Hello, 2024.

2024 is the year I will turn 40. It's genuinely a disbelief for me that me.. me.. ME.. I..? I am turning 40? LOL. Just literally yesterday I went to pick up my daughter from school and when I went to the reception counter, she gave me a "student form" to fill in. I guess I still look the part for a high school student? :D

But yes, 40. But age is just a number, really. Who cares. You do you. You feel you. You feel how you feel inside. You don't have to change yourself just because of a number. Stay hungry, stay foolish, stay curious, keep learning, embrace life with an open mindset because there's still sooooo much to learn. I have this goal of living in this world until I am at least 100 years old, and if the universe allows me, that means I STILL HAVE 60 YEARS AHEAD OF ME. Wow. Isn't that actually amazing? I can still learn so much in this world, and I want to. I'm excited. I'm always thinking about what skill should I master next. What course should I take next? And while I keep growing, I am just as excited to spend all my remaining years with the people I love unconditionally.

On the other hand, life's been...weird. For the past 2 years, I have been struggling to write. I have nothing to write about. My mind has been in such a messy place, my thoughts are all too scattered to gather to be put into words. But today I'll try.

It's funny because as you get older, you actually get...a little bit sadder. Sad because one day you wake up with flashes of memories that you have buried or tried to forget or even truly forgot and wow, they suddenly just come back. I think, when we are young(er), we focus so much on "succeeding" (whatever success means to you) that we put aside so much of our feelings and just work, work, work. We have so many dreams to achieve, we live with this high-adrenaline rush and all we care about is building our career, or our reputation. To be able to say, "I did it!", seems to be the main theme of life in these years. The years of proving yourself. And it's normal. It's exciting. But in all that process, we actually disassociate so much from our inner selves because our outercase mattered more. Usually it's all unconscious. But as we get older, the conscience starts to grow (back), little by little, and it starts eating you up slooooowly and painfully. Or I might just be talking about myself here LOL. Pardon the generalization.

For the past 2 years, I have been doing work on myself. I realize I have so many open wounds inside of me that I didn't get to heal or even give thought about. All the childhood trauma that I endured, as Dr. Gabor Mate eloquently puts it, was not necessarily about what happened to me, but what happened inside of me because of what happened to me. I now realize that I grew up with 'neglect', having family who were always physically present for me at all times, but were emotionally unavailable for me. I have always felt alone and misunderstood. My opinions rarely mattered, my ideas were more often dismissed, my dreams were never taken seriously, and so I became familiar with the idea that I don't matter, and that's okay. But it's not okay. But I didn't understand that. I knew what I knew. Familiarity took over my senses. I became accepting of always being the second in everything. "I'm just a kid. What do I know, right?".  I was always the ugly one. I was never made to feel beautiful, and as a result, I didn't care. But you see, I should. I should care. I should feel beautiful. Because what is more powerful than a little girl stepping out of the house feeling empowered because she knows she's beautiful. And strong. And kind. And intelligent. And that she mattered. And all that affirmation should have come from her own family, her safe space. But she never got them. So she became strong on the outside, but broken on the inside. 

All these realizations only came after...more than 30 years of life? That's how long I survived a battle I didn't even know I was in. What took me so long? Why that long? And today, everyday, I am able to make sense of why things are. Why I am me. Why I do the things I do. It is all connected. That's how significant the impact of your childhood quality will affect your whole life. And I mean it. Your whole life. I get so upset when my husband forgets a tiny detail of a story I was telling him, because "forgetting a detail", to me, means he didn't listen to me fully, which means he was not listening to me enough. And you see, I always felt that my family never listened to me enough. And that little girl inside of me is still upset and she never had the chance to work on her wounds, so today, when something similar happens, it evokes the same feeling, it becomes a trigger. I get upset. And that's what I still need to work on. 

But today my head is clear. I understand things better. I am a constant work in progress. I am kind. I am strong. I am beautiful. And I matter. ❤️