A little bit of growth, a little bit of insight

I'm in a creative flow today. I've been meaning to blog for a while. I quite like the fact that after so many years, so much of ups and downs in life and losing interest in so many of my past passions and hobbies, I still enjoy blogging. I think it's mainly because I'm a talkative person and I like sharing my thoughts. 

I've always been somewhat ashamed of myself talking too much. I self identify as oversharing and attribute it to me having cPTSD. In a way yes, I tend to feel the impulse to overexplain myself trying to mitigate the chances of myself being misunderstood (because I often feel so). But also, sometimes I just like to talk, that's my way of coping with my brain. What I said out loud is only 10% of what my brain is actually saying, I just need to process my thoughts out loud because it's so noisy inside my head. Most of the time, I just felt the urge to chat. But I always go home feeling ashamed like I've hijacked the conversation, people must have hated me, I shouldn't have said this and that. It was a trait that I've hated myself for. As I grew older, I just learn to keep my thoughts to myself. But that made me froze in place. 

As I was journalling today, I was reviewing all my lifestyle that has been working and not working for me to combat the dreadful feeling of wanting to do something about my life yet feeling totally paralysed. I realized that I needed to go back to basics with a lot of things, which means that honouring who I am. One of it was the fact that I am talkative. 

I was thinking of all the things that I wanted to do something about my life but felt like I couldn't. The main one was I always have recurring period of time that I know I needed to do my work but there's always an overwhelming feeling of dreadfulness. This feeling of dreadfulness would overflow into other things in my life and essentially left me flatten on my bed, and only get up to pretend to be a normal functioning family member by participating in life sustaining activities (eat or feed dog or go out with family or bath). I felt so much shame in this because why? Everyone, including myself felt like I must be such a successful person, I have so much potential, but I can't even work? Basic work? No? 

But today, I'm in a positive and happy mood. I know what always works was when I spend time trying to see myself, spend time with myself and journal all the thoughts that was stuck inside my head. Then I recall how I used to study in comparison to my friends. I could never study 1 month in ahead of my exam, I would always need to spend time talking with my friends (also disturbing my friends that wanted to study instead of talking). I'd talk until I'm in the mood then I'll be able to go deep into my studies until I'm tired. Then I'll need to talk again and then go back to study. Heck, I'll need to talk instead of last minute cramming before I go into the examination hall. And I've always done well. But because I've started keeping things to myself and eventually not have any friends or colleagues to talk to, I was often left feeling a lot of anxiety as my thoughts has nowhere to go. I realized that maybe I need that, maybe all I needed was to talk. Instead of shaming myself for my need to talk and socialise, I lean into it. 

I realized that I'm just a bit different from everyone else, and I should have just followed what works for me. Granted, I wasn't concious that shutting myself off from people and having trust issues with people is going to hurt my productivity, but it comes to show how important it is for someone to be holistically healthy and fulfilled in order to be actually perfectly functioning. 

I've also been journalling in Chinese, something that I have never really done since primary school. I've always struggled remembering how to write the character of the words I mentally know but just don't know how to write. So I realized it would be more convenient to just journal in English. But this change came about quite naturally as I've been chatting with Kelvin in Chinese. As I was journalling, I often surprise myself by how much more character I'm able to write without referring to my phone. This realization was how I figured that I have ways that would work for me personally. In school, the only was you learn to write a certain character was by repeating and memorizing. But it never really worked for me. I would always be able to spell the pin yin but unable to recall how the word is written no matter how many times I wrote it repeatedly. My sister would scold me for going to them to ask how to write words instead of referring to the dictionary as they did, and eventually someone was selling digital dictionary. I begged my mom to buy me one, and she did. I ended up really using it until the connection to the screen died, but my sister would say that I'm pampared for asking my mom to buy me a gadget. But of course, not being able to bring the device into exams I still did poorly for my Chinese exams. I've concluded that I'm really bad in Chinese. 

But the fact that I'm journalling quite smoothly (still need quite a bit of reference) in Chinese is kinda proving me otherwise. I realized that I would sometimes pause to think how a certain character is written, naturally a visualization of me typing in the pinyin into my phone and the word would pop into my mind. It's a weird but effective translation. I found myself referring less and less as this works more often as I kept writing. I felt a part of my inner child feeling seen finally for her struggle in all the years I was told I'm pampered for using a digital dictionary. In the end of the day, this was the very thing that helped me to learn better than to repeat and try to memorize. I realized I need to stop trying to do what everyone said works for them and find what worked or works for me. I realized that even if I do see the benefits of using the ways of others, it didn't work for me. 

Knowing how other people just decides to do what is needed, I understand now it doesn't work for me. It's not because I don't understand, I do. But rather than motivating me, it drains me and paralysis me. I've always known that tough love doesn't work on me, but I'm trying to tough love myself now telling that I need to just do the hard thing. I need fun, I need joy, I need enjoyment. So right now, I'll drop all these shoulds and musts out of the window. I've always needed a different way of doing things, it just took me 10 years to figure out that I wasn't wrong! I'm an adult now, so I can do it the way I want to.