Realisation

These are the most boring weeks of my life, just staying home studying. I have not been out for weeks. To be fair I don’t really enjoy going out now anyway because the last time I went out, it was not so fun. Also I just recovered from a fever and now still having sore throat. Hence I have limited verbal activities. Therefore I turned to my blog to pour my heart out. Besides, everyone’s too busy studying to listen to my crazy rants.

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Today I played a game with my friend. Just out of boredom, I told her that we were going to talk to each other in a third person’s voice. So our conversations turned out to be something like this:

“Jenny, Thu likes salad. Salad’s healthy. Does Jenny like salad?”

“Yeah Jenny likes salad.”

“Thu wants desert. Why is there no desert today? Thu likes the chocolate cream puffs but there isn’t any left”

And so on…

Well she gave up after 5 minutes because she said it was too crazy for her to carry on. But I stuck with it for the whole night. I drove my friends nuts.

It was fun and I made my friends laugh with my crazy talking. But after a while I felt a bit different. Speaking as a third person made me realise that I have full control of how other people see me. I have this character named “Thu” and I have total control over what she says and does. It was like I shrank into a small little version of me sitting comfortably at a desk at the back of my brain and decide what happen to the rest of the body.

Suddenly I get this feeling that whatever happens now, to my body, or whatever events that might/have occurred, those things don’t matter much because they will be/were over. What’s important is that I have this little me at the back of my head always knowing what to do and directing my body. This little person is the very essence of me, of every decision I have made and every thought that came across me, of what I believe they call “soul”.

Was that me getting in touch with my innermost self?  I don’t know. It just felt nice to, for a moment, be clear about who I am and not just doing things for the sake of it (which is really unavoidable in monotonous days like these).

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Thu is sleepy. Thu is going to sleep and Thu will write more next time 🙂

Thu leaves you a song to listen to:

Another Memory

At school on a sunday! 🙂

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I am lucky to have lived more places than most of my friends: Belarus, Russia, North and South Vietnam, and finally now Singapore. I credit my parents for giving me the chances to have such a unique experience. At each place that I have ever been to, there are always new things to learn, and I love that thrill of doing something new for the first time.

When I was younger, that something new was as small as crossing the street. Actually in Ho Chi Minh city where I came from, crossing the street is not that small a thing. During my 4 years in Singapore, all of my friends who have been to Vietnam ranted to me about how hard it was to move about in the city because they did not dare to step out of the walk way in fear of being ran over by one of the speeding motorbikes. They compared the traffic in Vietnam with sci-fi movies where vehicles move with lightning speed and are able to weave through the smallest gaps between each other to move forward. Just that in this case everything is controlled manually by reckless human, most of who are not going by the traffic rules, and so it’s much scarier and more dangerous. I have seen really tall and macho Caucasian tourists who looked totally helpless without a clue when and how to start crossing a street path and ended up calling a cab in desperation. As much as I love the city life, I was never fond of being outside in the traffic.

The first time I crossed a street (one without any traffic lights or zebra cross) on my own, I was 9 years old. One thing I remember most clearly was my mom on the other side of the road waving encouragingly to me to walk forward. I took my cautious steps and, with some difficulties, reached her. Even though I knew it was not a big deal, I still felt proud, considering how scared I was of the speeding motorbikes that seemed to be aiming for me. Shortly afterwards I got the hang of it. Sometimes the trick is just to walk your pace steadily and let the traffic avoid you. I was finally able to walk confidently and to see an approaching vehicle from the corner of my eyes.

Nevertheless, that first time, as clumsy as it was, remained a special memory for me. It keeps me aware that there are so many things I have not tried and that I should never let any temporary fear or hesitation stop me from experiencing it. By this point of my life, I have accumulated many of these “first time” memories: first time going overseas and living far away from my family, first time dancing on stage and realising that I really love it, first time going for a survival trip and knowing that I can live perfectly well without any form of technology, first time rowing boat for 3 days in a row and realising the true value of friendships that are built through hardship, first time being part of a community trip to Cambodia and experiencing a much simpler, poorer but warmer life on another corner of the Earth…

The world is so large and I believe there are so many more of such “first times” for me to try out and explore. I believe maturity comes with experience. I have been lucky to have experienced lives in more places than most of my friends and I am still taking my opportunities to experience even more. After all, it is life that teaches you more than school can ever do.

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Song to warm up a long, long weekend 🙂