25. Chapter 7
Flux: New Boundaries and Backslides as Part of Transformation
*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.
“Why did you go, Simone?” my cousin asked me in disappointment as I sat slumped on a bench at a nightlife destination in Singapore called Clarke Quay. I was crying down the phone to her. These questions we should be asking ourselves are often asked by people who truly love us, who observe us from the outside, who don’t want us to continue to do the same negative things to ourselves over and over again like a hamster wheel of insanity. These “why am I like this?” questions should be something we ask ourselves regularly because being analytical about our behaviours strengthen the relationship we have with ourselves. These questions unveil our paradigms and the stories created by some of our deepest wounds. More often than not however, we never ask these in the eye of the storm because turning the magnifying glass onto ourselves can hurt like hell. Over that phone call, hand shaking, chest hyperventilating, I could not think how I’d gotten to that place both emotionally and physically. I had been doing copious amounts of therapy, at least a visit a week since 2015, and it was now 2017 and I had been progressing so well.
I had been recalibrating the way I reacted to my co-workers in the toxic workplace I was part of at the time, a workplace, which had gaslit me into feeling I wasn’t good enough, I knew that feeling of insecurity in my bones, it was a replica of my childhood home. While all of this was happening, I had been following through on a plan to leave this full-time job. Every hour I wasn’t on air on the radio or sleeping I was studying the new industry I wanted to be part of and yet amongst all this diligence, I could feel the restless old habits wriggling inside me. The behaviours which are self-sabotaging, the temptation to do things that aren’t in service to your goal. I imagined the less optimal version of me to be a sort of translucent amoeba, floating in the fluid spaces, it wanted to grow, to fed off all the good that was building like a parasite and take me off the mission of my transformation. For most people looking in from outside, the act of stepping out of a disciplined routine to blow off steam would seem innocuous. Nothing more than the antidote to extreme discipline. Like wanting to eat junk food after a water fast. But I knew myself enough, with a myriad of traumas still needing further healing, my intuition knew that going out that night to meet him wasn’t a good idea. So, my cousin was right: Why did I do it?
The shame shower as I sat at Clarke Quay after that “date” made my toes curl. I had been “interacting” for a few months with a fresh-off-the-boat to Singapore Dutch man. He fit my only criteria for men at the time in that he was physically attractive.
