A friend once told me that I had a lot to learn about being in a relationship. He told me that there were plenty of times when my impatience to fix things had been counter-productive. Seeing as how I'm now still completely capable of making the same mistakes, I realize how very true that advice was... After having spent a long time apart from people I'd dreamed I would keep in contact with forever, I've only managed to learn two things:
No matter how much you want more from a friendship, you can only ever accept what others are willing to give. That is to say, you can always hope for more, but it is neither right nor practical to tell others, in more or less words, that we want more. It's like asking a stone to turn into a fish: Unnatural. What is, is what is, and what will be is what will be. We only have two choices: Be ourselves, and let things take their natural course, or play pretend, and build relationships on lies. (Though wanting more seems to have similarities to asking for change over real discontentment, they're really not the same thing though, we can mix them both together in a single request... There's another time to talk about that, I suppose.)
The second thing I learned is that you can tell yourself for months that there are people you hate and keep your anger brewing and bottled up inside, and yet, in the end, you will always find yourself missing them terribly.
Anyway, I re-read what he wrote, and it made me laugh, the way I could be angry with others for something that I myself had done to completely different people. Truly, judge not, lest ye yourself be judged... There was also a request to remember, and in doing so remember the most important things about someone. To be honest, I've forgotten most of the conversations we had. We need people around us to remember, as we retell old conversations and joke about old experiences around the dinner table. But I've always fancied that remembering the details are important, but not the key thing to knowing what a person is like, and I fancy that idea still. That deep impression of a person I can trust continues to remain.
As much as I've tried to convince myself that I can step into the shoes of others, the truth remains that I'm terribly unaware of my surroundings, and, terribly unaware of how people feel, something I found out for the first time in Secondary 4. Blur is the word. Hahaha. These labels we get when we were younger stick so well sometimes. I could lay in bed thinking for hours about situations and people and still come to no reasonable conclusions.
Which is what I did this evening, with intermittent disruptions from images of the 267 x 21 pages of 20th Century Boys I read popping up in my mind... How moving and how terrifyingly chilling that manga was... It was good to just lie face down and let my mind wander.
I've always thought that one of the most important decisions we can make in life is to always make the choice to believe in others. Lately though, I've been thinking that that idea obscures the equally important question, "What do we believe? Or who do we believe in?" We can try and try to believe, as honestly as we can and as hard as we want, but perhaps at the end of the day, we have to come back to the question of what we really think about things, and then work out a solution from there. I laid in my bed for a long time, half-awake and thinking about all the things I never had time to think of or think about during the university semester.
We don't always have the answers. We don't always have something to say in return.
And all this is, in part, because I told myself a lie: The worst kind of lie, the kind close enough to the truth that you can believe it yourself. Maybe that's why, for some time now, I felt I was unable to recognize myself. It wasn't, as I'd previously believed, that too many people made too many different demands on me, but that I'd started to deceive myself about who I really was... And though some of the postmodernist thinkers in our sociology papers ask the questions, "Who are we, really? Can we ever truly know?" and though they deride the idea of an essential self and promote ideas of fragmented selves, I think the truth remains that there are some things that we are, and some things that we are not.
Note to self: fetching bewitching alluring bedazzling WINSOME
Year 1 Sem 1 Exam Pep songs: Tobira no Mukou e, and Sorairo Days
Year 1 Sem 2 Exam Pep songs: You Know My Name, Heart of Sword, The Heart of Life, Strong and Strike
