tender

my mother married at 23 and gave birth to me at 24. when i think of my mother when i was a child, i remember her young, walking me to school in her platform sandals that were trending in the 90s (and now trending again 30 years later in the 2020s). Her sandal snapped one day as we were crossing the bridge that connected the park to my primary school and she had to carry them in her hands. When I was a teenager, I remember telling my friends that I would want to marry younger if I could, in my early 20s, just like my mother. It meant I would have more time to watch my children grow. When I said that adulthood was a comfortable distance away, and I thought life was lived the way one would travel down a road—singular in direction, with each significant stop an inevitability you will meet, a natural course that just happened without much thinking. the adults didn’t want to tell you the truth at that age, and when you read about the truth they were always wrapped in fiction. now i am 31 and what i had said as a teenager is no longer a possibility for me. life is not a road, it is a wild country. you take one path, you choose a route, you take a turn, you cross the lake, every choice you take means you forsake other possibilities. what did you want to take in, to experience? as i went through my life i must have realised the simple image i had in my mind that seemed like it would come so easy was not exactly what i wanted, or more accurately, the society i live in will not give it to me in the way that i want. it’s not so easy. i remember my walks with my mother, that it seemed easy and quaint. those parts were nice. i forget the parts where she suffered, alone and unsupported, stressed and bullied, exhausted and at times penniless. “you are strong because i suffered when i had you” is what she told me, but now when I remember this I can’t help but hear it not as a call to my power, but an inheritance of suffering.

just want to have enough mental freedom to spend days deep diving in a topic of interest and develop a very specific and in depth knowledge of something i have absolutely no use for except the total weight of pure joy and thrill of being human and alive and feeling like the world is there for me to uncover

Today is the first day of me no longer having a full-time job. I made the decision that I simply cannot survive in a full-time position, that my body and mind isn’t built for it, and that I didn’t want to feel myself being slowly and surely wrapped in a suffocating gauze that was dimming the light of my creativity, my imagination, and my drive to journey into the spiritual path of the total and fierce experience of one’s life. For the past 2 years, especially considering that I have entered my 30s, I could feel each day weighing with the question of what exactly I am doing with my life, where have I shelved my dreams, what am I doing with the gifts that I was entrusted with. The answer was me, each day, showing up to a job where I did not really feel seen, where my talents were asked to be hacked in a shape that was more understandable, consumable. So here I am, my money will undeniably be diminished. I am doing part time work till June or July, at which point, I was be cast to survive. By then, I had better finished what I needed to do, to have worked what I have told myself I needed the free time and energy to do.