if there is one thing my trip home and the past two days have taught me, it is that at the end of the day, the people matter most of all. i could have the best job in the world anywhere (and i do really love my job) and it wouldn’t keep me there if i didn’t have my family or my best friends around too. and what a family, what a group of friends i have. i couldn’t ask for more.

and if there is a second thing i have learned, it is that there is no such thing as the perfect place to be. here, i miss so many things about singapore and sydney, there, i miss things about england. wherever i go, i think, there will always be something or other i miss; fuzzy said to me after tea at coffee club that this feeling of passing through places and always being in transit was probably always going to be a permanent one, and i can’t help but think she was right. ironic, isn’t it, for someone who has been doing nothing but trying to find home for the past four years. maybe the answer i’ve finally found is that there is no home. there are only feelings, feelings of being home, feelings of belonging somewhere, and the people and things and memories that trigger them.

and there is no combination of words i could say

there are so many things i want to express, for which words will never be enough. reading terry pratchett’s nation in tasmania, and then watching it last night at the national theatre, brought that home to me all over again. i feared i would cry at the last scene, instead there were helpless, silent tears in my throat and a choked up dryness in my eyes. how do you put a name to this? how do you say hello, and goodbye, and hope to see you again soon, and i love you, in your own way – without using these words that so many people have used before you, to mean things that they feel, not that you feel? there is only so much i can pour into my christmas cards, into my smiles and gestures, and i don’t know if it is good enough.

I know I ask perfection of a quite imperfect world
And fool enough to think that’s what I’ll find

i had some very pensive and slightly blue musings here, involving the painful aptness of the carpenters on this cold, quiet, rainy friday night, but then i decided that no one is served by my melancholy, least of all myself.

deep breaths, deep breaths, if i concentrate on the hereandnow split nanomilliseconds of each moment and just, for that short period of time, be happy, it will all add up, and it will all fall into place.

the days are so short, now. i miss the spring, i miss the summer even more, and most of all i wonder where 2009 went.

This evening, it occurred to me how absurdly overdeveloped this sense of guilt and wrongdoing has become when I found myself, stirring soup in the pot, dwelling on guilt and feeling all kinds of guilty for feeling guilty. And then feeling guilty for feeling guilty for feeling – well, you get the idea. Like one of those mirror images which never ends.

I know, I know. I’m working on it, I promise. Please don’t laugh at me. I’ll get it under control… someday. Really. You have your irrationalities too, don’t you?

In other news, we had unexpectedly good weather throughout almost all of the August bank holiday weekend, and a whole array of good food (chorizo burgers at Borough market’s Brindisa, Monmouth Coffee, GBK, lassi, cake, duck rice at Goldmine!) plus NHM plus butterflies plus South Bank sunshine plus good company made it a lovely one. And that’s it, for summer – but what a memorable sendoff.

(but my heart’s not in it)

absofrigginlutely exhausted. what a week. full of thoughts. full of conflicting emotions. bouncing from almost sinfully sugary highs to fist-clenching, gut-twisting lows, feeling like the tension knots in my back will never leave, feeling full and empty alternately (like the proverbial glass of water), soaking up the last of the summer sunshine, thinking how much i’d miss this as i walked down the south bank, futilely clinging on to the moment, loving it, hating that it had to end.

i can’t even think straight enough to string a post together coherently, i am so tired, and i feel so drained, and i feel like there is nothing of myself left over for me. i haven’t felt like this since jc. and it’s scary. i know i’ll be ok. i just really – need to let this tension go. thank goodness, thank goodness, that i will be seeing wanyun in a week’s time, and finally touch base again with an old familiar world where i know the people love me no matter how long i’ve been away and how long it’s been since we’ve spoken. i’m trying my best, here. but it’s hard.

Questions/things I am thoroughly sick and tired of hearing from other people:

1. “Have you thought of moving back home?”
2. “Why don’t you go home?”
3. “So what do you do in your spare time?”
4. “What does ‘looking for a job’ involve?” (GO AWAY!)
5. “Have you tried the National Theatre?” (Yeah, because you can just waltz right up to the National for a job, they hand them out like candy…)
6. “Have you tried [insert other famous theatre]?” (ARGH!)
7. “How about looking out of London?” (yes I’m sure a town with one theatre, as is the case with much of England, will have better job prospects than London)
8. “What do you actually do at work?”
9. “It’s not work if it’s only an internship.” (GO AWAY! part II)
10. “How are you surviving on an intern’s pay?” (uncomfortable scenario part I, where I explain I’m not actually even paid)
11. “How are you surviving if you’re not paid?” (uncomfortable scenario part II, where I explain I’m a shameless, selfish financial liability)
12. “Why don’t you just get a temp job or something and waitress/be a receptionist/work at Starbucks?” (have you even TRIED getting a random temp job in the current market when you have zero customer service background and all your work experience, while significant to your chosen field, is irrelevant to others?)
13. “Have you tried looking for something other than in the arts?” (If I wanted a job I don’t actually have an interest in, I could’ve gone home to be a teacher.)
14. “It’s so much easier getting a job in Singapore.” (you think I don’t know that?!)

In conclusion: if you secretly think I’m a good-for-nothing layabout who’s being exploited as free labour within an inch of her useless, penniless, mooching life, please sod off, I have got no more patience for the likes of you, and right now I feel like I could bite.

there was a big ranty post here, in which i railed against numerous frustrating things and feelings that had cropped up recently, but i often forget that i am very blessed in many ways and it won’t do to continually dwell on sawdust while ignoring the plank in my eye. so all i will say is, i am still way too sensitive, and have a long way to go, and even with all the facility with words in the world i remain incapable of understanding the words of other people. especially when they are unaccompanied by body language. :/

sometimes, even though you know you really need to be strong and do what you have to do, all you want to do is let rip all your anger and frustration and just scream and cry and punch the pillows and walls and kick things and ruin your one good knife by viciously mincing your ginger to tiny shreds. you don’t want to keep whining to people that you’re down, that you feel you’ve been kicked in the gut. you know you can get up again because you’re strong and because, given time, this too shall pass. you don’t want anyone to worry, you don’t want anyone to think, oh god, there she goes again, on about the same old same old, and you know that you’ll be ok, so let’s just skip the bit where we inflict the misery on others as well.

you know all that but sometimes, everything that you don’t want to hear comes in a barrage and it’s harder to remember what you ought to do, and you throw yourself on your bed and hug the duvet and cry angry salty choked-up tears.

then you realise it’s past 9pm and you get up and you try to do the washing up and household chores and the job application you’ve been meaning to do all week, or at least take a crack at it. because if you don’t keep moving and lounge around feeling sorry for yourself it will only get worse. and you force yourself to ignore the emotions bubbling over, you put a cork firmly in it, you pick up one heavy leaden foot and put it in front of the other. harsh. but real.

but there’s no time to grieve
we just pack up our things and move on
and move on

I don’t really feel like saying anything today, but one week past is one week past, and it’s not as if I’ve nothing to say. I just don’t want to talk about it.

So tired… but just gotta fight on, fight on.

one day more
another day, another destiny

Promise longer, more cheerful entry later in the week when more sanguine. Sorry so brief.

parece todos los días me esfuerzo tanto a encontrar mi propio camino, pero a veces, no sé la razón por me estoy continuar a esforzarse, porque parece no puedo encontrar algo no importa lo mucho que me esfuerce. me pienso debe haber, todavía, una luz al final del túnel, pero ¿dónde está? ¿está aquí? ¿me estoy esperar demasiado para algo que está solo un sueño?

a veces no sé, ya no sé más, no sé qué me estoy tratando de hacer con mi tiempo y mi vida aquí, no sé porqué. estoy muy cansado, pero no quiero perder todas mi esperanza.

y tú, ¿qué piensas? de mí, de mi esfuerzo. ¿debo detenerme tratando? ¿debo importarme lo que piensas?

(¡mi español se ha convertido muy muy horrible, durante la mayor parte de dos horas pasado escribando este! y tuve que usar un diccionario con casi todas las palabras y frases, qué horror. pero estaba un poco terapéutico)

I have huge problems with emotional contagion. I can be in the most buoyant and lighthearted of spirits one moment, and the next come crashing down because someone I care a lot about seems down/is down, or I’ve just come into direct contact with someone who is. I’ve known for a really long time that this is something I have to learn to deal with because being so volatile and susceptible to influences beyond my control is really not fun, but it’s probably the aspect of myself I’ve been least able to change over the years that I know still needs changing.

I wonder why the contagion happens though. Sometimes I think it’s because I’m upset that I can’t help the other party feel better and that despite my best efforts they remain sad, so I feel useless, and frustrated. But part of me knows it’s not the whole story. Part of me knows I’m not altruistic enough to care this much about whether I am able to cheer other people up when they feel down, mostly because my detached, practical side is cognizant of the fact that other people’s feelings are entirely theirs to deal with and I am really not all that powerful to start with, so I don’t need to worry so much. (Though Louis did point out to me back in second year that I am often egotistical enough to assume everything is my fault and take on tremendous amounts of useless guilt – mea culpa – case in point!)

If the motive behind the emotional contagion is selfish, however, I really don’t know what it could possibly be. Maybe it really is an ego thing and I just feel very annoyed with myself that I feel happy and am yet so unable to spread that happiness to others. Maybe I feel, rather stupidly, that I have no right to be happy when others are blue. Maybe it has to do with the fact that I can be very overcurious about wanting to get to the root of things (why? why do you feel sad? whyyy?) and try to mirror the emotion in order to understand.

According to Wiki, the official scholarly stance on this phenomenon (is it psychological or sociological?) proposes something similar r.e. the mirror effect: research claims that we tend to automatically mimic the emotional expressions of those around us, subconsciously. It’s like how if your cashier at Borders is really grouchy you get grouchy too, and if you get a smiley one you feel happier about the whole shopping experience. While this is more apparent in physical interaction, it happens through telecommunications as well. I can personally attest to emotional contagion being equally strong for me via emails/texts/Facebook/chat as it is in person. Sometimes it’s worse, because when the visual cues of body language are missing, I can lie awake at night tormenting myself with all kinds of interpretations of bare words not knowing what was meant.

At the root of all this is empathy – or perhaps it would be more accurate to put it the other way round, and say that emotional contagion is the root of empathy. Neurologist Jean Decety from the University of Chicago argues that empathy begins with the involuntary act of shared emotion, that primitive impulse to perceive and share what someone else is feeling. There’s nothing wrong with shared emotion as it is, but where the problem begins is when a person lacks, in Decety’s words, “the capacity to distinguish self from other” and starts experiencing the other person’s pain as if it were their own. The transferred distress incapacitates and cripples; only when you are able to separate yourself from the other party will you then be able to leverage the shared emotion into helpful empathy.

I’m not well-versed enough in the science behind emotional contagion to know whether or not this guy is right, but it does ring true, somewhat. I guess it would definitely give some sort of rational explanation (intuitively, it’s obvious) as to why it is that this hits strongest with people I am closest to/care the most for: because they’re the people with whom I share the most of my life. That said, I don’t know how to start to fix it for myself. When the emotive process is so instinctual that you aren’t even aware of what’s going on within you, how do you peel apart layers of being and awareness? Is this, in actuality, some crisis of selfhood? Do I need to start by figuring out who I am and what I feel so that I can separate that from who others are and what they feel? Has the mirror effect really taken such hold of me? Am I blowing this out of proportion? Is the solution much simpler and less philosophical? Am I asking too many questions? (Yes.)

I am really tired, and no closer to an answer, and will probably be sleepless pondering this.

so please be kind
if i’m a mess