Tag: anincompletelovestory

  • Home, is a feeling

    Home, is a feeling

    I was never convinced that home is a place. It’s a feeling.

    I say this because I’ve had many places to call my own, but none of them felt like home.

    I’ve had many places that felt homely, most often when visiting the homes of others, but none that felt like my home.

    Home, in my mind, became that larger than life aspirational goal that continues to fuel everything that I do.

    It’s a vision and a dream, a goal and a purpose.

    But never having truly connected with it, it is an idea, the closest to which I’ve come having been the intense belief that I was created for a place other than this.

    Thus, I adopted the pace and purpose of a traveller, never looking for roots but always feeling grounded.

    The same is true for concepts like peace and feeling safe.

    All nice ideas and beautiful imagery but lacking in substance.

    Born restless. Living restlessly. Hopefully to die peacefully.

    Fully spent. Without a single ounce of energy to spare, or regrets to lament.

    Just a peaceful conclusion to the best effort that I was capable of.

    Perhaps in that lies the promise of all three. Safe, peaceful, and homely at the moment of reaching my final destination.

    Exhale.

  • Afraid to hope

    Afraid to hope

    If fear is what shapes your view of what lies ahead, you’re focused on everything that could go wrong because of what went wrong before.

    That may seem like a natural response to protect ourselves from being hurt or betrayed again, but it also means that we’re focusing on everything that appears as a risk.

    The problem with that is that we only find what we’re looking for.

    If we’re looking for risks, we’ll find it. But that means that we’ll miss all the opportunities to get things right, or to create a better outcome than before.

    While there may be practical reasons to protect ourselves from physical threats, it’s very different when we protect ourselves from perceived emotional threats.

    It’s like putting a bird in a cage to protect it from getting killed by a predator.

    You may protect it from that possible fate, but you also prevent it from learning how to fly away from such dangers.

    That bird then becomes dependent on you for its protection.

    The same is true about emotional threats.

    Only, with emotional threats, we become dependent on holding onto that past hurt or betrayal, or failure, to ensure that we remain alert to any circumstances in which the possibility exists of repeating such an experience.

    When you release yourself from that emotional cage that trapped you, remember to give yourself enough time to learn to fly before you go in search for new opportunities to create the life that you want.

    If you don’t, you’ll look to the future with fear, and convince yourself that hope failed you each time.

    It wasn’t hope that failed, it was a lack of awareness of what we were getting ourselves into.

    Solve the right problem. Don’t give up hope, invest in yourself so that you’re equipped to create the life that you want.

    It always starts with you.



  • Let’s exchange needs

    Let’s exchange needs

    Men complain about lack of intimacy and women complain about emotional unavailability.

    Sometimes, the roles are reversed, but generally, these are the two most common issues that couples face in a relationship.

    Problem is, neither is the problem that needs to be solved.

    We’re naturally more emotionally available in spaces where we feel seen or appreciated.

    Having no reason to doubt our significance to our significant other is all the reason we need to drop our guard.

    As for intimacy? We’ve largely forgotten what that even looks like.

    Similar to love, we’ve forgotten how to be intimate.

    Intimacy is not sexual acts or raunchy nights.

    Intimacy is about sharing something much deeper than that.

    But we’ve turned these elements of a relationship into commodities and rights.

    It’s therefore unsurprising to find that most couples, even the ones without major relationship problems, are essentially complacent or unfulfilled about their relationship, rather than inspired to live life passionately because of it.

    If you find yourself discussing your rights and your needs with your partner, understand that you’re distracted from why such a discussion is needed at all.

    This may sound naively idealistic, but perhaps our lack of idealism is what has killed the romance in our lives.

    Perhaps it’s our focus on occasions, and functions, and events, and allocated dates to acknowledge or celebrate each other that denies us the spontaneity needed to feel alive.

    Perhaps that’s why we’ve become so transactional in how we live, how we love, and how we seek fulfilment.

    It’s time to question whether you’ve been trying to solve the right problems in your life or have you simply been changing the dressing on a festering wound.

  • To me… From me…

    To me… From me…

    This may seem vain, but I’ve been wanting to do this in my copy of my first book since I first published it.

    And today, sitting and reading through it to remind myself of some of that advice that I give others but don’t use, it felt like the right time to finally acknowledge me.

    There was no one cheering me on to walk this journey that I started in 2018.

    Rarely did anyone cheer me on in my journey up to that point either.

    And I often have to remind myself to give myself a break because it’s easy to get life wrong when you’re trying to figure it out by yourself.

    The best things to come out of my mistakes, have been the most fulfilling lessons that I’ve been able to share with whoever thought it worth listening to.

    So don’t go through life judging yourself harshly for getting it wrong at times. Or even most of the time.

    Success makes us haughty while failure and mistakes inspire us with wisdom.

    It all depends on what you take from it.

    Peace.

  • Avoiding life is waiting for death

    Avoiding life is waiting for death

    Sometimes, avoiding drama seems like the only possibility of experiencing peace.

    But, that’s like saying that as long as we’re not sad, we must be happy.

    We know that’s not true.

    The absence of unpleasant events in our life may give us reason to be grateful for not having them, but it doesn’t mean that we’ll feel fulfilled or content with the life that we have.

    That lack of contentment is what leaves us feeling uneasy or restless, knowing that we should be grateful that it could be worse, but also knowing that there must be more to life than just the avoidance of drama, or the fulfilment of responsibility.

    We weren’t created to maintain a status quo.

    Since birth, we were driven towards progress and improvement, and stagnation felt like a threat to the joy of life.

    Because it is.

    Stagnation kills our spirit and convinces us that there is nothing much to look forward to.

    If every day seems like a repeat of the day before, what then becomes the purpose or reason to want to rise to a new day?

    Avoiding unpleasant outcomes is only enough to avoid unnecessary trouble, but it doesn’t mean growth or fulfilment.

    If you want to experience the sweetness of life, you need to go beyond avoiding things, and instead, start embracing new experiences, new ideas, and new concepts.

    You must be improving the quality of life of those around you, and not just your own.

    Fulfilment and joy is experienced from seeing the face of another light up because of your contribution towards their life, it’s not through seeing an extra digit on your bank balance.

    That bank balance means nothing if it doesn’t bring joy or upliftment to those around you.

    And not having someone to share your joy with is like witnessing a beautiful sunset, by yourself, each day, every day, until witnessing the sunset by yourself feels inconsequential.

    That’s what the absence of drama is like.

    It feels empty and pointless, because there is no point to a life of stagnation.

    Own Your life.

  • To be loved

    To be loved

    To be seen… Beyond the facade. To have the essence of who we are, known to those we trust and hold dear.

    To be heard… Not only when we cry out, but also when we speak gently of the troubles in our heart.

    To be loved… For more than how we make others feel, but to be loved for what we need in return, without having to claim it.

    In that order, because a voice without an identity is not a voice. It’s only a whisper in the wind.

    A face without a voice is only window dressing, or a trophy. And not a complete being.

    And love… Love without a reciprocal embrace…an embrace of what we hold within, as well as what we willingly give, is an empty love that taints towards bitterness, rather than beauty.

    Love beyond lust or infatuation is rare. True love is never abandoned.

    I see you.

    I hear you.

    I love you.

    Three of the most valuable gifts you could ever give.

    But, you cannot give what you don’t have.

    For this reason, you must first see, hear, and love who you are, before you will be able to share it with another.

  • Torturous love

    Torturous love

    And so it is…love and torture have always been stablemates.

    Sometimes, without warning, someone enters your life and challenges every assumption that you ever made about what’s possible.

    What you thought you deserved was limited to what you were capable of achieving up to that point, and maybe just a quiet desire to acquire some peace beyond it.

    Until they see in you what you thought was your own delusions, and you see in them what you thought were only your dreams.

    Once you connect with that truth, nothing can convince you that anything less is what you must settle for.

    Settling becomes a vulgar thought, and fulfilment becomes incomplete without them.

    When that happens, the distance between love and torture grows, and you find yourself stretched between the two, with only shards of sanity to prevent you from being torn apart.

    Those shards will tear at your dreams and taunt your delusions until their embrace is secured.

    Until then, life becomes a dyslexic dance with insanity, and love remains elusive.

    (From the archives)

  • Dream a little dream…

    Dream a little dream…

    In a world of cynics, it’s easy to lose sight of the power that you have to turn your dreams into reality.

    Your efforts become more daunting when faced with an endless barrage of naysayers who only see your potential through their own fears.

    Sincere advisors are often driven by fear, and thus focus on protecting you from their fears of what failure may bring.

    So you slowly give up on your dream as a fantasy, while using its promise as fuel to cope with your reality.

    When you maintain clear boundaries between the two, you convince yourself that dreaming is an irresponsible indulgence of youth, while reality is for adulting.

    Without meaning to, you adopted the fears of those around you, and measured your success by how much you could exceed their expectations within the frame of fear that they painted for you.

    Beauty is lost, endearments become fickle expressions of lightness, and death becomes the morbid milestone by which you gauge how much capacity you will need to keep going.

    All this because you believed others when they disbelieved in you.

    Your dreams are yours to abandon, or yours to claim.

    But if you’re trying to claim a dream that is intricately woven around the presence of another, brace yourself for the anguish that accompanies a lifetime of trying to convince them that achieving your dream is possible, when the events of their life convinced them not to try.

    Dream with abandon, and live with courage.

    If you don’t, the regret will be yours to court, and dreaming will become a cynical taunt that feels like a nightmare.