For nights since my return I’ve been glancing at the time while in bed – 4am and I’m drifting in and out of sleep. Jetlagged and fraklagged – poo has its ways of catching up. After going through the 900 or so unread work-related emails that didn’t make it through the forwarder, sure enough, the queasy stomach had involuntarily returned. It’s squirming as I type.
I thought mainly about the resolutions I had made during the trip, the alternate, invisible and silent journey which began as I was lying on the New Forest moors.
I was questioning myself. Why do I want to do what I want to do? Why do I want to return? Am I happy? Would I be happier there? Can I be equally happy here? Why? Why not? What’s important to me? Why has this year been such a ruckus? I had many intellectual answers but none satisfied. I turned inward and probed deeper, penetrating the barriers of (non-)emotional defence. I don’t believe I’ve consciously done that before, but the weak and battered mind, yet to recover from recent battles fought, left keys in locks.
It brought me to re-examine my relationships with family and friends. And my relationship with myself, at the risk of sounding narcissistic (all personal blogs are naturally so, so that’s a lost cause there).
On the first night back, I was thinking about the day ahead, mustering the courage to deny a service, wondering if I and others could forgive me if I did.
Something had changed, and I felt compelled to follow a course of action that in the past I would have eliminated in the earlier rounds of solution-seeking.
Something told me that a humble yum cha with family is more important than a volunteer assignment. Granted, it was more than just a volunteer assignment; if I pushed it I could say it was something I gave my word to, although the situation wasn’t right for its undertaking as the expected external arrangements fell through. But a yum cha is also more than just picking at dim sum with chopsticks at a noisy Chinese restaurant; it is a reaffirmation of family ties. Something was also telling me, look, you’ve got a few hours left to tackle those hundreds of emails, read and absorb dozens of training slides and briefing material, figure out what you need to do for Tuesday and the YOG, and those few hours cannot be left to start past midnight should I opt for the nobler calling. Something was telling me that there’s no time. Geddit into your thick head: there’s not enough time to do everything.
Something was booming into my ear: YOU GOTTA TAKE CARE OF YOURSELF. In that voice were echos of advice given by friends, some delivered with a frown, others with a disapproving elder-brotherly tsk, all flowing with genuine concern.
I listened, and decided, but I stumbled when I hesitated to communicate. People can get real upset when you’re no longer accommodating. If the fear of the suffering can be greater than the suffering itself, can the fear of the upset be greater than upset itself? Guilt induces action, but guilt can also paralyse.
For how many years now, have I detected the feelings of dejection in a friend as she waits for me to check my schedule for free dates, and the pangs of disappointment (in both of us) when I cannot meet a simple request for a night out and a dinner?
How many emails, messages and texts have I put off replying, for I was too caught up with the task at hand, letting work, business and ‘important stuff’ take priority?
Yet how many more emails, messages and texts have I not replied due to that guilt paralysis that persisted into the procrastination of the execution of the former?
How many times have I missed being in the moment, in the company of friends, when I was jabbing away at my phone, settling one issue or another?
How many times have I had to reply in the negative to a friend who was seeking a shooting buddy in someplace wild, where I’d very much prefer to be?
How many times have I heard, from almost everyone around me: “Relax!” “Smile!” “You’re so boring!” “SMILE!” “Don’t be so serious!” “Don’t be so uptight!” ?
Why am I always so hung up on work? I’m not even speaking of a career here. It’s just that – plain ‘ole simple honest work, physical and mental labour. I spoke often of the drive to accomplish, to do things, to continually be spending my time productively, applying my skills effectively, devoting myself to bigger causes. But it has become an unhealthy obsession. A crippling habit. A force that has gained its own momentum and has snowballed out of my control.
I tried, as much as I could, to keep away from work, during my trip. Even that wasn’t easy.
I cannot recall a time when my life here has not been overwhelmed by projects and events. I ran my life on meetings, errands and never-ending tasks, being sucked into blackholes. A glance at some of my old blog posts would suggest that nothing much has changed. Nothing much ever changes when I’m in Singapore.
What kept me going, making the same flawed decisions again and again, despite the fact that I wasn’t any more relieved but was in fact made to feel worse off? A sense of duty. Or so I thought. And so I’ve been told.
A sense of duty to what?
I thought about that too. If it’s a sense of duty to others, it should be to the people I have a duty of care towards. That would mean, ranking among the first of them, my family. Then friends. But no – history has shown that I have quite often put my family in second place. I was putting the needs of and my obligations towards strangers and people I couldn’t quite classify as friends, above people I should really be caring about.
If it’s a sense of duty to myself, well, that’s just silly, for what skewed sense of duty would it be if I was just working myself to smithereens? Nevermind the thought that I cannot bear to have failed to meet others’ expectations, or that I cannot meet my expectations… when I was becoming so tired that I didn’t even have the energy left to think or care about whether or not I was meeting expectations!
And if it’s a sense of duty to the task itself? Err, that’ll make me a robot.
“You’re only human.”
A humbling fact that cannot be reiterated enough.
I was always going against what I wanted to do (asking instead what I’m ’supposed’ to do or asking what is ‘right’ failed to work a long time ago) to accommodate others, to please others, or simply not to hurt others, or not wanting to contaminate my integrity (or what I considered was it). In the end I’d end up not doing the things I needed to get done. It wasn’t so much of the actual work – it’s never about the work itself. It’s always the conflicting needs, all the different sides, these seemingly trivial decisions that send ripples of repercussions across everything else on my plate and the neighbouring glass of water, which is never empty. I was eating away at my own happiness.
Too many tasks, too many people, too many organisations, too many groups within an organisation, too many conflicts, only one moment a time, only one me.
My mom walked out of my room a few seconds ago. Posed another layer to another dilemma. This Friday: my aunt and cousins are visiting from Hong Kong and they’d like to have dinner with the family. The Scouts are asking for a meeting (two meetings, in fact, on the same day) and both are groups of people to which I hold some form of responsibility. There is also some administrative paperwork that needs doing at HQ, with the next day as a deadline. I have to be at the airport to receive my Olympics Principal at 4am, Saturday morning – the start of a marathon of 11 absolutely-filled-to-the-seams full days of work, and I’ll need to prepare for that, with some info only coming in on Friday morning.
I could write entire chapters out of such likes.
As the weight of the stress resulting from the… post-mortem of these situations accumulated, I crack.
Being busy was my fuel.
But I’ve combusted.
Crash and burn…
Crashed and burnt!
“You’re only human.”
Lessons learnt.
I cannot keep sacrificing myself.
Now I can hear them cry “But! We cannot do without you! Things will fall apart!” Or is that just a voice in my head? My parents think so. I think not. But can I afford to care? Nobody in this world is indispensable. Everyone is expendable, replaceable. Except for maybe, well, parents. And siblings. And relatives. And friends. Close friends. These are they who are loveable. But not volunteers, employees, grunts. Even Steve Jobs was once squeezed out of his own company. The world will keep spinning.
It is easy to understand the fear that is attached to the notion that being self-assertive and having a greater consideration for my own needs can be construed as being selfish – nobody enjoys being called selfish. But friends, the University of Life and School of Hard Knocks (as Blackadder calls them), are teaching me lessons. The better I can look out for myself, the better I can serve others, and the richer all my relationships and my life can be.
What a very un-INTJ thing to say!
But then again, it’s quite like the INTJs too to be able to logically re-define their lives and choose to ‘right’ themselves onto a better path. ;)
Some of the issues may have been diluted, confused, simplified as I blabber along, but I see the convoluted threads in my mind with a just-about-legible clarity and they make sense. Some threads were probably left out. I know where to go from here, and I now know what may be more important to me… than what I previously thought was important. It’ll take some experimenting, and major changes in perspectives and behaviours to find out. It’ll take lots of courage and risks.
I kept asserting that it’s the freedom in London that is drawing me back; I guess it’s not merely the intellectual, political, cultural, physical and filial freedom. It’s also the freedom to live for myself and those close to me, without needing to feel guilty about it.
