Random Thought Catalog read - How We Let People Go

And that means letting go of everything they meant to us, proving to ourselves that life can be just as good, just as beautiful, without them in it. When you realize, long after the fact, that you no longer care about someone — that what they are doing in life has no bearing on you, and vice versa — it feels very much like a small death. Who they were with you no longer exists, and you cannot even preserve it in your memory, for the sake of your own mental health.

What's up with forcing me to key in a title in the title field box Blogger?! I used to be able to publish my posts without any titles. >:( Now we have this big ugly title field that I can't get rid of.

Also it's almost 4.30am and I'm not sleeping! Maybe I should go play some candy crush.

[11 July edit: NOW I can publish posts without any title input!!!]

This article from Thought Catalog was sitting in my drafts for the longest time. And this seems to be a good time to publish it. I think it's time. I don't feel as angsty as before. I even feel - should I say this - indifferent. And you know what is the opposite of love? It's not hate. It's indifference.
I think the grieving has ended. I don't think I'll ever forget, but I think I can move on now.

"I grieved my first love until there was literally nothing left to grieve. I grieved the shit out of it until it became a fucking embarrassment. “Wait,” I would scream. “Don’t take this away from me just yet! There’s still a little portion I haven’t mourned yet!” I thought that this was just the natural way, this was how you got people out of your system. And it was. It’s that way for your first love and then maybe your second. Then a funny thing happens and everything stops making you wince. You can stop going through this life feeling like a raw nerve, someone who could cry at the slightest provocation and subsequently spend the entire day in bed. This is what they call maturity, I suppose, and in many ways I’m thankful for it. I have to admit though that I’m sad to see time doing its job already. I’m sad to see my first love disappearing because for a long time it was a big part of my identity. I was someone with a broken heart and that’s all I had interest in being. I didn’t want to be recovered and single. Boring. That means I’ve officially been forgotten. I wanted to be the person unraveling at the seams. I wanted to be someone with visible wounds because it showed people that I was someone who Loved and was Fearless and had Experiences. Most importantly, it showed that I was someone worth loving — at least for a little while.

- From Thought Catalog

Morning! It's 12/12/12. Another special date with nothing special going on.

Had the ultimate chillax weekend break away in Bali and witnessed a longtime friend getting married to her true love! Le sigh, so envious! But very happy for her haha :) And more so for myself, desperately needed this break to get away from things and it helped to distract me.

But now I'm back and trying not to sink into a funk again. It's always those moments when you are alone with your deep dark thoughts.

Today's Thought Catalog read (25 Things You Should Know About Love):

"5. It’s so painful to have loved someone once and then never again. Sometimes you’ll wish it never happened just so you didn’t know how good it felt.

7. You will never love someone quite the same way you do the first time.

8. In most cases, this is a good thing. The first time is fucking insane.

22. When you fall in love with someone, be prepared for the possibility that you might hate them one day.

23. You will always have that one ex who will stick in your mind. They’ll feel like a perpetual dull ache in your side."

And another one (Baking For Someone Who Doesn't Love You Anymore):

"Baking isn’t much fun either, when the person you’re baking for will take this thing you’ve spent countless minutes, hours creating, this thing you wanted to perfect, this thing you loved; they will take it and destroy it in seconds and have no idea how much time, how much of yourself you had to sacrifice just for it to exist. Baking is hard, you know? It requires time and patience and muscle and measurements; it requires attention and aspiration and that’s why you shouldn’t bake for someone who no longer loves you."

This article is written for me! Haha. No but really, spot on for the last 2.5 years of my secret life.

Thought Catalog - When You Are The One Who Loves More

"When you love more, when you can feel that your partner does not return so much of what is essential to you, you start to love yourself less. You see yourself as worthy only to the degree that this person whom you love so much has deemed you worthy, and if they are not loving you with as much passion or conviction as you love them, there must be something wrong with you."

There's also one that talks about the flip side of the coin - When You Are The One Who Loves Less

Epic epic mind blowing conversation yesterday. Again all the hurt and betrayal started coming back, just when I had managed to somewhat shut myself out of it.

Lots of whys, hows, whens, and still, WHY?????? Why do it? WHY??!?!?!?!

It's hypocritical behaviour, especially based on what you said in the past, no amount of justification will right it, and I've effectively lost all respect for you. So it turned from pity, to like to love? Go and do whatever the shit you want with your girlfriend then.

This is going to be one of my life principles from now. Don't ever come into my life if all you are going to do in the end is to leave.

November has been too much of an angsty month. >:(

Another Thought Catalog article - You Don't Hate Your Ex's New Significant Other, You Hate Your Ex

"There is an awful tendency we have as humans to excuse even the most egregious misdeeds in the people we love. When combined with our propensity towards jealousy and insecurity, it makes for an extremely unpleasant display of our more reptilian brain. When we are cheated on, for example, it is often easier to direct the more brutal edge of your hatred towards the “other person,” rather than taking a painful look at the person you love and who you thought loved you just as much. We direct our anger in the only way it can go that doesn’t require directly calling into question our relationship.

And when you lose someone you love, when you feel as though you were kicked out of a home you considered your own for so long, few things are more painful than to see your love being happy with someone new. Especially if you were left for this new person, but even if their romance started some time after the fact, it feels as though someone has moved into our territory and planted their flag with no thought as to who may have been there first. We built so much into this person, this person we considered ours for so long, is now perfectly content without us. While our happiness is still almost fully dependent on the whims of someone else, they seem to have forgotten we exist.

We remember them as is easiest and most comfortable, at their best. No one wants to think that they loved someone so much who wasn’t kind, who didn’t care about us, who didn’t need us as we did them. It is more pleasant to paint them in the most gentle, flattering portrait, excusing every flaw they may have had and the fact that we were only too happy to want them in spite of it. This new person — a person who is as much a mystery to us as our ex is a known entity — has no rich history that needs to be explained away to justify their new behavior. You don’t love them, you don’t wish they loved you, and they offer only a great threat to your happiness.

It is easy to turn them into a monster. You can assume the worst and risk nothing when it comes to your own relationship. You stand to gain nothing by being friends with them, by being kind, by giving them the benefit of the doubt. While there is still an ugly, jealous part of you that wants the person back who so brutally left you — or at least for them to tell you they still love you so you can do the rejecting this time — there is no part of you that yearns for the approval of their new love. In fact, it’s easiest if they hate you. It allows you to further your dislike of them, to place more of the blame on them, to call them crazy and assume no responsibility.

But we don’t really hate them. We don’t even know them. Hell, chances are that we’d probably really like them if we got to know them. They are not some soulless demon who wormed its way into your love’s life to ruin yours. They are a human being with an actual heart, who is capable of seeing the same wonderful things we once did in the person we loved. The truth is that we are simply hurt, every inch of our pride battered by our ex’s ability to just toss us aside and ostensibly recreate all that was so unique to us with someone who doesn’t resemble us at all. And this pain, this fractured pride, has nowhere tangible to go except directly to the person who is perhaps least deserving. We don’t want to yell, we want to cry. We want to be held, to be told that we’re still worth loving even if the person whom we love the most doesn’t think so anymore.

It may be the hardest thing to do, but it is crucial to remind ourselves at every step that no matter how much your broken heart wants to convince you of hating a stranger, they are not who we are angry with. We are angry with our ex, and maybe even ourselves a bit for having let them get away. But the truth is, hating a third party will not bring your ex back — and even if it did, would you really want it? Would you want to be a love only worth keeping once you’ve played around and had your fill of something else? There is nothing to be gained from being cruel, from perpetuating the cycle of hurt feelings and misdirected anger. Hate-reading a Facebook page to find out everything you can possibly dislike about someone only wears on your own heart, and turning into someone petty enough to do it will never make someone love you again."

"Now, we tend to just fall into relationships with whatever is close to us, convenient, or has already been conquered. Friends will incestuously date within their group of friends, over and over and over. Friends with benefits whom people are not particularly interested in will become de facto boyfriends or girlfriends because, well, we need a date to a wedding. We will exist in a nebulous state of “sort-of dating” our “half-boyfriends” for years on end because it’s better than being single. And of course, if you ask these couples if they would ever consider settling down with said significant other, most would give you a resounding “no.” They would even justify with a “I don’t need to see a serious future with someone I’m dating, it’s just to have fun.” But could anything be more selfish, more unfair, more an insult to the both of you?
 
First of all, how do we know that the other member of this couple feels the same way? Perhaps what is just a game for you–something to pass the time until something better comes along–is something serious to them. How many couples exist on two planes of commitment, completely unaware that the other doesn’t share their intentions. And even if you are both completely indifferent about the other in the long-term, why become a couple? Why give your time, romantic energy, or half-hearted commitment to someone you don’t see yourself ending up with–for what are likely completely valid reasons? Why stay in this limbo?

It must be tightly interlocked with our deep, gnawing fear of being single. We just passed Valentine’s Day, and think of the hordes of people who used the occasion to spill out their hearts about how incredibly lonely they felt, how left out from a society they imagined as coupled-up, how less-than being without a significant other made them feel. And you don’t need to have a holiday to see this kind of behavior — even on a Saturday night, you’re bound to hear a friend complain about how they just wish they had someone to go out with — as though friends, family, or just themselves is not company enough. Sometimes I would see these kind of sentiments during the long periods of my singlehood, when I was going out on dates here and there but not feeling anything magical, and feel like the only person my age who didn’t care that I was single. I liked being single! Some of my best memories are walking around my city completely alone, doing everything I want to do in the day and not having to consider another person’s itinerary — seeing sights and being alone with my thoughts. Just sitting by the water with a glass of iced tea and a book was some of the most wonderful pleasures I can recall. Of course, my memories shared with significant others are just as beautiful — though in a different way. And loving running hand-in-hand with someone in the rain doesn’t negate an afternoon-long stroll by myself on a warm spring day."

- Extracted from Thought Catalog

Haha I have been reading way too many articles on Thought Catalog lately!

“What are we doing?”

“We’re” – I thought for a moment – “Sitting by a fire in your backyard.”

“Yeah, but us. What are we doing?”

“What do you mean?”

“Are you going to be done with me in like five days? We just started dating, I mean we just met, I hardly know a damn thing about you. Just-” She always had a problem finishing sentences, I would learn.

“I’m not going to be done with you in five days.”

“But how do you know?”

“I don’t. In all likelihood we’re going to break up. You’re right. I don’t think that we’ll end up getting married. I don’t think that will be our ending. But between right now and that breakup we have so much to experience together and so many opportunities, it’s pointless to think about the end right now.”

- extracted from Thought Catalog

I like that sentence in bold, only because I can identify with it.
If I allow myself to give it some deep thought, I think I agree with it.
I agree with it because I'm very much a in-the-moment type of person. I don't worry about the future if I can help it. Heck, I don't even like to think too much about stuff. I live for the now! Carpe diem! Yoohoo!

(Of course, not thinking things through often results in bad execution, and that doesn't bode well at work, but that is another topic of discussion for another day.)

Then again sometimes that spontaneity goes away and the worrywart enters. Little voices talk to you.
Sometimes you think it's enough, sometimes you think you want more.
Sometimes, sometimes not. Sometimes, yet not quite.

Hurhurhur. Maybe? Not quite?
Ah-hah, life is full of possibilities ain't it.

But let's not let the mind wander into that infinite dark hole of life and its endless possibilities; what lies beneath that dark hole is too heavy a topic to contemplate right now in my rather shallow and superficial state of mind.

For the night is late and we must bid goodbye. Tootles!