The Subjectivity of Stupid

Posted on
12

In my senior year of college, I met a girl named Andy. We became groupmates in a Theology project and got along really, really well. But then graduation happened and I didn’t hear from her again.

Until I started blogging. (I genuinely thank God for the internet and Facebook. Andy is personal proof that you can’t put a period on any relationship.)

We met up for lunch yesterday – prior to that, we had also met up sometime in June – and what I like most about being with her (besides her winning personality) is that we don’t try to relive college. Instead, we dream and chart out the future.

Andy has watched me attack and assemble the inauspicious life of a freelancer. As  a teacher and writer without roots, going from project to project and paycheck to paycheck, I told her that the only real issue I have with my professional life is the pressure.

I get it.

You can’t make life choices like my own without the consequence of judgment.  I’ve read between the lines of people’s side comments and sneers. I know that they think everything I’ve chosen for myself so far (from my college degree to my current terms of employment) runs the gamut between stupid and impractical to risky and non-beneficial. Flights of fancy of a girl with her head in the clouds.

To that I say: do me a favor and give me some credit.

I’m not unintelligent. I could prove it to you with reasons or with a list of all my accomplishments but that would just be bragging and bragging, in my opinion, is very, very tacky. I’d like to think I’m better than that. You’re just going to have to take my word for it when I tell you that I wholly understand the financial repercussions of my post-grad decisions.

I understand that to be a freelancer means that I am giving up all the stability a conventional job offers. It means learning how to juggle around what I have and it means learning to live with what I don’t. It has not escaped me that the career path I am walking on means having days of having less. But I can live with that.

I can live without labels and luxury. I can live without the frills of extravagance. I was, after all, never ambitious about wealth – one perk, I suppose, of having been born into a middleclass family. I know the meaning and the intrinsic value of having enough. 

Despite the obvious absence of glamour, it’s a life that isn’t as deprived as the world imagines it to be. I can still go out for dinners with friends, I can still buy nice clothes, I can still travel and make superflous purchases – I just can’t do all these things at once. I’m constrained by a budget, by the proper calculation of my basic survival for the week and by hopeful estimates.

And so it pays that I am not unintelligent because what a freelancer needs to be – more than anything – is clever. Clever when it comes to investing her money, time and talent; clever when it comes to choosing which projects to take and which to decline. The freelancer’s vital trait should be their extraordinary cleverness at handling the unpredictability of life.

That being said: I am young. I’m hardly there yet. I am just beginning to get to know the world and, despite my limited intelligence, I am still learning.

It has not escaped me that the career path I am walking on today means having days of having less. And, yes. It is as hard as it is humbling. But what I do know for sure is that having less has never, for a second, meant being less.

And that’s why all the pressure sucks.

I am currently in love with Andy’s mantra, which is: everybody is broke in their 20′s. As I told her, everyone should go through it. At least once. Having nothing – or even just having less – shifts a person’s paradigm towards what’s important, what matters and what is worth the risk. Which is why I do what I do in the first place.

After two years of writing and teaching, meeting new people and being tossed into strange and funny experiences, I’ve found that I don’t just have enough — I am also very, very happy.

This is not an attack on people with 9-to-5′s or to people who are thriving in the corporate world. I think that some people were really meant to grow and thrive in that kind of environment. But, as fate would have it, I’m not one of those people. Which is not to say that my doors are closed. Maybe one day I will look for an office and a timecard.

But today is not that day.

No, this entry is a non-comprehensive debunking of the myth that freelancing is stupid. Stupidity is subjective and, in this humble writer’s opinion, true stupidity is running away from doing the things that you love. Or listening to the sermons of people who don’t understand, who don’t think that what you are doing really matters in the grand scheme of things.

A few years ago, I was having lunch with my friend and his parents. When they found out that I was taking a degree in Creative Writing, they asked: “What happens after?”

That is an excellent question. And, to be honest, I don’t know. But give me a lifetime – I’ve only just begun figuring it out.

For the dreamers and freelancers, for Andy, who is just getting started, for the ones who are jumping off metaphorical cliffs, here’s an excerpt of Amena Brown’s How To Fly:

It is not for punks, not for cowards, not for innocent bystanders. It is for the weak, the hopeful, the discounted; for the few who can’t quiet the dreams beating in their chest. For the brave who harness fear like sails & let it propel them towards things to come:  This just might be your time to fly. Do not miss your flight.

The Problem With The Refusal of The Stars

Posted on
11

I finished John Green’s The Fault in Our Stars on the same day that I finished Daniel Handler’s Why We Broke Up. That being said, this won’t be another book review – although I’ve been encouraged by some to keep writing those. This will be an exploration of feelings and thoughts, as many of my past entries have been, on the wonderful subject of that wonderful thing known as love.

One thing I like about John Green is that he isn’t flowery. A lot of writers – and I, myself, am guilty of this – like to paint romance and emotion with grand hyperboles.  I will love you until the stars refuse to shine! You are my world! My love for you has no limits!

These are all sweet sentiments but they don’t tell me something that’s true. And I think that that’s the thing with truth – you don’t need to make it any more beautiful than it already is.

The problem, for example, with I will love you until the stars refuse to shine: I like watching wedding videos. I like weddings. A lot. Weddings represent a physical metaphor for union and commitment and I happen to actually be a big fan of both.

But when people talk about the refusal of the stars in their vows, I – though not a literary scholar, just a mere lover of words – kind of cringe on the inside. Because stars are heavenly balls of gases  and while I concede that they are very much alive, I doubt they actually have even the slightest mental capacity to choose (much less, refuse) when to shine. The stars are not human and that is what is so great about them – they hang without choice and only stop when they die. I find comfort (and romance) in that.

I know that that line about stars refusing is just a fancy way of saying I will love you always but I’d rather someone promise me that outright than promise me poetry based on the condition of the stars. When it comes to words, I think love needs to be put very simply.

I like how Lemony Snicket/Daniel Handler phrases it in The Beatrice Letters: 

“I never want to be away from you again, except at work, in the restroom or when one of us is at a movie the other does not want to see.”

Very (and quite comically) real.

Also this one by Jonathan Safran Foer, author of Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, which I have, regrettably, not yet read:

“I love you also means I love you more than anyone loves you, or has loved you, or will love you, and also, I love you in a way that no one loves you, or has loved you, or will love you, and also, I love you in a way that I love no one else, and never have loved anyone else, and never will love anyone else.”

(That one I have actually considered using as a wedding vow but I think the whole point of vows is that they are supposed to be personal, not copied.)

It would be better, I suppose, if someone said: I love you like the stars. Because then that would, in a way, talk about a person who gives up all his options to remain within unwavering love, come what may, until the day that he dies. That, I suppose, is the power and beauty of words. To omit one thing or to add another can change the meaning of something completely; can push it towards or away from what is true.

People have asked whether I would want to marry a writer someday. And I have always said that it truly doesn’t matter, that I am ready to embrace whatever similarities or differences we have. But here’s my personal disclaimer: I would really like to end up with someone who understands the complexities of words, the weight carried by the simple idea of the stars’ refusal, who knows what he is saying, what he really means and who can attach something true to the beauty of I love you.

There’s a Christian song with a line that goes: Your presence is heaven to me. And I love it, I really do. It is probably the real-est line I have ever sung to God. Heaven, you see, is a personal idea. No one has lived to really describe it fully. It remains, until now, untouched beyond human imagination. But to say that you are heaven to me is to attach you to all the golden goodness I believe heaven could be. Not harps and angels and clouds but dancing, white dresses, words that are true and stars, of course. Always stars.

Here Comes The Feeling You Thought You’d Forgotten

Posted on
13

And you know what? In many ways, it did.

“But that’s why right there it was doomed. We couldn’t only have the magic nights buzzing through the wires. We had to have the days, too, the bright impatient days spoiling everything with their unavoidable schedules, their mandatory times that don’t overlap, their loyal friends who don’t get along, the unforgiven travesties torn from the wall no matter what promises are uttered past midnight, and that’s why we broke up.”

Daniel Handler’s (AKA Lemony Snicket) Why We Broke Up takes place in a big blue box. The box belongs to one Min Green and inside of it are a hodgepodge of secret memories she once shared with ex-boyfriend, Ed Slaterton, through the course of their one-month relationship.

With beautiful illustrations by Maira Kalman, each item reveals an intimate story that traces back to how their love came to life and how it, ultimately, unraveled in the end.

Though I never actually finished the whole thing, I have always been a fan of A Series of Unfortunate Events. A friend of mine once told me that Daniel Handler is one of the most underrated YA authors and I agree. The remarkable thing with him is that, though the Series can admittedly be quite ridiculous sometimes, he is able spin his prose on the page so beautifully. He’ll pen in literary gold and mix it with humor like a spellbinder, leaving the reader – for lack of a better word - captivated.

But Why We Broke Up is a hundred leagues different from Handler’s Series. It’s messy, it’s real and it’s raw.

Upon reading it, you’re thrown right smack in the middle of the heart of Min, thrown into a symphony of emotions. From uncontainable euphoria to the fear that lurks quietly in the corner; from beauty and bliss to the eventual collapse. And that’s exactly what it feels like, folks. A collapse.

Like your heart is swelling and your hope is rising and your love is growing and suddenly, you’re empty. Suddenly, everything crashes and breaks and the world grinds to a halt and you are found, speechless, by an incredible wave of crushing loneliness. That is what reading this painfully beautiful book feels like.

Because even if you haven’t gotten your heart broken in years, you will become Min and your heart will tear itself right out of your chest. The emotions, the ones you hadn’t felt in years, the ones you swore you would never relive, will come barreling out of you, ripping themselves out straight from the pages – here comes the feeling you thought you’d forgotten - and you will remember the tender art of loving somebody who doesn’t quite love you back.

It is only now in my 20′s that I appreciate unrequited love. That I understand how powerful, how pure, it is and can be. To quote Will Grayson, Will Grayson:

“You like someone who can’t like you back because unrequited love can be survived in a way that once-requited love cannot.”

 

The moment love is reciprocated, a story begins. One where you and I are on the same page. Where a miracle is born, where our hearts actually connect and find shelter under the same roof, where we both look in the face of uncertainty and say, with bold and blind certainty, yes.

And as we run through the rising action and dance through the conflict and hold each other in the climax, there stands just one single expectation – one golden, unmovable condition – and that is: no matter how fast and furiously the pages are turned, we will remain, hand-in-hand, on the same one.

That when we speak of love, we are agreeing, solemnly and silently, on the impossibility to un-love.

But you couldn’t and you didn’t and that is why we broke up.

 

Thoughts On Everything & The Idea of Nothing

Posted on
8

This will be messy. You’ve been warned.

***

I spent most of my Friday night in the hospital. I watched as doctors pumped out the toxins that a really close friend of mine intentionally ingested. As I type this, I know that I will be taking us towards the taboo topic of suicide and I do not know how we will navigate our way through this. I just know that we’ll be walking through it – through murky, dark waters – together and that, really, is the best thing I could hope for.

(Told you it would be messy.)

The funny thing about loading yourself up on pills is that if you survive it, the first few hours succeeding the overdose will reflect the heavy haze in your cerebral system. You won’t understand anything – why tubes are in your nose, why there are doctors hovering over you, why your throat feels like you just swallowed a vial of acid. When I first saw my friend in the emergency room, she didn’t even recognize me. She was lying down, eyes bleary, and her first words were: “You look Korean.” And despite the situation, that made me laugh.

But it was two-sided laughter. Because even though she seemed drunk and incomprehensible, the difference was that people who get wasted on alcohol do it to escape something.  But people who pop more pills than their body can handle? They do it to escape everything. And there is a certain darkness, a certain heaviness, to that.

***

When I got to the hospital, when I first saw my friend lying there, she looked nothing like her usual self. Yes, she was alive but there was no real life in her – just an empty hollow void of confusion. As I watched her, as I sat by her side and answered her questions and stroked her hair, the question in my heart was not: don’t you know that I love you?

The question in my heart was: why?

The way I see it, the books keep getting it wrong. Because your concern, when a person intentionally puts their life in the balance, is not whether that person is aware of your love. You don’t even wonder whether they actually love you back. I might be wrong on this but what really happens – or, at least, what happened to me – is that a huge disconnect starts to form.

You don’t become oblivious to love, you become hyper-aware of it. And if there was all this love between us, then why would you even think of doing that?

What you want – what anyone who is ever left behind or almost left behind by someone they love wants – are answers. Something that could possibly make sense of the matter.

Because if I loved you and you loved me, then why was that not enough to stay?

***

People often talk about it. The dark night of the soul. It is real. And I think that we all go through it, at least once in our lives.

The dark night that falls upon each person is always different. It can be catalyzed by anything, even just the slightest sliver of pain. And, in that moment, life won’t make sense and pain will become your only truth but I’m telling you: if you hold on, if you stick it out, if you fight, things will get better. They always do. It sounds impossible and it sounds crazy but hope… hope is real.

You might hear every lie in the book telling you that life is useless, that you are worthless, that nothing matters but if you listen even harder, I hope you hear what your heart (deep inside) knows to be true: that love is louder.

Love is much, much louder. And love, real undivided love, is worth staying alive for.

***

I hope you will be a light because there are many hurting and broken people. What I find interesting is that the first thing God ever spoke into existence was: Let there be light.

And though it seems like it’s God’s job to keep the light on, the truth is that it’s all of ours.

“Where there is light, there cannot be darkness.” – Renee Yohe

***

You are loved. Infinitely and truly. And though it may not look like it, you are an irreplaceable member of the universe. You are wanted. You belong. You matter.

Stay.

***

The last text I sent my friend said: we will walk through this together.

And we will.

Wild Worlds (A Story About My High School)

Posted on
4

I do not miss my high school.

Wait. Don’t get me wrong. I’m not one of those people who experienced intense emotionally scarring from their alma matter. In fact, I’m lucky enough to say that I had so much fun in high school. I was genuinely happy. I guess I’m just too old (and in love with the present!) to still be living in that past.

I’ve been thinking about it a lot lately though and what strikes me these days, reliving high school as a 23-year-old, are the small moments, not the big lessons. I had been going to a prestigious all-girls Catholic school for 9 years when I suddenly decided to transfer. I was 13. My reasons for transferring were really murky, even to this day. I suppose it was a combination of many things – the feeling that I had either outgrown the school I had come from or, perhaps, not grown at all. The excitement at the thought of possibility. The readiness for change.

The school I had grown up in had a big beautiful campus with state-of-the-art facilities and lots of big trees. When I was toured around my new school – a narrow 6-floor building – I didn’t notice the paint that was chipping off the walls, the sari-sari right across it (it was situated in the middle of a hidden street in San Juan), the red (or was it green?) linoleum floors and the signs of early dilapidation all around me.

I loved it.

It was new and different and scary and even if I didn’t know what would await me on my first day, I was incredibly intent on finding out. It was a very brave thing, now that I think about it, to leave behind 9 years of my life to pursue something that was the exact opposite of all that I had ever known. What drives a girl to do that? Looking back, I was fearless. And I’m proud of me for that.

It wasn’t logical and I’m sure a lot of my friends in my old school thought I had got kicked out or suffered from a case of impulsive stupidity but I have no regrets.

In my new school, one thing I loved were the uniforms. Our ties were navy blue and silky and they looked nice against our white tops with our names stitched above the school crest. We didn’t have IDs because everyone walked around with their names (GARCIA, ISABEL MARIA F.) on their chests. In that way, everyone knew everyone – which was something that I always found rather lovely. When you are young, I think your biggest hope is to be known. In that school, I was known. And so was everyone else.

In my old school, we were heavily populated and you could quite easily go through your 4 years of high school without even knowing a certain person even existed. In my new one, there were 60 of us in a batch and new students were incredibly easy to spot. I was placed with kids who were a year younger than me because, unlike myself, none of them had been required to go through the 7th grade.

My first day – I still remember it. I was so nervous to meet everyone - would they like me? Would I like them? Had I just made the biggest mistake of my teenage life? – that I didn’t quite understand how I looked in their eyes. You see, my new school was exponentially different in every way possible. It wasn’t Catholic, it wasn’t all-girls and it wasn’t (though you might’ve guessed this from my description earlier) very rich.

Now I, personally, didn’t care for any of these things but to my classmates – who were taught at an early age how to use public transportation and how hold their own in the big, bad streets of Manila – I just looked like a snotty, private car-owning rich kid. Which, to be honest, was hardly the whole truth.

Needless to say, they didn’t like me at first. Or maybe they were just very wary of me. But, eventually, we all got into a groove where those seemingly huge differences ebbed into beautiful quirks that we learned to love about each other. This is why I believe, to this day, that mutual kindness has the potential to bridge everything, even the impossible stuff.

During my first year in my new school – I was a 14-year-old sophomore – we had to attend a camp. I had attended a summer camp before and so I was excited. Little did I know that the camp we were asked to be part of was a military camp. We had to sleep in army tents, on big bamboo slats, and do training exercises. At one point, I was asked to crawl on my belly, in the mud, under ropes that represented barbed wire.

For someone who had come from a place that ensured to keep you pristine and safe, this was a huge shock. But I liked it. In fact, that experience of crawling through the mud on all fours, became my metaphor for what my high school was to me: a wild world, where one could get extraordinarily messy, where the unorthodox and the unexpected were welcome.

During lunch time, since one of my friends had an aunt who worked in the school as a pastor but was also always out doing field work, we’d hide out in her dark and quiet office room and share stories. This made it a place where secrets could thrive and where camaraderie could flourish. In my first year there, I met a boy that I really liked and he would walk me to my locker, to my car, to the canteen, through hallways and to class. It was an experience that was incredibly foreign to me that I – admittedly – really enjoyed. This became my first brush with romance and that, I suppose, added to the wildness of the school. It became a place where I could tangibly believe in the potential of romance to exist, where I could watch it happen and unfold right before my very eyes. My close friends personally saw to it that I would leave the halls of school fully equipped with the ability to navigate through Manila in a jeepney, a train and a bus. (I don’t think I learned that all too well.) They introduced me to the messy, un-tame side of the metro and showed me how and who to ne so that this side would not and could not consume me, even if it tried. They taught me the value of being street smart, which is one thing that I fervently believe the youth needs.

I think what set my high school experience apart were the people. They weren’t really conditioned to all act a certain way or to follow a certain mold. Yes, there was a sense of group think among us – it was, after all, a Christian school, but the personalities and manners of speaking and backgrounds were so varied and that was what I found particularly refreshing. The people were all so unapologetically different. I celebrated that. I celebrated that because it made me feel and believe that I was free to be different, too.

Let me tell you about my classmates today: one is opening her own restaurant. One works as a chef in Guam. One of them, my good friend, Anna, is still studying to be a veterinarian. One works in an advertising firm in Singapore. One studied film in Australia. My other good friend, Ciara, is going to be a stewardess in PAL. One of my classmates, our batch valedictorian, now works as a counsellor for abused children – which I think is incredibly awesome and gives me hope in the idea that there really are people who would willingly live for others.

But before they all got to where they are today, we had to go through an institution together. And it isn’t one that is impressive in the light of the Real World but it was ours. On the day of graduation, the school surprised me with a medal. It was a big silver medal with the words Best in English engraved in the center.

I look back on that moment now as another metaphor. They didn’t tell me I’d be getting an award and I was caught, mouth agape, in the middle of shock and awe. But that was the gift the school had given me for the three years that I had been a part of it. The gift of surprise – to be surprised by people and circumstance, to be surprised by the reality that things are never as they seem, that they can be more and that they can be greater; surprised by the good that can come out change, surprised by the fact that people are not so different when they’re under the same light, surprised by the beauty of the wildness, surprised by the fact that some things just shouldn’t be tamed.

Today I am 23 and I teach high school girls. Their school has taken very good care of them and I can see, even as early as now, that they will grow up to be fine citizens of the world. But every once in a while I try to indoctrinate them in the ways of the wild through by passing on secondhand stories of my firsthand encounters. To talk about the worlds outside their walled campus is a gift and I hope it sparks a curiosity in them, in the possibility of running unbridled; I hope it sets a fire inside that will help them believe in the reality that the life that waits outside may be dangerous but it can be better – so much better.

I do not miss my high school, not one bit. But I think it’s safe to say that I will probably always love it.

The Messy Ugly Art of Feeling

Posted on
14

Everybody told me that I’d get into trouble if I wore my heart on my sleeve.

At the time, I was young and still in the middle of getting to know the world and worst of all, I believed them. So I hid my heart. Every time I felt the slightest compulsion to care, I pushed it aside because caring meant vulnerability and vulnerability meant pain and pain seemed far too big a risk for a heart as young as mine.

During that point, a friend of mine said that what the world needs the most is more intellectuals. Rational thinkers who can segregate what they feel from what they do. And that made sense to me at the time because I was made to treat emotion like a weakness, a crutch and a disease.

It never occurred to me that what the world needs is truth. Genuine, authentic people who can live honest lives – lives where they don’t attempt to shy away from emotion. Lives that celebrate feelings, or at the very least, acknowledge them. Lives that are transparent and messy and, at the core of it all, real.

As I write this, I am thinking about the people in my life who I’d count as genuine. They are always the people who don’t pretend to have it all together, the people who have had their hearts split open and felt unnerving pain, the ones who have loved so valiantly and fiercely even if the cost was close too fatal.

Yes, they are the people who dance on the edges of the messy stuff in life.

I realize now that the kind of person I am drawn to, the kind of person who wins my respect and admiration, is the person who can live boldly and truthfully. A person who can be broken, who can grieve, who can feel rage or passion or, at the very least, something - something beyond apathy disguised as level-headed, practical coolness.

Not caring is a way, I think, to keep things simple and safe and neat. And that may be logical but it is also grossly incongruent to real life.

In real life, you go through the motions of falling and failing, of facing disappointments and moments of absurd joy. In real life, you go through some pretty negative emotions and those – those are real. But you go through some pretty positive ones, too and those – those are even realer.

And that, the messy ugly art of feeling, is beautiful.

Perhaps not (perhaps never!) in the moment but what I’ve found as I look at my life in hindsight, is that the moments I exercised courage or authenticity or any virtue worth being proud of, always happened when I opened my heart up to feeling more than I ever thought I could take.

And this whole entry is a giant post-it that I’m leaving on the windows of my soul. There is merit to caring.

In 1939, Rhett Butler’s character in Gone With The Wind, Gable, says this as a parting line to his love interest, Scarlet O’ Hara:

Frankly, my dear, I don’t give a damn.

And it sounds so cool and so badass… but we all know that I will never be either.

Even though we live in a world that believes in the contrary, I want to be the kind of person who actually and genuinely gives a damn. And, yes, it may lead to some sort of trouble – but trouble in the right context, I believe, is what makes love, life and relationships so much more fun. It is also synonymous, in my book, to good, delicious mayhem – which, I believe even more, is quite possibly the best thing we could hope for.

Three Things I Love About The World

Posted on
22

Most of my writer friends began their start-of-the-year entries with the personal goals and resolutions they had made for 2012. There really is something so promising about a new year. The lure of a clean slate compels people to cling to a hope so much bigger than they’d  normally dare to embrace. It’s a good hope; a legitimate one. It’s redemption: the hope of getting things right this time around.

I’ve been pretty excited about 2012. No hidden agenda, no secret reason behind my uncontainable enthusiasm. Just a feeling — a hunch — that wonderful things are going to come barreling towards me. I can’t explain it and I can’t prove it either. I guess it’s a faith thing.

To be honest, my only real goal for this new year is that I won’t let it pass me by. I won’t be a bystander anymore. This year, I’m participating. I’m going to involve myself in the stuff of life and it’s going to be messy and painful and altogether wonderful. That I am sure of.

So here is my very first entry for 2012, to kick off what just might be the most exciting year of my life. While a lot of people pray for optimism, I’ve got optimism spilling out of my ears. And though a lot of people may sneer at me for that, I agree a hundred percent with John Green: “The world may be broken but hope is not crazy.“

The Three Things I Love About the World

1. People can do some pretty messed up things but when they love, they really love.

We’ve all heard of the crazies. That boy who brought a gun to school, attacked all his classmates and then killed himself. That woman who murdered her own baby and then pleaded innocent in court. Those people who do acts heinous enough for us to collectively think:

Yes, they exist and we know it. But there is still another side to all that ugliness: the people who make us believe in love again. The people who humbly put themselves on the line, who give themselves again and again, who disregard the cost and just love even when it seems ridiculous, futile and pointless. Those people are my heroes.

I read this a few weeks ago and it reminded me why we risk, why I love people and why humanity isn’t completely hopeless. Here are a few of my favorites:

  • Today, and every day for the last two months since I returned to school with burn scars on my face after being hospitalized for nearly a month for injuries I sustained in a house fire, a red rose was taped to my locker when I got to school in the morning. I have no clue who is getting to school early and leaving me these roses. I’ve even arrived early myself a few times to try to figure it out, but each time the rose was already there.
  • Today was the 10 year anniversary of my dad’s passing. When I was a kid he used to hum a short melody to me as I was going to sleep. When I was 18, as he rested in his hospital bed fighting cancer, the roles were reversed and I hummed the melody to him. I haven’t heard that melody since, until last night. My fiancé and I were turned on our sides looking at each other in bed when he started humming it to me. His mom used to hum it to him when he was a kid.
  • Today, my 11-year-old son speaks fluent sign language because his best friend, Josh, who he grew up with from the time he was an infant, is deaf. Seeing their genuine friendship evolve and grow over the years makes me think.
  • Today, due to Alzheimer’s and dementia, my grandfather usually can’t remember who my grandmother is when he wakes up in the morning. It bothered my grandmother a year ago when it first happened, but now she’s fully supportive of his condition. In fact, she plays a game every day in which she tries to get my grandfather to ask her to re-marry him before dinnertime. She hasn’t failed yet.

2. People are so beautiful and can make the most beautiful things.

I love that the world is so varied and so rich in culture. I love how two strangers coming from opposite ends of the world can come together and build a friendship. I love that it doesn’t always matter how different you are. You can still forge something beautiful, something that could possibly carry a lifetime’s worth of amazing stories.

And I also love how people all over the world have the capacity to create. Poetry, prose, art, music, dance – some of the things that stand as a person’s only true lifeline in this world.

Esref Armagan has been blind since birth but has been producing amazing works of art for 35 years already. How can a man who has never seen the ocean or glimpsed the rising of the sun even begin to come up with stuff like this?

It’s a beautiful anomaly and I do not understand it all. I don’t think I want to. What I do know is that we all have the potential to inspire. It’s there, waiting at our fingertips. The question is: what are we doing with it?

3. Anything can happen.

You could be walking down the street or doing your laundry or dancing in a club or driving through a quiet alley; you could be caught up in the mundane or in the middle of the worst day of your life. You could be anywhere in the world. Doesn’t matter. It could happen. And it is anything.

And I love that. I love that about the world. I love that the possibilities are endless, that the beads of reality run infinitely through time and space. I love that as possible as it is for the absolute worst to happen, it’s just as possible for the absolute best to happen. And I think — no, I truly believe — that it is for this very possibility that we live.

Anything can happen and that is what makes life so deliciously wonderful. We open our hearts to a chance. The chance that our dreams could come true, the chance that we’ll beat the odds, the chance that we might find a love that stays, the chance that we could encounter something truly remarkable.

Life and the world is made up of statistics. People say that it’s entirely likely that we will die never achieving our heart’s true desire. But we don’t live for likelihood, do we? We live for the chance of fate turning around, for the tiny speck that it will find favor in us, for the hope that if we stick it out, if we wait, we will find something absolutely worth it.

That is how I am approaching my 2012. With the knowledge that the road ahead is long and that the doors are endless and that anything can happen and to some, that might mean nothing but to me? That could actually-quite-possibly-potentially be everything.

2012: A New Year’s Benediction

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This coming year, I hope you find courage. Courage to begin again and take good risks; courage to find yourself and be somebody. I hope your faith is big enough to guide you through and if it isn’t, I hope you cultivate it until it grows into a garden of good things. Life isn’t going to get any easier but I hope you hold on. If there’s anything I learned from 2011, it’s that even though the odds are against you, it does get better.

I hope, with all my heart, that you never settle. It doesn’t matter what aspect of life you decide to apply this to — you are too good to content yourself with something less than great. I hope you find your passion and have plenty of good, ridiculous fun. I hope you learn to forgive yourself this year because forgiveness is always succeeded by love. Speaking of love, I hope you fall in love. Real, hard, astounding love. I hope you open your heart and go beyond yourself. I hope you empty yourself for the sake of something bigger. Yes, if I should hope for anything for you this 2012, it’s that you will always find yourself in the middle of a great love story, whether with someone or by yourself. I hope you will see the many ways in which love abounds — in God and people and, sometimes, even in a wonderful piece of fiction.

I hope you discover the beauty of simple things and how they stand as lifesavers when the big things fall apart. I hope you find yourself face-to-face with a problem so seemingly impossible you will be forced to find a strength within you that you never even knew existed. And, with all I have, I hope you win. I hope you learn to be a hero. I hope you get to share an amazing adventure with people who are nothing less than wonderful. I hope you find all kinds of opportunities to show kindness to a hurting and broken world – even if it costs you. I hope wherever you are, hope grows. I hope you get to travel. I hope your horizons expand beyond all your expectations, I hope that you tremble with vulnerable love but above all, I hope you witness a miracle.

And, as 2012 comes to a dazzling end, I hope you realize what your heart has hardly begun to believe:  that the miracle is you.

2011

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On the last month of this very quiet year, I set aside one night to watch Stranger Than Fiction. It has always been one of my most favorite movies and I hope you get the chance to watch it yourself so that you can understand why.

I would describe it as the story of an ordinary man whose whole world changes the moment he realizes that life is a miracle and can be pretty damn extraordinary if we were actually brave enough to treat it as such.

Now that 2011 is coming to a close, I find it quite appropriate to liken myself to the movie’s protagonist: Harold Crick, the man with the horrendously ordinary life.

2011, for me, was strangely… normal.

There is something initially disappointing about normal. Normal doesn’t make for good writing. Normal isn’t interesting. Normal is unimaginative, unimpressive… boring. I would love to fill this entry with climax; tell you about struggle, intense emotion and passionate rage. Unlike last year, with its generous heaping of sick emotional drama, 2011 has actually been relatively easy. Like that big gulp of air before the tide comes rushing in, or the last few days of summer vacation, or all the inconspicuous hours, seconds and minutes that preceded the big moment that finally changed Harold Crick’s life. 2011 was the sweet middle chapter of a very long novel.

Personally, I’d like to defend normal. Because the reality is that normal is all we could possibly hope for. We often swing between the polar extremities of high highs and low lows, we’re well-accustomed to the struggle, that we take for granted the simple pleasure of life being wonderfully easy. It’s a rare opportunity but, in a world of high stress and constant crisis, it still happens.

Truth is: you don’t get a lot of of easy years after you turn 20. And when I think about it that way, I know that I am extremely blessed that Life decided – for unknown reasons – to grant me a reprieve.

Which is not to say that it wasn’t agonizing at all. When your life is at a standstill, it gets difficult to watch people your age climb corporate ladders and promotions. It gets emotionally constricting to see them conquer the world and don superhero capes while you sit on the sidelines, waiting.

And waiting for what, exactly? I’m not sure. Waiting, I suppose, for a clear sign. For answers. Waiting to be ready. Waiting for something stable, something certain. Waiting to try again, to start anew, to make a comeback that would have the world start believing in me again.

Which is also not to say that it wasn’t great. When your life is at a standstill, you have a special luxury known as time. And it is through the abundance of time that I found my word for the year:

R E – C R E A T I O N

We often attach this word to summer camps and sporting activities but what it means to me now is actually a lot more literal.

Re-creation: to create again. 2011 was a season to re-define all that was unclear which, in my case, was my entire life.

It was a season to get personal, to figure myself out, to try new things, to fail, to have fun and to not worry about the big stuff. It was my year to invest in the smaller picture. There were also plenty of seemingly idle moments but that’s okay. I believe that God usually does His best work in the waiting.

It’s not always going to be like this, you know. One day, this blog is going to be filled with stories of travel and boyfriends and weddings and, quite possibly, kids. And I find it comforting to know that I will be able to look back on my life and find a time when everything was absolutely still.

I will miss it and when my season of busyness finally arrives, I will look back on my early 20′s fondly – perhaps as if they were the best moments of my life.

In 2011, I turned 23 and got to:

  • Buy and raise a puppy.

  • Travel to South Korea and the United States. (Specifically Missouri and Memphis)
  • Be part of a new community.
  • Make my first major purchase: the iPhone 4, the phone of my dreams.

  • Go kayaking and fishing in a lake with my cousin; it was a 5-hour adventure!
  • Resign from my day job.
  • Teach young people.

  • Teach older people.
  • Go on a couple of road trips.
  • Be a part of a couple of weddings.
  • Change my hair approximately 4 different times.

And that’s just for starters.

So while it wasn’t as financially lucrative as those of my friends who have real jobs and, ahem, real lives, I can’t say it wasn’t fun. In fact, it was insanely fun. Which is pretty much what re-creation is all about.

Here’s what I’ve realized:

Every once in a while, you will go through moments where the landscape is dull and where the world hardly looks like the paradise that was promised to you. You will go through points that are dry and through months – maybe even a whole year – where absolutely nothing happens.

But I hope you’ve figured it out by now. That nothing in life is arbitrary. That there is a bigger picture in the works that we will perpetually be blind to. And that, when life seems to be far too quiet, it just means that destiny is about to fall on you. It’s about to kick you in the face and smack you in the head. Because life is not static.

No. If life is a story then the plot is always geared towards moving forward. The magic always happens in the middle of an ordinary life. Our hero thinks he’s normal then something happens that changes everything. Who is to say that isn’t true for all of us?

Perhaps it’s not so much about waiting for something to happen as it is about making something happen. If my break has taught me anything, it’s that I’m officially ready to move again.

I’m going to take greater risks next year. I’m going to work on my future. I’m going to run through open doors and if the good ones are all locked, I swear to yank them off their hinges.

And despite all the initiative I promise to take, I also truly believe that 2012 will bring a lot of good mayhem without me even trying. Yup, I’m making it official: 2012 is going to be my year. 

Call me crazy but I really believe that my world is going to be changed next year – I don’t know how and I am definitely not prepared for it but I am, without a doubt, excited.

We’re all living different stories and we’re all walking through different seasons. And whether we’re taking over the world or taking time off, it’s good to remember that wherever we are is exactly where we’re supposed to be.

However your 2011 turned out, just keep going. Move your plot forward. What’s coming ahead might be either very dry or very ridiculous – or perhaps a fine mix of both – but in any case, don’t forget to be wholly there. Life doesn’t begin when something happens, it simply always is.

I likened myself to Harold Crick earlier in this entry. His realization at the end of the film is no different from mine at the end of this year:

“And so he did what countless punk-rock songs had told him to do so many times before: he lived his life.” Kay Eiffel, Narrator

Just live. And find delirious contentment in every season you step into. Because whether you’re standing still or moving quickly, what doesn’t change is that life’s a miracle. Let’s treat it as such.

I wish you all a very happy new year. Thank you for all the love. :)

Merry Christmas!

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I spent a large portion of my December watching romantic comedies. I’m not particularly cheesy or mushy (he he) but it is an uncontested fact that Christmas truly is the most romantic season of the year. Valentine’s ain’t got nothing on it.

It’s the lights, the chill in the air, wrapped presents under the tree, a heightened sense of family, the long string of grand celebrations and a collective excitement shared by people who dare to hope again.

While the shopping frenzy continues outside my window and the whole city goes to corporate chaos, I hide under warm blankets and open my heart to love stories.

Here’s a list of everything I’ve watched so far: Love Actually, The Holiday, No Strings Attached, Sex And the City: Love and Labels, She’s the Man, Keeping the Faith, A Walk to Remember, Arthur, Little Manhattan, You’ve Got Mail and When Harry Met Sally. (By the time this gets published, Easy A would have belonged to that long inglorious list. Yeah, I have a lot of free time these days. No judging!)

Here is the embarrassing conclusion I’ve come to after staying up late to marathon formulaic Ashton Kutcher movies:

I miss falling in love.

There. I said it.

I miss the quickened beating of hearts, the explosion of emotions, the closeness; I miss the intimacy, the conjoined futures and the burning ember of that thing known as possibility. It got to a point where I secretly started getting a tiny bit depressed about being single for the holidays.

And then I realized that I had spent far too much time hoping I would find love this Christmas that I had forgotten something far greater: that I could be love.

Or perhaps, more pertinently, that I am love.

It is really easy to get lost in the hype of couple-y, sensational romance. People do it all the time. But Christmas wasn’t meant to be a slap in the face to the lonely. In fact, Christmas is really all about relationships.

My family and I have received different gifts from interesting political figures, long time acquaintances, relatives living abroad, dear friends, colleagues and a neighbor we have never once interacted with. It’s like the Universe is telling us that no matter how bad (or good) the year went, we weren’t alone in it. We created connections and built bridges and for them, we can be nothing else but grateful.

The underlying message of Christmas, I think, is that people matter. 

We spend most of the year consumed by school and career and, yes, even the crazy pursuit of romance when all around us, love abounds. Love is the person who walked you through your messy breakup. The person who held your hand in the hospital. The person who read your blog and told you that you were making a difference. Love is the person who believed in you even when you couldn’t seem to believe in yourself. The person who took you to that incredibly fancy dinner place just so they could spend some time with you. The person who remained on your side when everyone else jumped ship. The person — the people — who went out and actually did life together with you. And though they may seem like mere flesh, bone, and blood, the heartbeat that steps alongside your own is always, always, a miracle. Nothing less.

People matter to you, people matter to me, people matter to God. And maybe Christmas is a time when we can actually go celebrate and, for once – in a year seasoned with either merriment or misery – let the things that really do matter, matter.

So, this Christmas, I wish you love. Lots of it.

Or, perhaps, more than that, a great awareness of a love that seeps through every single pore of your existence.

As for me, there is no Ryan Gosling, waiting to kiss me under a non-existent mistletoe. But I can snuggle under warm blankets, with a puppy by my side, knowing that, while I’m not in love, because I am loved, I am always in Love.

A very merry Christmas to all of you. <3

Love,

Isa