Hi, my name is ____ and I am an escapeholic.

Okay, I admit it: I have a problem. It’s gotten pretty bad, and I don’t know how to solve it.

I know acknowledging the problem is always touted as the all-important first step– hey, you recognize you have a problem, that’s great! Now you can do something about it!

Yes, but what? I’ve always known I’ve had this problem– what’s step two, please?!

I’m getting ahead of myself.

For all appearances, you would be excused from thinking that my problem is that…I have an addiction to my computer, my phone or more generally, the internet. It’s the first thing I turn to when I wake up, it’s the last thing I look at before I fall asleep. As long as I’m not officially occupied at work, I will be seated infront of my computer. I surf the net when I’m eating, when I’m commuting. My hand reaches for my phone every couple of minutes regardless of what I’m doing, regardless of whether there are any new messages or calls. I spend hours every single day in front of the computer. My smart phone (and accompanying addiction) is relatively new, but internet surfing is not.

However, if you look beneath the surface, the computer, phone and internet are just the mediums, I believe, for my addiction to escapism and procrastination.

When I reach for my phone only to discover no new messages, I don’t just put it down again. Sometimes I stare at the screen blankly, swipe from page to page, back and forth. I click to facebook (nothing new in the last 2 mintes), click to twitter, click to the one or two games I play regularly. Scroll through my whatassp chats. Up and down, back and forth, open the apps, close the apps. I just want something to read, something to occupy myself, distract myself.

When I open up my laptop, I always go through my ritual before I can even think of doing anything else; check facebook and read everything in the newsfeed, opening any interesting links in new tabs. Check my blogs, check my emails, check my friends blog, check the handful of webcomics I follow. When I have nothing left to check, nothing left to read, I can easily spend the next couple of hours trying (desperately) to find more things to check, more things to read.

However, it’s not the internet that I’m yearning for, chasing for when I pick up my phone or open up facebook or a friend’s blog for the umpteen time. It’s two other things: distraction and connection.

It’s gotten so bad that it’s become extremely difficult for me to get work done; even if I manage to physically get myself away from my computer and phone, I can’t concentrate at all. I want to think about my work but my brain is just constantly throwing a tantrum, saying ‘not now, not now…’ and wants to be distracted, doesn’t want to think.

That part of the brain thinks of this (vegging out in front of the computer reading stuff) as enjoyment, as relaxation. The rest of me feels trapped. This breeds extreme frustration and stress, and zero satisfaction to know I’ve just wasted more hours of my life doing nothing.

I don’t know if this comes from the break up, but I think the break up (or my methods of coping with the break up) definitely worsened it. That how I got past my depression: distraction. The addiction and hunger of escapism and distraction may in itself be bourn of a deeper problem that comes as a direct result of the break up: Loneliness and a general discontentment with my life. I miss having that deep connection with another person so much, and the happiness that I derive from it, that I desperately try to find something to replace it, but nothing does, leaving me watching funny youtube video after youtube video, chasing that high and contentment that never comes.

I’ve been trying to talk to people more, start more chats with people, connect with friends more, make more new friends, but that just leaves me staring at the dead whatsapp chat or stalking their blogs or facebook page, wishing for a much deeper connection and not getting it.

This isn’t very well written because I’m just writing it quickly at one shot, without thinking or editing. I know blogging has also become just another means of procrastination and distraction to me, and I really want to get away from this screen as soon as possible.

Any suggestions on how to get my brain and focus back in order would be nice.
I have the attention space of a goldfish right now.

:(

A Bubble Floating Through Emptiness

To reality hop.
Can I hop through different realities, please?
I really don’t want to be here.

Be in an anime, or a movie, a fantasy world. To come and go and leave and as you please.
Put me under, into the dream world, go down the rabbit hole, escape.

When I think about you, the world flips inside out and nothing makes sense. I want to run away.
In to psychedelic colours, grunge textures and linkin park songs. I lose touch with reality– this can’t be real, what is real? This is not my reality, I reject it. I don’t want to be here.

There must be somewhere else I can go. How can this be all there is? How can this be my life? It’s not mine, I reject it. I want to go back to there– that felt real, that’s where I want to be. No, that’s where I am. Who closed the door, the door to narnia, to nivarna, to bliss, to home? Why am I stuck in this place, in this shell, in this meaninglessness, in this emptiness?

I feel no attachment to this world, this realm, this reality– it’s not reality. No attachment, no bond, no relation, no investment. It’s not so much that I don’t want to be here as how much I want to be somewhere else– I’m lost. There’s a taste of reality, a taste of home– no, Home– a taste of heaven, I remember. I’ve been there before. Why did it go, where did it go? Who stole my keys and shut me out, threw me out?

How do I get back to reality?
How do I get back home?

Must I stay here, in this prison without walls, bidding my time, and waiting, hoping hopelessly that one day I will escape, one day I will be home again, and reality will be real?

Which is the reality? Is the reality I crave but a dream, a drug, an escapist’s delusion? Am I binded and intoxicated by a dreamy haze? How can things be so contrary– why does my definition of reality differ from yours, is reality relative?

Seeing you, meeting you turns my world (what world?) topsy turvey.

I don’t understand that, but I don’t understand anything.

I am a bubble, floating through emptiness, waiting desperately to

pop.

When the discriminated discriminate

I just read this piece from Thought Catalogue, “The Queer Community has to Stop Being Transphobic” and I couldn’t agree more with the sentiments of the author.

I used to be a transphobic gay man.
….
“I know I’m supposed to get it because I’m gay,” I said, “but I just don’t understand the whole trans* thing at all. It makes me feel so weird.”

That’s exactly how I felt. You would think that being gay would make it easier to understand what being trans is like, but on the contrary, I think it made it harder.

I would think to myself, yeah, I can totally understand not wanting to follow these stupid gender norms that society sticks by. I can understand being a girl and preferring to do guy things, preferring to wear guys clothes. I can even relate to the feeling of wanting to be a guy, or be more guy-like in appearance. Yet it’s because I could identify with all that so closely, I couldn’t understand why they needed to go one more step to actually become the other gender.

I mean, I would ideally prefer it too, if I were taller, more muscular, more masculine… but I can accept that this is how I was born, this is my body. I can learn to accept my body for its good points and ‘bad’ points, why can’t they? Don’t they realize that being a girl doesn’t mean you need to follow society’s stupid rules for girls? You can still wear pants, you can still do whatever you want to do. Why should the physical body matter so much? 

Why should it matter so much indeed.
To throw the question back at myself: why should clothes matter so much? Surely clothes matter even less than your body. Surely a colour would matter less. Surely… all these little stereotypically girl activities and accessories… what’s the big deal? Why can’t you just accept them? They are just things.

And yet I would feel so uncomfortable and out of place in a dress. Like a fish out of water. I wouldn’t feel like myself. Probably as uncomfortable as an average guy would be, if he were forced to wear a dress. Okay, admittedly slightly less since I’ve inevitably been ‘forced’ to wear dresses in my life time.

The other day I watched ‘These Ears Have Walls 2‘. It follows three separate story lines about lesbian couples, in different time periods, all set in the same house.

The first story was thoroughly depressing and the last story was positively uplifting and happifying (helllo Ellen Degeneres and Sharon Stone!). It’s really heartening to see just how far we’ve come and how different things are (in some places), from 1961 to 2001. But it was the second story, set in 1972, that was the most intriguing and thought provoking to me.

(spoilers!)

The story focusses on Linda, a young student who shares the house with a few friends, all lesbians. They are also part of a feminist group, but are being kicked out as the group doesn’t want to be associated with or thought of by others as a ‘lesbian group’ and want to be taken seriously as feminist.

The interesting tension comes when the friends go to a dyke bar and are disappointed and disapproving of how the lesbians in the bar fulfill traditional butch and femme roles. Linda, however, is charmed by and falls for Amy, a butch in a shirt and tie who rides a motorbike. Despite Linda’s efforts to get her friends to be accepting and open, they continually make fun of Amy.

It feels so ironic to me when people turn into exactly what they are fighting against. Like anti-gay religious people claiming that they are all about love, acceptance, forgiveness. This case is worse than that though; you’re clearly part of the same outcasted group, and yet you still discriminated against each other?

It reminds of that that scene from the L Word when the main L Word characters make fun of Moria for being ‘butch’ and for categorizing lesbians into those traditional roles. As though that’s something backward and old fashioned, something to be laughed at. Shouldn’t being part of the same out-casted group be enough to make you realize that how you are treating them is exactly the way you don’t want others treating you?

Yet I can still see both sides of the story. The girls dislike Amy because they see her, and  butch lesbians, as part of the problem. Here they are fighting for equal rights for women, for girl power and the empowerment of all things feminine. And here there are these females who are, bizarrely and counter-productively apparently trying to be men. Why buy into the idea that a suit and tie and masculinity means power, means control? Why think that you have to be the ‘male’ in the relationship and buy the drinks and make the moves and buy the flowers? All that chauvinism is exactly what they’re fighting against and they don’t want people from their own ‘ranks’ undermining their position.

On the other hand, Amy is just like them– she knows who she is and she accepts herself and will not lie or back down about who she is, even if she knows that it will make life difficult for her. She stands up for her own truth, just as they stand up for theirs.

The ugliest moment was when the girls made fun of her to her face, tried to mess up her neatly gelled back hair, and forced her to put on a girly top. Trying to ‘free’ her from her ‘self imposed’ restrictive masculine persona when in fact what they were doing were forcing Amy into their own box.

In another scene from the L word, Max (formerly Moria) tells Jenny, “If you think men are the enemy, then you and I have a problem.” Yes, men, or masculinity, aren’t the enemy, even for feminist. The enemy is bigotry, the enemy is oppression. The enemy is forcing your truths down someone else’s throat, forcing other people into your boxes, because you are more comfortable with that.

The truth always looks slightly different from different angles.

For me, trans* is difficult to understand because, my biological sex doesn’t matter as much. It’s not a core part of my identity– I honestly think that I would feel as comfortable in a male body as I do in my female body. To me, the expression of my gender and the expression of my sexual orientation is much more important than my biological sex. I am all for blurring the gender lines and androgyny.

I dare say this wouldn’t be the case for most people– if you find the thought of having the body of a member of the opposite sex weird and disturbing, then I dare say you can understanding how a trans person feels even more than I do. And if I wanted to understand, I can easily translate their experience into something I can relate to.

As humans, we are so incredibly diverse and the way we experience things can be so different. It can be such a leap to try and understand something that is so foreign to you it have never even occurred to you and you don’t know how to even start thinking about it. Yet, underneath all that, I really believe that all of our fundamental experiences are exactly the same. We are all human. It just takes you to make the effort to listen with openness and translate someone else’s problem into something you can relate to.

We are all human.

Freedom

It’s when you’re thrown in darkness that you most appreciate the light, when you’ve been in the scorching sun that you most appreciate the shade, when you’re parched that you most appreciate water… I’m sure you know all this.

It’s only been three weeks since I started work work proper and woah, the freedom each Friday/Saturday and especially today with a one week break coming, tastes so sweet. The freedom to be wandering around aimlessly and not worry about getting home to get work done, or to get sleep. The freedom to wonder to yourself, where should I go next? and know that it really doesn’t matter– I can wander for a few more hours or I can go home, it’s entirely up to me.

Not to mention the freedom to wear something other than collared shirt and pants, and the freedom to actually style my hair something other than boring neat and normal, and the freedom to  paint my nails odd colours and…

Too bad my freedom will never last long enough for me to have the freedom to have funky hair…

This afternoon we were about to jay walk across the road and the group of us were like um, no so nice right, for us as what we are, to jay walk? One of the girls exclaimed, we have no freedom!

I was scrolling through my facebook newsfeed and saw pinkdot calling for volunteers. As a civil servant and especially this kind of civil servant, am I not allow to volunteer for pink dot? Is my freedom really that restricted?

Can I survive three years in this environment, with these restrictions? To put a part of me (a large part?) on hold and behind bars for now? How sweet will the freedom taste after three whole years? Or would I be ‘tamed’ by then and these things no longer freedoms that I crave but mere wild fancies that I can easily do without? Would I find that it was those childish whims that were restricting me and holding me back, keeping me from reaching my full potential and leading a productive life?

Freedom to be who you want to be versus the freedom to fit in and live a normal, respectable life. How important is the freedom to be whatever you want to be, do whatever you want to do… compared to all the other priorities in life?

Colours and Wind

What I don’t understand is where the ‘care’ went.

How is it that you can go from caring so much, to not caring at all?

What I don’t understand are the masks– back to the basics, like strangers. To speak to each other with polite, surface smiles and upbeat small talk, keeping each other at more than arms length, when once we shared all manner of heart to heart talks. It feels so pointless, fake and above all, really, really sad. Can’t I be myself with you any more?

To have taken all that time to figure out that maze, to slowly disassemble the walls and put down the masks. What a blessing it is to have that sort of familiarity, closeness, trust with another human being. What a curse to have that taken away.

What I don’t understand is– well, everything.

It doesn’t matter, I guess, what I understand or fail to understand. Life goes on.

When I dream of you, I awake with a sense of happiness and contentment. I dreamt last night that I wanted to take you out ‘flying’. Yes, I fly in my dreams. Flying dreams are the best sort of dreams ever.

We’ll keep dreaming of the sky. Colours and wind, colours and wind.

Windy Sunsets

I love walking home in the evenings, before the sun sets on a day with nice weather like today. There’s always something so poignant and emotional and beautiful about the times of dawn and dusk.

The blue sky and it’s puffy white clouds, so beautiful, so beautiful.
We spend too much of the day indoors.
Want to just spend all my time sitting by the beach, staring into the horizon.
And feel the wind embrace you.

I love the wind, I really do. When it blows, it feels all encompassing, going around, over and, it seems, almost through you. I close my eyes as it roars past my ears and whistles through my hair. It makes me think and feel of carefree days, of freedom, of love and joy, of simple pleasures and happiness. It stirs up vagues wisps of emotion-memories of being overseas, on holiday, relaxing. It stirs up vague wisps of feeling-memories of the beach, of Bishan park, of Changi beach club, of childhood memories and being much younger. Perhaps it even reaches further back than that to the memories of childhood dreams and desires to fly.

The blue sky and white clouds and trees and wind also call up memories of Jalan Bangket. Of MacRitchie Reservoir. Of taking walks in her estate…of relationship memories.

It’s a taste. Of openness, freedom, carefreeness, contentment, peace and a simple joy… But also of days gone by. Of past simplicities and securities. Of being young, when everything was always alright. Of a happiness, light-heartedness and optimism that I no longer possess… it makes me melancholy.

The wind always fills me with emotion. If a were a theist I’d say that’s when I feel closest to God, when I can almost literally feel His embrace, his reassurance, his love. Yes, I feel so loved. But I’m not a theist.

Instead, I’d say its when I feel most alive, most aware of the beauty of life and living, most in awe and appreciation, most at one and almost at peace with the world.

The most beautiful things in life are often bittersweet, like the sunset at dusk.

Related:
I Think I Love the Wind the Best 

Changing Partners

I stay me. And you stay you.

The things I would do stay the same even if it’s someone else beside me.
Like spazzing out over furry plants and cactuses or pointing out eagles in the sky, I guess.

The things you would do stay the same even if it’s someone else beside you.
Like dressing up in yukatas and having lunch at sakae sushi, eating salmon and amaebi sushi.

It feels disconcerting– I used to do that with you, and now you’re doing it with someone else? But it’s inevitable, just the way it necessarily is. I shared myself with you, and now you’re gone, but I’m still here. I’m still me, and the things I share are still those things.

I’ve always wondered, for people who’ve had multiple bfs or gfs… what do you call them? Does the name stay the same? Isn’t strange though, if you called boyfriend A ‘baby’ and you call boyfriend B ‘baby’ as well?

And yet, how many terms of endearment can you cycle, huh? Besides, what if it’s a personal preference, it’s a term you like. You stay you. And the other person just changes and swops and cycles. The term you use is a part of who you are, and not an identity of the other.

I wonder if there are things that aren’t just you (with me tagging along) and aren’t just me (with you tagging along) but are us. Things unique to us. Things that can’t be cycled, can’t just swop in and out someone new. Things that we only did together, that we wouldn’t do with anyone else.

There must be, for surely a relationship is greater than the sum of its parts? For surely there is ‘you’, there is ‘me’, but there was also ‘us’?

I can’t remember, I”ve forgotten, I am forgetting.

When I look at our ‘things to do before we die!’ list, the items seem to fall neatly into the things you wanted to do, and the things I wanted to do. Of course, we’d thought we’d do them together, but you would still fly in a hot air balloon without me, and I am still set on climbing mountains and seeing the northern lights with or without you, or anyone else. Was there anything on the list that was truly something for us to do before we die?

We were waltzin’ together to a dreamy melody
When they called out “Change partners”
And you waltzed away from me
Now my arms feel so empty as I gaze around the floor
And I’ll keep on changing partners
Till I hold you once more