My day to day encounters
What tattoo do you want and where would you put it?
Today’s prompt just brought a huge grin on my face.
I love ink. I appreciate tattoos.
I have tiny cute weird ones that I love love so much.
I’m still trying to figure out what my next one should be. I want it to be very very sentimental. It might be my offspring’s name, I don’t know.
What is one word that describes you?
Authentic.
What was the best compliment you’ve received?
I have been told a bunch of times that my presence is calming.
Hear this out,..
While other people appreciate how authentic I am, some have told me “Val you don’t have to be entirely authentic” This blows my mind every time. I would never ever want to torment myself like that. Genuinely, those are the people I run away from because how on earth can you advise a person, on not being entirely their true selves and somehow you manage to sit down with yourself and be okay!!!
I am still trying to find out why authenticity should be such a bother to people.
On Sunday, another sweet soul told me “you are overly kind, and you should change that” I lost it. I promise I broke down. Totally. I’m not daft, I know when to be chill and when to bring out my claws, I just don’t like reacting to things that are bound to disturb my peace. I choose my battles. Smartly. Most times I’m just chill.
In the last few weeks I’ve been told about a bunch of things that I shouldn’t be, and everything I’ve been told not to be, is what I love being.
Again, in the last four weeks alone I’ve been told by more than four people, “when you love, you love extremely and that’s where you go wrong”
In a world where I’ve been told, don’t be too authentic, don’t be too kind, don’t love extremely, I wouldn’t know how to exist I promise. So the smartest thing to do is smile at those remarks and rub them off as soon as they are thrown at me. It’s a messy world out here.
I’d love to protect my cacoon.
That was a whole rant I know, but the point is, the most rewarding compliment I’ve received is about my presence being calming.
Cheers🫶
I’ve been totally out of my flow in the last one week and a few days.
Presence. This is my new way of navigating friendships. I know my social life has been in the trenches for so long. I have awesome souls in my life, but besides interacting virtually, I barely ever make time for them.
Because of that, I have been trying to restructure.
My friend lost a dear person to her. On a phone call with her, she broke down and my heart crushed. My friend is the strongest soul I know. It crushed me hearing her break down on the other end like that.
Unlike me, she’s not mushy. We call her “gaidi” to mean rogue but in a good way. She’s amazing.
Apart from my family, I have never been around such a big number of people for more than a week. Most people would argue and say, I wouldn’t know how to navigate such situations, haaah! The joke is on them.
In as much as the circumstances that brought us together were sad, but I’ve loved, especially how beautifully human beings can coexist together.
I have never at any point enjoyed being the center of attention, story for another day.Â
Something about my walking style, I make calculated, graceful steps that seem to bother people more than they should. I have learnt to be entirely comfortable anytime somebody cracks a joke about my walking style.
I went on a break from my job hunt, because clearly a lot has been going on, still is.
In as much as it has been entirely rewarding just being there for my friend, I won’t lie I’ve had moments where I’ve felt guilty about not being “productive”. I always have that feeling any other time I’m not doing something “constructive”.
Social interactions aren’t a waste of time. They can be rewarding. Slowly, I am teaching my brain how to register that simple fact.
Major changes are happening and I hope it’s all for a good cause.
Cheers🫶
Who is the most confident person you know?
Yet to meet one,
I only know a bunch of cocky humans who mistake that for confidence.
Somewhere around mid January I lost my gig.
It wasn’t paying much, literally it wasn’t paying at all but I loved it regardless. I loved working for that gracious lady. She fired me in the most gracious way. I read the message smiling.
For someone who’s always loud about “communication”. Ask me why I lost the gig? Communication. I was slacking at my deliverables because I’d been ill for a while. I didn’t communicate.
When everybody was hyped up about the year, you know claiming the year and coming up with all those cute visual boards, I was in my cocoon eating a bunch of Ls.
I once talked about energies and how I can feel them, around late December I kinda knew I was going to lose my job. And I would even vocalize it, careful what you say out loud the universe has such big ears, it listens and it hears. (I actually wanted to add, unlike your boyfriend) My intrusive thoughts have been winning lately.
I can be superstitious every so often, I was recently going through my journal and I also noticed somewhere around December I had this dream that felt rather weird, and I documented it…
Okay, I couldn’t expose the rest of the write up, because it was rather personal..(funny right? Because most of the things I write on here should be tucked away in my diary)
Anyways, I have restarted this year so many times..the last time I did a friend of mine said “Val, it’s enough with the restarting” I listened.
The last few weeks I have been juggling my way around..sending applications. Between my dream of being a freelancer and now having to find an actual job..my head is spinning. So in between my job hunt, I am caught between growing my portfolio as a freelancer and sending in those actual emails for actual jobs. Lol. Fair to say, I am so busy now than I was when I was working my 9-5.
Okay all this blubbering is to say, I hate that I’m not writing much these days. I felt a tinge of guilt yesterday and I tried tapping into my creative tabs and I couldn’t open any at all.
I’m going through the worst writer’s block and that’s why I am here writing this. How insane is this?
I was almost tempted to edit this with chatgpt, then I remembered how I once was loud on here about being authentic with my writing. I weirdly feel so guilty any other time I have to edit my write ups with AI. So before you proceed, forgive the grammatical errors. Thank you.
I can be such a “no pressure” person when I am not acting on my emotions. I have set a bunch of daily reminders about the same.
I am working on building my presence on my LinkedIn page, now this is the work because Lord have mercy! On there, it’s not about being delusional and emotional. It’s about real stuff. So help me God because I just do not know how to write without involving my emotions.
I enjoy this space most because I can butcher and break all the grammar rules and no one would give a flying F.
Enough of the blubbering Val.
Cheers.
Self limiting beliefs can be detrimental. We don’t say this enough times.
Can we talk about the opportunities we’ve lost simply because we thought they were entirely out of our league.
Not even that, can we talk about how much time we’ve lost just trying to catch our own tail simply because we just didn’t believe in ourselves enough.Â
It definitely starts from the inside, how do you speak to yourself? This should definitely be our first step into greatness.Â
Cheers.
Moving on has never been easy, especially when everything else was coming from a point of authenticity.
She is doing her best to move on with grace.
She just wouldn’t understand why these dreams wouldn’t extend any form of grace.
Last night she had this dream where this guy showed up wearing his actual heart on his waist. The guy was in tears. As if seeing a heart being worn on the waist wasn’t tormenting enough. Were the tears necessary really?
Now she’s conceptualizing all those dreams she had in just one night, it wasn’t just that one by the way. And she’s just here like wtf!
She knew it was going to haunt her bad. She just knew it. What she wasn’t going to do though, was try to anticipate what her life was going to be like, in a month or two. Clearly, that is what she had been doing for the past three years, living in anticipation.
She made the decision under peculiar circumstances. If you’d asked her four weeks ago if she had it in her to make the decision she’d made now. She would have laughed in your face bad.
She knew that was her once-in-a-lifetime love, and so she had vowed to fight to the end to ensure that she had it.
He knew she loved him more than she loved life. Effortlessly she had proven that to him.
Did he ever love her though? Maybe he loved the idea of being loved fiercely. She will never know.
Maybe the universe conspired to ensure they never would get together. Looking at it differently there was always a force that seemed to be keeping them apart. She had communicated that at one point, but at that time, she knew they were going to conquer it all.
She has cried both sad and happy tears.
She’s grateful that she has been able to genuinely and sincerely love another soul so fiercely, not everyone gets a chance to experience that.
Most of their memories are virtual, and they managed to exchange very beautiful messages. She’s gonna hold on to that.
She’ll still have him in her prayers, sending out good thoughts. Because genuinely he is a good person.
How would it have been, if she felt half the love she had for him, coming from him?
She usually is one to communicate, but this time round she chose silence. It was less burdening that way.
Probably that’s how her once-in-a-lifetime love was bound to end. Probably she gave up too early, probably he never loved her, probably removing herself from his life is the exhale he needed…a lot of questions but she just would never know. And that’s the thing about life, you just never know.
She’ll mostly be grieving what it could have been, the mental picture she had created like how Sundays were supposed to be for baking and slowing down. And how her house was supposed to be their escape from tech and external noises.
In the meantime, she’s exhausted she no longer has it in her to fight anymore. She’s done fighting I guess.
