December 2019 – A clean, well-lighted place.

December 30, 2019June 29, 2020

「week 29」Ringing out the old

It’s this time of the year again. The date on the calendar is reading a mixed sense of anxiety and hope. Another year has passed, are we closer to the things we want or further? At this time of the year, we seem to always secretly think that “let’s just get it over with”, wishing that a change of vintage would just miraculously write things over.

In a nutshell, I am actually quite happy with my 2019. It’s probably the one year that I spent the most alone time in my life. I traveled by myself four times throughout the year, two of them profoundly changed my perspectives — a 6-day unplugged silent retreat in Bali and a long-overdue first trip to Paris. I got a new job, made more money. I reignited an old passion for piano. I took my body serious and trained hard. It’s a year I didn’t share myself with anyone. A year I fully retreated to the basics. A year I worked hard to make me re-like myself.

Last time this year, I was alone in Bali. I didn’t intend to be alone. (Even for me, someone who travels solo all the time, I still would prefer to be not alone for that time of the year.) But I didn’t really have a choice. My relationship ended before the trip I planned with my ex so I had to go by myself.

I booked a volcano sunrise tour for Jan 1st, so I celebrated new year’s eve by dining alone at 5pm in the best restaurant in Ubud center and went to bed at 9pm. I woke up at 2:30am the next day, a tour guide picked me up and drove me to the volcano area. It was a long drive, we chitchatted a little bit. I looked out the window at the moon, feeling both sleepy and nervous, for I really dreaded climbing a mountain and I knew it’d kill me for my pathetic level of muscle strength. I started to climb up following a local guide in pure darkness. It was slowly lighting up. People passed ahead of me one after another while I was panting like a cow. It was as tough as I imagined, if not more. By the time we arrived at the peak, the first sunbeam of 2019 was out. It’s hard to describe how I felt at that moment. I was both exhausted and excited. I had no one to share the excitement with. I remember thinking to myself: it’s not that scary, isn’t it? (I was wrong, it was really scary going down the hill.)

When I was back to ground level alive after scratching and scrambling and cursing my way down the hill, I posted on Instagram and said: “I reckon there’s no better new year present than this, stronger legs, stronger heart.”

Looking back, I do believe I have lived up to my own expectations this year.

A few days ago I realized I sort of made a list of resolutions sometime last year. So I dug it out and did a self-review. The result, surprisingly, is only 50% disappointing. Attaching it below for everyone’s entertainment. (I wrote it in Chinese originally, so I’m keeping the Chinese and giving a quick translation in English.)

New Year Resolution 2019:

Behaviorally:

狠狠加大阅读量。不是for pleasure only的阅读量，是真正通过量变达到质变的阅读量。每天集中时段阅读一小时以上。每本new yorker至少读2篇（不包括shouts and murmurs). 确保身边永远有书可看。
Read, a lot, not for pleasure only, but read to the extent that qualitative change happens. Read one hour everyday. Read at least 2 articles in every issue of New Yorker.(excluding shouts and murmurs). Make sure there’s always a book around.

Review: Failed. Stopped reading books after Paris. And only read New Yorker occasionally.

写作。除了平时的随笔和日记，每个月进行一次短篇写作尝试。
Write. Except essay and diary, try to write a short story every month.

Review: 80% on target. Didn’t manage to make progress on short story.

显著减少社交网络使用。social networking screentime降至1.5hr以下。有意识地养成每天只在固定时间（如午饭、晚饭等）看社交网络的习惯。
Significantly cut down on social mediating. Keep social network screentime under 1.5 hour a day. Develop a habbit to only look at SNS at particular times in a day (eg lunch, dinner).

Review: hmmmmm. pretty much failed. my phone addiction is more serious than ever – I blame it on the new iPhone 11pro.

每周健身3次——yoga、fitness、boxing。夏天学paddling。养成在家可以做的30分钟routine。 Three times of fitness activity a week. Learn paddling in summer. Develop a 30-minute home workout routine.

Review: 80% on target. didn’t learn paddling. didn’t do any home workout – too busy ordering chicken nuggets. But training has become a core part of my daily routine and I have developed a mental need for it.

每天练半小时吉他。每个月至少练一首新歌。
Play the guitar for 30 mins every day. One new song a month.

Review: On target, except that guitar is replaced by piano now.

减少看电视时间，美剧一天最多只能看一集，whatever that is。每周可有一天chill day。
Cut back on watching tv. One episode a day at most, whatever that is. One chill day a week (means free pass on TV).

Review: hmmm. I did watch less…. but sometimes before I reachded the controler to press “stop” the next espide has already begun. I blame Neftlix for leaving too little mental struggling time for viewers.

生物钟目标：12点睡，7点起。早上预留一小时时间做以上任何一件事，如阅读、瑜伽、吉他。 Schedule goal: bed at 12, up at 7. Leave one hour in the morning to do anything mentioned above: read, yoga, guitar.

Review: 100% failed.

消费及存款目标：减少可有可无的消费。普通衣物购买准则：买一件新衣服，就要舍弃一件旧衣物。每个月可以买一件pricey & timeless piece。每个月平均存1/3收入。
Consumption and saving goal: cut down on Latte factors. Principle of buying clothes: an old piece has to go to make room for every new piece. Can buy one pricey and timeless piece a month. Save 1/3 of salary at least.

Review: Beating the target thanks to my one year clothes shopping hiatus pledge.

饮食目标：晚饭戒碳水。学会3个可以自己做的晚饭菜式（excluding速冻饺子）。勤用榨汁机！
Diet goal: no carbs for dinner. Learn 3 dishes that I can cook myself (excluding frozen dumplings). Use the juicer frequently.

Review: pretty much failed. I need to eat heathier.

掌握高质量地独处技能。对每一次大剂量独处进行规划和目标设定。谨记独处不等同于懈怠。
Master the skill of spending quality time alone. Make plan and set a goal for every big chunk of alone time. Remember being alone doesn’t mean slack.

Review: 50% on target. There are ups and downs.

Mindset:

1 – 对新事物保持开放态度。Keep an open attitude to anything NEW.
2 – 减少成见、偏见、不在不了解对方时stereotype任何人。Hold back on prejudice. Never stereotype anyone before knowing them.
3 – 建立positive perspective. Establish a positive perspective.
4 – Don’t be petty.
5 – 在亲密关系中做到坦诚。过没有谎言的生活。Be honest in any intimate relationship. Live life without lies.

Review: can do better on no.2.

This will also be my last post this year. I appreciate everyone who has ever visited this place and spent time reading my thoughts. Resuming writing, out of everything, is the most meaningful move for me in 2019. A friend asked me earlier this year that “what do you like about writing?” It got me in the first few seconds. I don’t think anyone has asked me that before. After thinking for a while, I told him “I write to help myself. It’s a therapeutic process for me.” I guess people write for different reasons. And I, for one, write for very selfish reasons, and will probably continue to write for this reason only. But I believe every writer writes in the hope to reach someone, anyone, a potential reader, a potential reader that can resonate. Knowing there are people reading, does make me feel less lonely.

Thanks for reading and happy new year.

December 15, 2019December 16, 2019

The crier monologue.

I cry a lot. If it’s a social norm that we all need to identify ourselves based on tear-secretion habit, I’m definitely a “crier”, same way as I am an occasional drinker, party hater and used-to-be smoker.

On a recent weekend, I cried on the taxi on my way home. I was a bit tipsy after a whole evening’s game-playing/drinking/laughing at my friend’s house-warming party with people that I knew from head to toe. I walked on the empty street for a few minutes after the party ended. I got on a taxi and looked out from the window, as the city in the midnight passed through my blurry gaze, a sudden rush of lowness crept on and my tears started to emerge. When the taxi arrived at my doorstep, I knew it wasn’t over. So I got off and walked along the waterfront nearby, facing the darkness glittering through the water surface, my favourite emo song playing in my ear, and started to cry as hard as I could.

I can’t remember how long it lasted, perhaps half hour or longer. I just let it flow, the fluid of my eyes, with my face wrinkled at its maximum and my upper body involuntarily twitching. Often when I was crying like that, I couldn’t help but be amazed at the same time, at how little control I had over my own behavior, how powerful sadness can be, and how inexhaustible my tears are. It was a good cry that evening, for I happened to be at a perfect place at a perfect hour to enjoy the luxury of crying in public open air without worrying being embarrassed. Even more, I received messages from someone I wanted to connect with most at that moment. On a scale from 1 to 5, it was a 4.9-rated cry in my extensive experience of crying.

The above behavior, which I wilfully exposed a bit on my instagram story (as I usually did), has generated concerns from some friends and stranger followers. Which, wasn’t my intention but also wasn’t surprising. As much as I appreciate that, I genuinely couldn’t respond with a better explanation than “I just like crying,” which, I know, could sound perfunctory and almost disappointing, in a way that my crying wasn’t driven by any dramatic event and failed to satisfy the sympathy-mixed curiosity. And this was not only to general acquaintance or strangers. My ex-boyfriend, for one, had tried to get to the bottom of my tears. There was once I cried unexplainably when we were both in an altered state and he was desperate to understand the reason behind my sadness that I just couldn’t give. I remember he had this dissatisfied/dubious look on his face. It was the kind of expression that pained me, for I couldn’t share more, and it wasn’t becoz I didn’t want to.

The myth of crying had stayed with me for many years. I first noticed it when I was in the second year of college. I was drinking with some uni-mates one night and it was probably the first time ever in my life that I “over-consumed” alcohol and entered an alcohol-driven emotionally-heightened state. At a moment when everyone was still laughing and high, I quietly started to cry, at first only to myself, wishing no one would notice. When someone saw that and it became a group-wide event, I just gave up and let it out. And inevitably, I quickly killed the night. That was the first time I met this incontrollable, inexplainable, and inexhaustible stream of sadness inside me.

There were of course, many times when I’d also cry for more specific reasons. Like the night when my first serious ex-boyfriend told me he was engaged, half year after our two-year relationship ended, and he said “I wanna personally tell you instead of you finding out from facebook or something.” Like that time when I couldn’t get out of bed in a tiny hotel room with no window in Toronto after being thrown out by someone who I flew all the way there to meet. Like when I first found out in primary school that my father was having an affair and I thought “this is it, my whole world is broken and I would end up like one of those miserable unloved kids“. But these aren’t the kind of cry I’m talking about, these disaster-driven emotion breakdowns. The kind of cry I’m talking about is something that doesn’t have a clear trigger, not from outside at least. It happens as if someone left the tab on, or there’s a leakage in my body somewhere. It happens as if the sadness creek inside me has accumulated to a point that it just has to empty out to keep it going. It happens as if there’s a little weeping girl living inside me and from time to time she just badly wants attention.

Throughout all these years, I’ve spent numerous nights with her. And our relationship wasn’t always as smooth as today. I used to resist and feel shamed of her, the incontrollable sobbing. As many people would, I had taken her as a sign of weakness. For many years, I thought I couldn’t help crying becoz I was a weak freak who couldn’t contain her emotions better. And I did feel weak when I was crying, among other things. I had felt helpless. I had felt there was no way out, and that my existence made no sense but only pain, endless pains. I had felt it was impossible to connect, no matter how much I wished for it. I had felt wronged, hurt, all alone, and simply sad. I guess these are pretty generic feelings shared by mankind when we cry. And I guess I was indeed a weak person, for a long time. Until the day I realized I’m not as weak as I thought. (It happened last year) And I’m actually stronger than many people in many ways. Ironically, if there was one witness to the process of my toughening up, it’d be my tears.

But the crying didn’t stop. She still showed up out of nowhere from time to time. I started to understand I didn’t cry becoz I was weak. I cry becoz I have this intrinsic sadness in me that needs a mechanism to be funnelled out. I start to take my sadness as part of me – an important part – which makes me who I am, and is core to my sensibility. I don’t confuse sadness with weakness anymore. And I start to recognize sadness as a source of my strength, even though it doesn’t seem that way sometimes. Most importantly, I have no shame for my sadness, no matter how unpopular it is in today’s world.

Today, when I cry, besides the unexplainable sorrow, the cathartic and liberating feeling, I actually am relived. I’m relived that I’m still connected, with the used-to-be weak version of me, and the latest version of me with a part that would be eternally soft and fragile. I’m relieved to know that they’re still there, despite how far I’ve gone, as a safety-net knitted through time.

Make no mistakes, I’m not writing to promote sadness in any ways, and I envy people who doesn’t have to deal with this much sadness in their lives. I’m writing, I guess, to self-certify a small finding – the best (or only) way to connect with ourselves is to accept the shadows that come with it.

I’ve developed a habit of taking film portraits of myself when I was crying in the past years, given, I’d like to make the time I spent on crying more productive. The output, however, is pretty low as most of them are just not decent.

Several years ago I happened to know of a random acquittance’s negative comment on me to my friend, that he thinks my instagram feed is awkward, which seems to be full of selfies of me being alone and sad. His original language is something like “who does she think she can impress with those selfies showing she’s all alone at home?” I was a bit offended hearing that years ago. It was hard to imagine someone in the “art community” would make such insensitive comment about people he barely knew, not to mention I use instagram primarily to document the trace of my being instead of a tool to make inflated impressions. Thinking back these days, I guess I can sort of understand why he’d think that. It can be uncomfortable to come across contents that one can’t makes sense of. He is probably one of those people who somehow never need to confront their solitude or sadness (which is indeed a shame for an “artist”). And it’s definitely too much to expect for people to resonate with the sad states that I captured through images, when even I myself can’t fully comprehend them.

To make sense of my very own sadness is perhaps a lifelong solo journey. After all, crying to me, as much as writing, is the most private act in all human’s behaviours. The most and least I can do to share, I’m afraid, is to instagram-story about it that would last 24 hours.

December 1, 2019December 14, 2019

「week 25」Returning and the cave

I decided to write this piece with as least thinking and organizing as possible.

In the past month or so that I didn’t write, I was busy with many things. Travelling alone in Laos. Starting the new job. Getting annoyed and exhausted by the new commute. A short and reminiscent trip to Shanghai. Seeing someone that means something to me. Meeting many that mean little to me. Being distracted for silly reasons. A few silent and chronic heartbreaks, for the soured friendship, the enlarging gap on a society level, the fleeting intimacy.

On top of all these undercurrents, I feel like I was really just busy doing one thing. I was waiting for them to pass. I was waiting for this moment that I can sit down back at my desk and type, with a more or less neutral mind. The moment of returning.

There were twice I tried to force myself to sit down and pretend I’m here, but both times I failed. I wasn’t here. I was somewhere else. I discarded the unfinished drafts that I wrote as if they were mind garbage. I don’t want to force it. It has to be flowing out of my mind naturally. It has to be that I really feel ready to be here, instead of the adult version of me ordering me to be here. When I was in primary school, the schoolwork that I dreaded most is the weekly journal we had to write. I always felt deeply stressed by that assignment and would have a mini-breakdown (a mix of tears and curse) most Sunday afternoons when I didn’t know what to write. Funnily enough, I almost replicated the same scene in my middle-age adulthood.

I won’t say I’ve completely shrugged off the aftermath of this mini-storm in the past month or so, but here I am anyways, giving it a try, and documenting with my maximum honesty.

I started to meditate for 15 mins every night before I slept (if I’m not too drunk) recently, as an attempt to regain some control in the midst of a turbulence, or simply out of a need to spend some “quality time” with myself out of a crazy life schedule.

When I close my eyes, the one scene that keeps emerging is when I was in a dark cave in Laos. In some way, it seems my mind was trying to take me back there. The cave experience is not very pleasant to think of. I was at the end of a full-on doing-stuff day in Vang Vieng. And the last activity in my booked private tour was visiting Jung Cave. My driver dropped me off at the entrance of the area and I started to walk in myself. I was quite exhausted already and thought, let me just get this over with.

When I was walking in, I realized this scenic area is bigger than I thought. Since it was already the last opening hour of the day, people were walking out as I walked in. The whole area was getting quiet. I didn’t see any peer tourist around except myself. At somewhere, I saw a group of Lao teenagers hanging outside a small entrance to a cave, they were playing guitar and singing. I walked over, and saw a buddha at the entrance of the cave. I walked into the cave without a second thought, assuming that was the cave I was supposed to see.

As I continued to get in, the natural light was quickly lost. It was pitch dark inside and it became more and more challenging to climb. I had to use all my four limbs to climb up. I remembered seeing a group of elderly tourists walking pass me as I entered and wondered how they climbed this challenging cave. Despite of the suspicion in my mind, I proceeded to climb in pure darkness. I had to use my phone as torch so I can make out the inside of the cave – it was absolutely a wild cave, extremely narrow and steep. At one point when it was simply too narrow for me to climb through and I didn’t see any other possible ways around, I knew it was time to give up and retreat. And it was at that moment, when I tried to step down with my body in a completely twisted posture, that I missed a step and fell off in the cave by about two meters in height, with my arms and legs scratching against the rough rocks and my phone dropped off my hand. The typical “FUCK!” moment. I probably did say that, gasping and evaluating the damage. My phone was ok. I managed to stand up and reorient my body to be temporarily safe. Some scratches and broken skins on my arm and my right hip hurt terribly, but I managed to get out without further surprises.

It was an unfortunate but minor incident and I didn’t linger on too much for the rest of the trip. It was also a stupid mistake. I found my way to the “right” cave I was supposed to visit, a huge one that no climbing was involved at all. I hastily dressed the wounds and scrapped the whole wild cave excursion to the back of my mind.

When my subconsciousness took me back to the dark cave, I had no choice but to revisit the scene, the whole process, and especially the state of mind in the few seconds right after the fall. I remember feeling a fluttering fear in my heart, becoz I was all alone in a pitch dark wild cave and I just fell. If I injured myself more seriously, I could be in a real danger and it’d be very tricky to get help from where I was. I remember telling myself to stay calm and figure out a strategy (to move my body around the tricky rocks in dark) as soon as possible, I quickly switched my mind to a “surviving is key” mode. I was alone, absolutely alone, not just physically. It was like in an instant, that fall cut off all my connection with the world outside the cave and I slid to a parallel universe where there was just me. I also didn’t have any intention or bandwidth left to connect. I was 100% there, body and soul. In an obvious way, it wasn’t an ideal situation. But in a less obvious way, it wasn’t all bad. In fact, having revisited the scene repeatedly in my meditation, I realized it isn’t a situation that could be easily labelled as “good” or “bad”. It is simply an irregular heartbeat in the scale of life.

I’m not sure why this scene, of relative insignificance, kept emerging in my meditation. I could only assume it’s my subconsciousness reminding me of that feeling of my sheer existence, the kind that one sometimes can only feel through an irregular heartbeat.

Not many of us is in search of that cave. I’m certain that many of us aren’t even aware of the existence of caves like that. But the cave is just there. I have been there, by chance or by choice.