19 Dec – Reflection of Emotion

Audrey Hepburn said, “If my world were to cave in tomorrow, I would look back on all the pleasures, excitements and worthwhilenesses I have been lucky enough to have had. Not the sadness, not my miscarriages or my father leaving home, but the joy of everything else. It will have been enough.” Do you think you would do the same, or do the sad times stand out in your mind?

It’s hard for me to sit here and reflect on the positive experiences I’ve had in my life, or even the past few years, because it’s always been overshadowed by the negative and sad times – I think because they’re the moments that generate a more significant emotional reaction; they’re the ones that are the hardest to deal with and the ones that take more of an emotional toll on us.

30 July – The Best Decade

What has been your best decade thus far: Your teens? Your twenties? Your thirties or forties or beyond?

 

I would probably say my twenties. It was without a doubt the decade that forced me to grow the most. It was also the decade that taught me quite a lot and provided a number of experiences both positive and negative, but experiences that I needed to have in order to grow and mature as a person.

As a result I feel that having those kind of experiences in my early twenties has given me more ‘life experience’ than some of the others who are around my age. Especially those who spent their twenties living with their parents, I find them to be quite ‘sheltered’ in terms of certain aspects of life and adulthood, because they haven’t had to endure the same kind of trials and hardships you do when you move out of home and strive to be independent.

But who’s to say that my thirties won’t turn out to be better – I can use everything that I learnt in my twenties and apply it to my thirties to avoid as much bullshit and drama as possible and just focus on myself rather than all the other dramas going on around me.

So let’s revisit this in another 9 years hehehe.

Daily Prompt – Adult Visions

As a kid, you must have imagined what it was like to be an adult. Now that you’re a grownup (or becoming one), how far off was your idea of adult life?

When I was a kid I had all different kinds of fucked up images of what adulthood was going to be like… and it’s nothing like I thought.

Apr 28 – Crisis Mode

Do you keep calm in a crisis?

I think that’s dependent on the actual crisis itself. The other factor here is that everybody has their own definition of the term ‘crisis’. Generally speaking, it would need to be quite extreme for me to consider something a crisis and I think that I’d be okay.

I’ve been through more than more my fair share of bullshit over the years, found myself in some less-than-ideal situations unfortunately caused by other people, and although at the time it feels like the entire world is crashing down around me in an extreme path of pure destruction, I feel like I’m going to have a complete breakdown and yet somehow, I come out on the other side. Not necessarily without taking a few knocks along the way, but I manage to end up okay.

Mar 26: Alone But Not Lonely

Do you enjoy being alone? What do you do when you’re by yourself?

Dear Hulk, If you ever read this, please don’t be offended or take what I’m about to say personally… xx

I love being alone.

Well, in the right context. I have always been quite independent, ever since I was a little kid. From an early age, I learnt that it’s true what they say – the only person you can truly depend on is yourself. As a result, when I got a bit older and began travelling interstate by myself, I realised that I didn’t need to depend on anybody. All I needed was myself, and that was fine. It wasn’t until I moved out of home, moved interstate, and found myself living in a share house that I realised just how much I enjoyed being alone.

I was responsible to nobody else, except me. If I wanted to just come home after work and eat a whole tub of ice-cream… I could. If I wanted to come home after work and just go straight to bed and sleep for 12hrs – I could. If I wanted to take a day off to see a couple of movies, I’d do it on a Tuesday because it was ‘Tight-Arse Tuesday’ and all tickets were $9 – so I’d end up seeing something like 4 movies back-to-back. If I wanted to spend a Sunday doing nothing but sleeping, then I would. If I woke up one morning and wanted to go on an adventure, then I’d just do it. I had nobody to consider; nobody to consult with. I was a free-agent and could do whatever I wanted. It was a good time. But in saying that, I did also get quite lonely. Yes, I had a small close-knit circle of friends to fall back on when I wanted somebody to hang out with… but I had a good balance of company and solitude.

Just recently, I was away on a work trip, and found myself feeling quite lonely at night time because I missed having Hulk around… but at the same time, there were some quiet moments that I truly enjoyed being by myself. Swimming in the ocean at 7am when there isn’t a single person on the beach was truly an exhilarating experience. Granted, the water was incredibly cold (hence why it was completely deserted), but there was just something about that moment that I truly loved. Being able to experience that was something that I would never have done had it not been for the fact that I was away at the coast, and only because a few other colleagues had been discussing it the night prior.

I didn’t care. I just enjoyed being in the ocean. It’s been so long since I had been in the ocean, and it’s an experience that I miss quite a lot, and an experience that I have craved for a considerable amount of time.

Standing in icy water, armpit deep in the water on an empty beach, watching the sun begin to rise is something that I’m actually quite glad that I got to experience by myself. I didn’t have to share it with anybody else. It’s an experience and a memory that was, and forever will be, just mine.

Temporary solitude amongst the icy waters of Torquay Beach

When I got back to the hotel, I had quite a long hot shower (to defrost myself) and sat outside on the balcony in my oversized fluffy robe, watching the sun continue to rise, and listening to the echo of the waves crashing on the shore in the distance… and I realised that I could happily wake up to this every single day. I actually began to think that I would like to come back here at some point, purely just to focus on doing some serious writing… like working on a novel or something equally creative.

…however, to stay at that resort would cost an absolute fortune, and I simply couldn’t justify that sort of luxurious indulgence.