10. Chapter 3
Stillness: Sitting with Your Discomfort
*This book was set the be published by the publisher of my first book, but after years of struggle and many other reasons, I decided to release it on Substack instead. Each week, the 52,000 word book which was tentatively titled “Be A Force” will be dropped here online. The sections will start with number 1 and then progress over the 52 weeks of the next year. The Chapter title will be placed in the post description for clarity.
I still remember lying in my bath in the tiny studio apartment I rented post a major break-up in Dubai. My friends and I called it “the box” because of its bleakness and collection of neighbours, all in our twenties, living like a dysfunctional cast of Friends next to each other in adjacent units.
For the past two and a half years I had been with the kindest man I had ever met. It’s still unfortunately the deepest love I have ever felt. The breakup was all me. I loved him the way I saw my mother love my father, she never budged on anything. It was her way or the highway. I sucked the love from this man like I’d watched my Chinese Aunties suck the brains from a prawn head at a banquet, then leave the carcass shriveled on the plate. I would carry deep shame about this relationship for years. At this time however, I had no awareness of the fact our childhood wounds show up in our relationships. I had very little self-connection, so I didn’t know that my behaviours were what was programmed in me, versus a healthy way to love. Again, becoming a force is knowing your unique programming and adapting your behaviours once you’ve been enlightened by this awareness.
So there I lay in the bathtub in my yellow-grouted early-career apartment, the feeling of withdrawal from his presence so painful it was almost unbearable. I remember thinking that my chest physically ached. I finally understood what the heartache written about in countless songs felt like yet somehow, I bore it.
Now, with years of the self-connection work we have been talking about in this book, I realize the relationship was definitely co-dependent, and I would never have grown into a force had I stayed in it. Undoubtedly, we would have imploded and ended up stifling each other’s growth, but in that moment, the pain said otherwise. Because we were co-dependent and spent so much time together, the absence of his presence was like a huge vacuum that I didn’t then have the skills to know how to fill.
While sitting in the bath I opened my phone. As an undiagnosed love addict at this point, I was unaware that I dated differently from my friends. I am aware now that I had an appetite for dating which most don’t, I needed the dopamine hits in a way that others didn’t and the excitement of the manic process gladly distracted me. But again, at that time I was not conscious or mindful, I didn’t realise that opening up my WhatsApp to chat to different men was numbing me from processing the grief I felt. Now, some decades on, with the prevalence of dating apps we can see how easy it is to swipe instead of mourning the decay of a relationship, processing it healthily, healing and then moving on properly.
