Jan 4 2025: Pieces - Destroy-Rebuild-Repeat Until It Feels Like Me

A Retreat of Destruction

Years 2023 and 2024 were long, cold, isolated, dark winters for my soul.

I went on a retreat inside myself. A retreat of destruction.

My soul exploded into a million pieces, and I sat there… looking at each piece with detention.

I was tired of holding it all together for way too long. It was so heavy — all I had become. All the years of my life collecting experiences of friendship, trust, betrayal, expectations, disappointments, pain, people, things, despair, hope, hopelessness, emptiness, happiness, joy, judgment, connection, anger.

All the parts of me and the parts of others.

So many perspectives.

Just absorbing and absorbing and absorbing. Collecting piece after piece, until I couldn’t anymore.

The Detective Board

I questioned and interrogated all these pieces. I tracked them as far back as I could, trying to find their origin story. I tried to understand if they belonged to me in the first place, and I took the time to consider if I wanted to keep them anyway.

I bathed in them.

We drank tea together.

We spent sleepless nights.

I put them on a board like a detective and tried to find the link.

We stared at the wall in silence.

We panicked.

At times, it felt like I was going crazy. Like I was losing myself… and indeed I was. I was losing an identity. I was letting it go before I could even see what new identity was forming, or what was being discovered underneath.

I felt like I had breakthroughs, and then I felt lost again.

Like I was going somewhere, and then nowhere.

Like I was not making any progress at all.

Questions on my detective board popped up…

What is letting go?

What is surrender?

Who am I?

What is my worth?

The Sharp Glass

I hugged those pieces, and it hurt. Like hugging a pile of sharp glass.

And blood flowed… and I let it … flow, the blood.

I observed the wounds… and listened.

I yelled at my pieces and cried… and cried and cried and cried.

I sat with them by the seaside, feeling the breeze, talking to the waves and the rocks.

We went on long, long walks.

We sat in silence in a dark room.

We danced together. We went to parties.

We dated, and my pieces were shattered even more… and more pieces fell off… and I cried some more.

I tried to understand them. I got angry at them and threw them around the room. Then I made a pile with them, and we sat to watch anime and movies and doom-scroll when I got tired of looking at these senseless puzzle pieces.

I hated them and judged them…nand rejected them and tried to love them.

It was hard.

And I loved them, and hated them back again, and I understood them, and I didn’t, and then I did again.

Shadows, Dreams, and Old Selves

They came into my dreams in shadow forms.

They came every night, and they ran in the back of my head every day.

They swallowed me, and I let myself be swallowed.

I let myself become part of them.

I had long conversations with many versions of my past self, looking for answers.

I talked in my mind with friends, with family. I yelled at them too, until I started to forgive my pieces… and their pieces.

I loved some of them.

Some of them still haunt me.

I mourned them.

I felt grateful for those pieces when I remembered why they were there in the first place. What they gave me. How they protected me. How they defended me. How they pushed me forward.

I understood their role and their lessons.

At least some of them.

Others are still on my board.

They are still in a corner of my room.

They are still in my dreams.

They are still running in the back of my head.

They are still hurting my heart.

The End of Winter

And still, the long winter ended.

The last tears were shed.

And my heart, even with those thorns, wants to bloom.

My soul is ready for spring.

It is ready to choose joy.

To create joy.

To work for and with joy.

This year’s resolution is to choose joy.

To smile because I can.

To connect because I want to.

To be open and trust.

I’m ready to be hurt again.

To embrace and welcome the next experiences… and pains… and rejections, and befriend them all.

To continue to learn from it and be grateful for it.

To fail and be disappointed.

To make new mistakes.

To meet new people and let some go.

To question and question and question everything, so I can learn and understand myself and others.

You could say I will work on my desired superpower, which is asking the right question.

Choosing Joy Intentionally

I want to do joy intentionally.

I want to be intentional with my joy.

And practice it.

Practice remembering that it is always a choice.

My last years were a choice too.

And it was the right one.

And now I’m ready for my next choice:

Connect.

Create.

Appreciate.

Joy.

To feel my feelings and let them go.

I want to pursue living each moment as myself.

What does it feel like to be myself?

A new definition is in order.

It is only natural after letting so many pieces of me go.

Destroy and Rebuild

Destroy and rebuild.

It is the flow I want to exist in.

Destroy all the parts of me that do not serve me. Throw them on the floor. Look at them together with the pieces from new experiences. Select, rearrange, and incorporate once more.

Destroy the foundation and rebuild it as much as needed.

The power of adaptability on a whole new level.

I guess I want to be a buffalo now, and not a cow.

I want to run towards the storm, play in the destruction of it, and come out anew each time.

I want to pursue my inner voice.

I want to choose joy this time around.

Above all, I want to choose — not to wait.

I want to find my unique flavor, and I have to say, as of now, and as always, my favorite one has always been unpredictability.

Open road.

Options.

Action.

The Dark Hero

My favorite kind of hero is the dark one.

The misunderstood one.

The one who is challenged and challenges others.

The one who has to create a new path, a new way of thinking.

Only the ones who understand their essence stick around.

I guess I feel like that most of the time.

Although I don’t like Batman.

If I have to choose one, it would be Green Arrow.

And if I have to choose a god from mythology, it would be Loki.

My Own Formula

I’m not really a fan of routine.

I’m not a fan of doing the same thing again and again.

I have tried many formulas from many different books.

Go to sleep early and wake up early… bla bla bla.

Consistency and discipline — yeah, sure, you need that.

But I believe everyone has their own formula.

So many books.

So many methods backed by science, claimed by so many people.

So many contradictions too.

All that is, to me, nothing more than different routes.

None of them are absolute.

It is not one-size-fits-all.

At this point, it is just a matter of what resonates with yourself.

So what if I’m a night owl instead of an early riser?

Why fight that in the first place?

Why try to be in the 5 a.m. runner club if that’s not me?

I really tried all of those methods.

Everybody’s methods.

And just now, I’m starting to feel that mine will be born by filtering all the information through the voice inside of me.

My own interpretation of things.

My internal compass.

There is nothing absolute.

There is only change.

A constant destruction and reconstruction.

Let go of things.

Enforce things.

Try new things.

The way to find my own specific formula is to get to know more and more about myself.

I think that’s called evolution in the impermanence of things.

What Does My Consistency Looks Like?

So I guess I will be trying this out.

What is my best time to sleep?

What is my best time to wake up?

What are my productive hours?

Are they at the same time all the time?

Above all, I don’t think I’m a repetitive person.

I get bored of predictability and repetition.

I guess that works for some people, but not for me.

That’s why I’m not a runner on a treadmill.

Or a marathoner.

If anything, I’m a sprinter.

But they say you have to be consistent or you won’t achieve anything.

And I agree.

I guess I will find out what kind of consistency is the one that works for me.

What my consistency looks like.

A round-robin consistency?

An irrational-random consistency?

An instinctive, evolving consistency?

We’ll see.

I think what I’m saying is that I will identify my strengths and build on that.

Use what works and leave what doesn’t.

Not force everything I read onto me.

Fun As A Compass

My goal is to have fun.

How can I have fun? What is fun for me?

Lots for me to discover.

There is no point in complaining about what I don’t like in my current situation.

It’s also true that I still don’t have a clear goal of who I want to be, what I want to be, or what I want to be doing.

So my goal is to discover that.

And while going about that discovery, I still want to have fun.

I can’t wait until I have everything figured out to have fun.

I must sound crazy.

My goal is to be the weirdest me… and see who and what sticks around.

Also…I’m writing all this in public and whatever.

I’m committed to this.

PS: Why I Shar This

PS: Each time I write this stuff, I always question it.

Should I be sharing all this?

I don’t see right now why yes or why not, so I will keep it going.

So far, I know that some of my ways of processing are internal monologues with myself.

Internal monologues with other people in my life. Existing ones and imaginary ones.

Kind of like my own shadow boxing. Like Baki Hanma fighting his opponents in his mind, to understand them and learn their movements.

My version of that is conversations in my head. I explain things to them, and then I absorb the result of those conversations. Also, conversations with real people in the real world.

Writing, of course.

Questions, questions, questions. I want more of those.

In every experience, I’m asking questions all the time.

Why does it hurt? Why am I angry? Why am I sad? Why am I paralyzed?

And so on.

I write and move on.

Also doing, and failing.

I think one of my biggest assets, and also liabilities, is my risk-taking, just-do-it attitude.

I will have to fine-tune that too.

These last two years, this brought me a big loss. But it has also brought me a lot of achievements and learning experiences.

I have learned to pin things. Let them be. Things I don’t have answers for.

Knowing that the answer will come at some other time.

Before, I would get stuck and hang on to them for a long time. Now I just let them be, swimming in my head.

I know they will make sense someday.

Out In The Open

So…

That’s the conclusion and beginning of my year.

Funny how things are working. I was not planning at all to have resolutions.

At the end of 2024, right on December 31, I went to sleep at 9 p.m.

I couldn’t care less about fireworks and end-of-the-year celebrations. But sure enough, without any planning or meaning to it, I just felt this way.

So I know it is the closure of a cycle and the beginning of a new chapter.

I felt afraid of posting this too. Afraid of not living up to my expectations.

But here it is.

A challenge for myself.

Out in the open.

No one is reading…

But out in the open nonetheless.