synonymsforjane

In Dec 2019, I physically left Singapore. I left a place i had grown up in, a world where my definition of the truth was formed. My family, where my experiences mostly began. Friends, who journeyed alongside me, in the first 26 years of my life. And a marriage, that I got myself into, because I thought that was where my life was meant to go towards.

That physical departure brought both joy and much pain. Joy because i knew deep down my path led outside of Singapore, and maybe even outside of a marriage. Did I even want to be married? And If I wasn’t ready to be married, why did I let myself go there?

I was dealing with thus, a very shallow level of pain due to a divorce, and I thought that the pain I was suffering from was only due to the pain of my ex-husband leaving our marriage.

What I couldn’t accept then, was WHY he was leaving me. What I didn’t understand then, was that he had to leave me to save himself. He was too, suffering. Our marriage was the result of a very careless decision and he was also suffering, trapped between wanting to make things right and making me happy. I now appreciate how much he tried, in his own way, to stay in our unhappy marriage.

Now, I’m genuinely happy for him. His life has turned out much more amazingly – full of love and family, than if we had forced ourselves to stay together. Of course, I’m also happy for myself, now that i’m living my preferred lifestyle.

Anyway, back then, all of this happy for him thing didn’t exist. I was only in complete pain. But this pain wasn’t my own – even I could identify it on my own. This pain was of being abandoned, the pain of being rejected was triggered and caused an avalanche of emotion, suppressed from before my time. It felt like on my ancestral plane, shared by so many ancestors I don’t even know, built a wall to hold these emotions, and when the divorce happened, they released this memory of emotion that existed in my DNA.

In early Febuary 2020, a month after leaving Singapore, I found myself sat on a beach in Puero Escondido, Mexico. After moving around every few days, I was happy to stay longer than a week somewhere.

My 10 days in Puerto Escondido were completely submerged in peace.

If you haven’t been to Puerto Escondido before….that place changed my life

“How do you feel now?” My friend who was sitting beside me on that beach asked. She knew about the recent message.

“You know, I can feel the anger within me. It’s loud. And when I talk to my friends and family, I feel it engages within me, I carry their anger and it fuels mine. When I’m alone, however, just like this, all I feel is peace. When I feel this peaceful, I cannot feel any anger towards anything or anyone. In fact, in a strange way, I feel this happened as a result of other things. And that I now get. to choose what to make of this blank slate.”

“What do you mean?” She asks.

“When our marriage was going to shits, I looked at my ex once and I said, We didn’t know what we were doing when we got married, but since we got ourselves into this, let’s get ourselves out of this” And I meant it.

I really thought I was capable of doing that. Of calmly closing our chapter together, as abruptly as we began our journey together. No matter how much we kept from each other, I always felt that at the very least, my ex and I were honest about our care for each other. We were friends, at the very least?

(Yet, if i had to ask myself today – if I ever really loved him, I can tell you I loved him no more than I would love him now. As a person who’s also journeying through this existence. I think we can both really agree we were two very lost people who found slight comfort in each other, but couldn’t never truly be real with ourselves/each other)

That day on the beach, I felt what I have always felt in my life, when I was a child all the way till I began betraying myself. I felt, for the first time, in a long time, like MYSELF again.

I didn’t care about money. I didn’t worry about my future. I didn’t want to live in a competitive world where everything is about getting the best, being the most successful, begging to be respected and shielding the ego. I didn’t want to continue being in a world that gatekeeps things for the rich and powerful.

My ex and his girlfriend shouldn’t matter anymore. Who they were and who they chose to be had nothing to do with me. I needed to look within and investigate how I could betray myself so much. I didn’t even like myself anymore.

But after leaving that peaceful beach in Mexico….

The shadwos began to creep up on me with the intention to overwhelm me.

I felt this powerful energy surge up within me over the next 18 months.

It was a confusing time to go through.

I became extremely optimistic about my life, and yet it hid a deepening level of depression that was forming and growing. I could sense that the optimism came from a higher vibrational frequency and that the depression operated on a more primative level.

Let’s call my depression “Jerry”.

Jerry took over the moment I left Mexico.

The darkness that has plagued my family for years began to activate the hidden generational trauma staying dormant within me ever since I was conceived. The alchemy of my father and mother and them bringing their combined history into my DNA.

The feeling of being rejected. The feeling of being unloved. The feeling of being abandoned. My ancestors before me, especially the women in my life, carried so much of this that it was passed down to me and my cousins/sibling. I see it so much within the ways we have all tried to overcome it. We all deal in different ways. I’m really proud to witness my family members are learning/ learned how to copy with their generational trauma.

This concept that we hold generational trauma was so unknown and foreign to me. Of course, along with the dark comes always the light. And the sooner you acknowledge the darkenss, the sooner you reveal the light right beside it.

But anyway, understanding myself helped to change my perspective, staring with my own perspective. It changed the way I looked at everything. At my parents, my uncles/aunties, my grandparents, my cousins, and in turn…me.

It then helped me see my ex, his wife, my friends, my bosses, people I know, people I’ve witnessed transform, new friends I meet on the road…..It’s helped me see everyone so differently.

It was a major turning point in my life to realize we are all constructs of not just OUR past, but of our generations before us. There is a huge part of our “consciousness” that we are not at all conscious or aware of.

Of course, still being trapped in a human body with little control over emotional reactions, I spent much of 2021-2022 turning myself into goo and rebuilding a more “updated” Jane.

Making our home in Bali and Thailand. Me finding space to develop my own hobbies and follow my own curiosities. Us finding out more about slow living/mindfullness.

My intentions were clear. To not only forgive on my behalf, the grievances I choose to carry around, but to forgive on behalf of the generations before me. My grandmother’s grief of being sold as a baby for 12 dollars. Her anger for both her parents dying when she turned 19. Her self-betrayal when she stayed with a man who made her feel emotionally insecure and financially abandoned. She had to run two businesses, raise her step siblings and her four children, but all my grandpa did was work a minimal paying job, gamble, and flirt with other aunties all the time. My grandfather’s resentment towards the world, for locking him up in jail just for being in the wrong place/wrong time, for that being the reason he can’t find many decent jobs, for his father walking out on him at a young age, and for people to never pay him genuine attention. He didn’t believe he was worthy of love and so he rejected it.

I started seeing things from everyone’s perspectives, and realizing that we all affect each other. Our actions and thoughts literally translate into pain, grief, anger, resentment, and a thirst for vengeance, to prove we are worthy.

“How long do we go on for?” I asked myself.

For how long, do the generations in my family continue to live out the story plots that were written for us long before we are conceived.

Enough.

“So enough, you say?” Jinger asked me.

“Are you ready to forgive?” She follows.

“There is nothing to forgive. My actions had consequences, and their actions had consequences. We have all learned our lessons. That chapter has closed and should remain closed forever.” I told her.

“How are you on your healing journey?”

“I have finally opened the pandora’s box, and I’m thankful that my divorce and those involved gave me so many lessons. The entire experience was the energy I needed to blow up my life. Not in a bad way, but in a constructive way. I needed the universe to stop me in my tracks. So it could spin me off into the right direction.”

What is the next direction?

From 2022 onwards, I set out to “right the wrongs” in my life.

I traced back all the times I betrayed myself in life and started “spring cleaning” if you will. I opened up the dusty treaure box, and started to look into my ‘gifts and talents’ category.

I dug out all the energy-blocking paths in my near future, and repurposed the energy into more constructive things.

Working on creativity, reconnecting with nature, going back to school.

Going back to school has been an amazing journey. To start again the curiosity that students have, and to seek again community-based solutions to solve big world problems.

I’ve been thoroughly enjoying being a student of this world again.

It’s Sept 2023 now, and I’ve just opened up a time capsule.

I wrote this in 2021, when I was at the lowest point in my life – contemplating suicide because my depressed brain thought it was the most logical thing to do. When a mind is depressed, it doesn’t think irrationally. It thinks logically but with a pessimistic worldview. Because of what I was going through emotionally, It was so much to deal with that suicide was a logical way to get out of the mental torture, the insomnia, the lack of peace.

“The only revenge i could think of was to kill myself. And I’m not ready to do that just yet.

Maybe because I grew up thinking that love depended on only one truth, I began thinking as being conditional of the truth. But love should be given and received unconditionally. If we say we love someone, shouldn’t we love them unconditionally?

You strike me when the wound is yet (healed), and yet if I strike you back, I issue you a message that does you good but not me any.

Pain however, is what comes immediately with a lesson of wisdom. Pain is a gift, whether unwanted or wanted, pain is a gift of widom.

To forgive then…is to love.

If we pour the same amount of negative energy into the people who do us harm, they would fuel that twice and shoot it back towards us. Because humanity has been so conditioned to work on revenge. Military isn’t just trained to defend, it’s primary objective is to attack, no matter their reasoning. No fighter is taught to injure without killing. Everyone is trained to kill in war.

If we just converted the energy that pain,sadness,anger gives, into more constructive feelings like laughter, happiness, joy, and peace, the world would find less reasons to go to war for.

The answer lies within the next puzzzle: What is Love? “

I realize that everyone has a breaking point.

Mine happened when I was facing so many problems at a time, the pressure it put on me nearly pushed me to the brink of helplessness.

I wouldn’t say I surrendered to this helplessness.

But that I overcame it.

I overcame my mistakes. I overcame my fear. i overcame the overwhelming emotions that seemed to robbed me of any peace I craved. I accepted that things were because of so many uncontrollable factors, that I have no way. incontrolling the result.

With acceptance of all things possible, is also the realization that we can co-create our reality. We can decide what our present looks like by learning from the past. And we can decide what our future becomes by changing our present.

The change that this small perpsective change brought into my life was enormous.

I started mining the powerful surge of energy within me and using it to learn. To learn all over again, what love means. To understand what life means. To appreciate how much of a gift this existence is.

I learned how to not take this life for granted. And so now, my friends, I’ve been a student of this life.

And i’m enjoying it. I’m learning many things, experimenting on a few ideas. And im not alone 🙂

I have with me, the support of my family, the love from friends, a community of like-minded people, and the precious company of Marco, my partner.

I’m excited for the new chapters that will begin unfolding in life.

Now on, we know what life is all about. Now on, we want to build communities and help people find love, courage, desire, and all the things good for them. Now, we want to say thank you to the opportunities that open up to us, and recognize where our talents can be utilized.

Now, we want to embrace life and start DOING. See you out there.