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Protecting your heart and state of mind
Half my life, I’ve been protecting my heart so damn hard I subconsciously isolated myself. I haven’t grown cold, though, just wary. I am not incapable of attachment, I’m just cautious. The thing that leads you to protecting your heart is that you start recognizing the patterns that once hurt you. You, being a good-natured human being and all, never understood what disrespect and mockery looked and felt like. So you gave out a lot of chances to the people who, often through jokes, put you down. The very people who kept taking advantage of your kindness thought they could do it endlessly, without consequences, and you kept giving them…
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Not mutual? Not worth fixing
“Blood is thicker than water,” as I’ve found, is just another fairytale. It’s one of the many stories we tell ourselves to try to make sense of what’s important in life; try to make sense of interpersonal relationships. I had always defended the idea that family ties were, and should, come before everything. But inevitably, my own belief bit me in the arse. It turned out to be just another disillusionment of life. Accepting others as they are; accepting that maybe there will always be different points of view, even among a tight group of people who grew up together, is key to avoiding unnecessary disappointments. I adopted that philosophy…
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Fitting Right In
The other day, after a woman who must’ve been in her late 50’s or early 60’s started talking to me out of nowhere, I started reflecting on the relationship I have with people of all ages. This lady and I both walked out of a store at the same time, and walked the same couple of blocks towards the train station. Once there, we sat on the same side of the platform: southbound. Perhaps it was this coincidence that inspired her to want to start a conversation. “I love Sephora,” she said. “OMG, so do I!” I replied. Next thing I know, we’re deep in a conversation about skincare. Then,…
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Growing Apart — in short
One day, you learn that life is just going to have a lot of inevitable turns. Then, it’ll take another day for you to accept that reality. Yet, another day comes when you realize that, after all, you’re as unprepared as you were before any of those turns happened, to anchor yourself. To expect, to anticipate such changes — which, if one is lucky, may not happen at all — is not the same as walking by them, through them despite the warning. Feeling the shift with every conversation, with every heartbeat, every memory…quietly fading away. You might not always notice when you’re growing apart from someone, but when you…
