1. our old email addresses reflect our old selves from the year we created the address. how we wanted to portray ourselves, how we saw ourselves, how we wanted others to see us - all channelled into the email addresses we created for ourselves as children on the cusp of adolescence.
take my email address, for example.
i chose the address for myself when i was in primary six or sec 1, i forget the details already. why cold image? i don't know, but i think perhaps i wanted to portray myself as more aloof, more ice-queen like, more cold than the honey-sweet girl-next-door i thought people more than often saw me as. image, perhaps cos i wanted to seem like there was more to me than what meets the eye, like what people see of me could just be an mirror image and not the real me. so i channelled that ideal me into my email address, wanting people to catch on to what i thought was ideal.
now come to think of it, it was pretty darn silly of me to choose such an email address, and even entertain such thoughts of trying to appear a certain way in the first place. but but, i'm not alone in my silliness, and never have been. :)
i think almost all teenagers go through a phase where they try to create an image for themselves that they think will work for them through life. some try to create a fashionable persona, others try to create a goody-two-shoes character, yet others try to fashion a too-cool-for-thou attitude in the hopes of attracting other similar kinds of people to hang out with. adolesence without like-minded people is a lonely period and does nothing for one's budding self-esteem. every child seeks to carve out his or her place in the world, seeks to find out his or her 'true' identity and more often than not, this 'true' identity is created by oneself anyway.
people are such terribly fascinating and complicated beings.
okay. as i said, two things i realised while clearing out my room just now.
2. the process of cleaning out rubbish in my life to make room for the Holy Spirit to enter my heart and bring about her welcome changes is going to be, and is terribly, terribly painful, tiring and backbreaking.
i nearly died several times while cleaning and throwing stuff out today. the dust really nearly killed me. my eyes were swimming and tearing from the abhorrent dust attack. it felt like the dust in my room was waging world war 3 against me and my body, and i felt like i was on the losing side.
how a huge organism can lose against tiny, millions of dust particles is quite beyond me. but maybe i answered myself already - there are millions, trillions of dust particles. any single one capable of incapitating me by making me sneeze, sniffle, cough and tear.
anyway, as i was saying.
the process of cleaning out my life from all the dusty memories, habits, hurts and loves is going to be similarly excruciating. that much, i can see already. i'm gonna be knocked flat on my back several times while dusting, throwing and cleaning - like how i was today after a mere hour of looking through old things and throwing them out.
it's also emotionally painful to throw old things out. the longer i look at them, the longer i hold on to them in my hands, dust and all, the less i feel like throwing them out. i think the process of emptying out all the unnecessary rubbish in my life is gonna be the same. the longer i spend revisiting old memories, the longer i spend lost wandering in them and losing myself in the emotions of the moments; the harder it's gonna be ultimately for me to let go.
my strategy today was to just chuck and not look. after all, i rationalised with myself, if i'd spent 7 years not needing to even look for certain books/notes/gifts/files/whatevers, then i probably will not need to look these up ever again. so why spend hours poring over them? just throw.
if i stop to look at what i'm throwing out, the probability of me throwing it out dips to subzero levels and then, the clutter in my room will never clear.
so. same thing for my life as a whole. i ought to just let go of certain hurts/memories/events in my head the moment i get hold of it and not get lost poring through them. just hold and throw. or else, i'll never have room for the Holy Spirit to work her gifts and blessings in my life. similarly, the incentive for me to clean out all the trash in my room is so i can fill it up with more recent things i own instead of letting the shelves be cluttered up with files from 1999 and books from even before that.
i had to resort to wearing a surgical mask to fight the dust or i'd not been able to chuck out the 6 bags of rubbish that i did.
my side table in the midst of being cleared up. i finally transferred all the books on the floor onto the table - and now i can actually see more than a few square feet of my lovely parquet floor.
my table after my first attack yesterday. i can finally finally see the glass of my table instead of endless silver earrings or pads of testpad paper.
and. the bags i'm having trouble with. which to throw, and which to keep? such a bloody headache. i can't even imagine the trouble i'll have with my clothes and shoes when i start on them next week.
people do not put new wine into old wineskins. otherwise, the skins burst, the wine spills out, and the skins are ruined. rather, they pour new wine into fresh wineskins, and both are preserved.
Matthew 9:17
there seems to be a Bible verse to match every thought in my head! i gotta clean it all out or the new wine won't be preserved well. i wouldn't want my new wine to burst out of my old wineskins, would i? new wine's as the name suggests - new wine. new. new wineskins to hold the new wine. a new room to keep all my new belongings. a new Kelly to contain my new life in God.
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