I’ve never told anyone and there’re still more I’m not ready to tell yet and I don’t know if I ever will. I’ve spit out unedited thoughts and I’ve looked hard into my behaviors and decisions over and over again. And I did have my doubts. I’ve wondered if this is really helping anything but I’ve also questioned myself what do I really expect from it. Looking back, it’s a rather slow progress but there is a progress. (I’ve bragged about it pretty recently so I’m gonna skip this part here). Maybe this is a progress that’d happen anyways, but having someone who’s (paid to be) there to have witnessed it and is probably more aware of my progress than myself, is after all, a pretty assuring thing.

The other day I was watching a show, in which one of the characters (starred by Nicole Kidman) was testifying on court for her custody of her children. She was asked by the judge why she wasn’t even confessional about some of her destructive behaviors to her therapist, and she said it’s especially hard to tell her therapist, I quote, “becoz she’s worked so hard on me and, I think I just, I desperately wanted to see myself through her eyes and see progress.” And exactly that line, it simply struck me. I couldn’t resonate more with it becoz there have been many times I struggled to confess to my therapist of things I feared that’d disappoint her that I almost didn’t wanna go to a session.

Today I don’t go to therapy that often. Even when I go, it’s more like a regular dusting instead of some serious digging around or urgent salvage. But still every time I’d prepare myself for the confessional mode and the uneasiness that comes with it. It’s not all comfortable, becoz being 100% truthful about ourselves is not always in our nature. And with the busy urban life that keeps rushing us forward, we’ve more or less grown into the habits of covering up the messy part that we subconsciously wanna shy away from. We probably won’t even realize that if we’re not paying someone an expensive hourly rate to specifically uncover that. And just by being truthful as much as we can, in front of another person’s face, is in a lot of ways, already a significant progress.

I can’t give anyone any advice if they should seek therapy help, as it’d be a completely different journey for different people. And throughout the whole time, I’ve never seen myself as a patient, at most, I see myself as a temporarily lost person seeking for directions. But I guess the least I can say is, therapy does give one a chance to tell the truth about oneself, to chew on the truth, to acknowledge the truth and eventually, to work on the truth. Some people spend their whole life seeking for the truth, some people spend their whole life running away from it. But either way, after all, it is only the truth that matters.

P.S. I titled this piece as “In Treatment” in dedication to one of my favourite shows, In Treatment, produced by HBO more than 10 years ago. It’s definitely not thrilling to watch, with its overly simple setting and characters. It’s like a “salad” in shows, but provoking in its own tasteless way. I’d recommend it if anyone wants a “free therapy.”

In the past week I tried a meal plan service after a colleague told me about it. We are both single girls who doesn’t cook, so a meal plan sounds like a perfect solution of one tricky problem in life for our kind. It works for her, so I thought I’d give it a try.

Since the point is to eat healthy and in balance, I chose the low calories meal in small portion (becoz by default I just assumed small is the size for me). It is a mistake, it’s too little food for me, and too healthily plain that it upsets me everyday when I opened the food box. But It’s already ordered for the whole week, I had to stick with it. So everyday, when I sat in the office pantry having my sorry-looking meal box, feeling sorry for myself, some colleagues would pass by, see it, and feel sorry for me, hidden behind comments like “Why do you even need to eat meal plan?”, “Are you trying to lose weight?”, “You’re already so skinny.”

At first I’d try to explain myself. But after a while I stopped trying, it’s not necessary to share my single girl’s eating difficulty and it’s not anyone’s obligation to relate to a single girl’s eating difficulty. And mostly, I don’t even know why I’m eating a meal plan myself.

To be clear, I’ve never been the kind of person who’s cautious of what they eat all the time – partly coz I do look skinny (*this topic is worth another separate piece), but mostly coz I just don’t wanna bother. Eating, as much as it appears to be a tricky problem for my case, is after all at least supposed to be an enjoyment in some sort. And I simply don’t enjoy eating a lot of those trendy healthy bullshit food. In the universe of food, the love of my life is chicken nuggets, and my all-time comfort meal is the “sharing box” from McDonald’s, which includes 4 nuggets and 4 wings and I literally would never share it. In fact, one day last week I forgot to bring my dinner meal box home, I was quite annoyed at myself and decided to maximize the failure by having McDonald’s instead. It feels like cheating on my meal plan when I’m supposed to be committed to it (for the week) . It feels like acting out when you’re on a rehab of something. I’m not proud it. But honestly, that’s the only meal I enjoyed eating in the past week.

On Friday night, when I was eating my chicken breast and broccoli in the empty office pantry with 6pm sunlight shedding through the gigantic office building window, (I was hungry since 4pm) I can’t help but reviewing the reasons behind a meal plan. Besides the obvious convenience of never needing to fuss over “what/where to eat”, and the hypocritical satisfaction of eating healthy (and overpriced) food, it’s really more about a sense of control, something people are kinda obsessed with and is probably oversold in our modern society. Control over what we eat. Control over how many calories we intake. Control over how many calories we burn. Control over what materials we wear when we burn those fucking calories. Control over how we look. Control over what shade the skin glows, what angle the brows tilt, what degree the hair curls. The scary thing is, the level of control would only keep escalating. There’d always be products, services, professional advices that match up with or promote a higher and broader degree of control.

To be honest, I’m doing most of the above, if not all. By all means, I do think well-being and making informed decisions are pressingly important. And I’m trying to train myself to become a more self-disciplined person in all areas. Therefore, while I’m already making so much effort trying to control so many aspects in life, the meal plan is kind of like the last straw that crushed my “I’m living a healthy balanced life” fantasy and threw me into a “absolutely joyless camp”. I stood in that camp and thought, wait, I didn’t sign up for this, did I?

Healthy or not, I guess the bottom line is being able to see myself as a fleshed human being, instead of a hinged machine. And having a meal plan makes me feel the latter (whilst having chicken nuggets makes me feel like the former).

At the end of the day, there is only a certain degree of things we can control in life, and a lot more out of our control. For me, what I eat, I decide, is something I’d rather leave it in the “not meticulously controlling” category. I’m not sure if I’d order the meal plan again, but if I do, I’d at least make sure to order a larger portion and to pair with a glass of wine when I eat.

That being said, I am perfectly aware that I should really eat less chicken nuggets.

P.S. Talking about self discipline, I binge-watched Stranger Things S3 until 4am on Saturday. What can I say. I’m just a human bean.