laissez-faire

I wasn't expecting to come here, and I don't know where to begin. The past few months have been going like a freight train, full of emotional and academic baggage. Just when you think you've got it all together, life throws you yet another curve ball. It'd be great if I could see just what is being thrown at me, then I could duck, or dodge. The problem is that I'm not even sure what is wrong. 

I'm here because I know I haven't been getting in touch with myself for a while. Besides the fact that I haven't been updating this place with photos and boring news about what I have been up to, I haven't been taking stock of myself either. Where do I start indeed?

I remember feeling like this, back in J1 when I was walking around in a cloud of negativity. I think I was too hard on myself, wanting to get right into the groove of "doing life right'. If anything, it seems like I have been way too easy on myself that it has been unhealthy. It pains me that I am saying this but I feel like a ghost of my former self. Perhaps it's because I just completed an essay (and a terrible one at that) on Antoinette's loss of identity in Wide Sargasso Sea blah blah blah; or perhaps, in my disdain for her misfortunes, I have unconsciously aligned myself alongside that loss. Vincent was not wrong in saying that I have changed. Where was the person who ran this blog so religiously? Who took to the pen and to words whenever she felt a sense of restlessness, or a lump in her throat that cried desperately for release? Why am I so unfeeling now? Why do I take pride in sweeping my emotions under the carpet, burying them in work? Didn't I use to embrace feelings? Didn't I use to be unabashedly passionate? Where has that person gone; was I ever that person? 

I'm laughing at myself now because it all seems ridiculous -- see, why am I so steely, what happened to all that preaching of self-love? Of wholeness? Of balance? *side eyes korra*

I'm here to admit that I haven't been treating myself, and those around me, well. I've swept it away for way too long, those unwritten blogposts and poems, unsaid words and unspilt tears -- Alas, clichés again. They make me take myself less and less seriously.

1) I have not been out in the sun

2) I have not been in touch with nature: be they flora or vast blue seas

3) I have not been taking stock of my life and charting my mood, my progress

4) I have no confidence in what I used to love and do well in i.e. lit, theatre

5) I have no idea where I am meant to go

6) Where I am meant to be

7) What I am meant to be doing 

But I sure have been guarding against failures and malfunctions, which is why I presume I adopted a much more stoic and easy-going approach. A little too laissez-faire if you asked me. But you do ask me; so why let that happen? To guard against everything. I may have overdone "self-protection", like the counter-productivity of wearing too many layers to go outdoors in the freezing winter, only to be unable to get past the door.  I need to get myself out of this rut. I'm terrible at this life thing.