went for mass today with the family. realised i haven't been attending mass with them in a fairly long time - what with the weeks with YES running and me having to attend 6.15 Saturday evening mass instead of the usual 8.30am mass the family attends like clockwork and the recent weeks with one thing or the other cropping up.

staying out the last few nights after supper. i really could get used to this kinda life, you know. but at the same time, i'm also wary of losing myself so completely in this whole thing. on one hand, i think this could work out. i could make this work, i know i can. but on the other hand, another little voice in me cautions: are you sure you wanna make this work? are you gonna lose yourself while you're at it?

i don't want to have to do a complete 180degree change to suit other people. i'm mightily puzzled by how i'm perceived by others, sometimes. i don't think i'm stuck up, no i don't think so. i'm not prickly and hard to get along with - at the very worse i'm just not super friendly, but not difficult either. i don't step on others' toes very often, if at all. i'm mild, usually. i'm quiet when you first meet me unless i'm already with a group of people i'm already very comfortable with. i'm smiley enough. so what gives? i don't get it.

if it's something that's genuinely bad about me, i'd like to know what it is so i can change that less-than-desirable part of me. but if it's a general air of dissent, then what am i to even make of it all?

frustrated, everytime i think about it.

i'm getting a little too dependent, which is not good at all. i'm getting a little too expectant, which is even worse. i need to start grounding myself firmly on solid ground again first before i take off into some great somewhere.

i think i haven't really been praying lately cos i don't want to hear God tell me anything i don't want to hear. today at mass was a perfectly good example. when i was kneeling down and feeling God in me in the silence of my heart, i had an inkling of what God wanted to tell me and my heart started pounding like crazy. but i forced myself to calm down again and just listen. who knows, it mayn't be what i think it is. but when i made myself listen to everything through, i was mightily disturbed.

we'll see what else God reveals to me over the weeks. no point getting so up-in-arms over something i've just begun to take to prayer. something that came to me today again was that to love is not to be selfish.

such an oft repeated line, but extremely hard to enact.

it's so hard to love enough to let go, love enough to share, love enough to put your own wants behind the needs of others. when you love someone, you set them free, yes? even at the expense of your own immediate happiness, sometimes. when you love someone, you don't keep him for yourself even though that may be what you want. self-seeking, self-serving, too too selfish. makes me feel so thoroughly disgusted with myself when i realise how selfish i can be. just because majority of the world is like that doesn't make it any more right. it just means we're all wrong together. sometimes, right and wrong becomes dependent on the people in power. what suits them, they deem right - and the majority follows those in power precisely because they have the power. what goes against what they want to do, they deem as 'wrong'. twisted, ain't it?

sometimes, i feel a bit like one of those fat goldfish that someone has released from it's safe little goldfish bowl, into the rapid river, and i'm trying so hard to negotiate the currents that threaten to sweep me away and just over the cliff edge of the waterfall and into the whirlpool below. in my little goldfish bowl, i was too safe. too protected by the glass. too protected by my parents. i thought i was a normal fish, but when i found a way out of my bowl and into the waterways, others saw me as a goldfish. too stuck up, too high-and-mighty, too everything. but i'm still just a fish, i still think. i'm no different from any ordinary fish. i have fins. i have scales. i have gills. i swim, like all other fish. it's only the perceived colour difference that make other fish not like me so. do goldfish cry? or do they just wag their glittery, filmy tails sadly as they swim against the current and try to not lose their identity as goldfish?

today, i am one sad little goldfish because i am starting to wish i wasn't born a goldfish. i wish i were born a guppy or a mollie or maybe an angelfish or whatever, one of those more sociable fish that live in tanks with other fishies and not in solitary goldfish bowls.

i can't help being a fat goldfish. :( while i wish i were born a guppy, i also don't want to become a goldfish fixated on transforming myself into a guppy. because i'm not. i can't grow a pretty tail overnight and shrink my body and lose my golden colour. i want to be proud of who i am, but it's getting increasingly difficult when so many people point out the million-and-one things wrong with me but don't notice the other hundred things that are right.

hopefully i will wake up a happier goldfish tomorrow morning. i will not be selfish anymore. Jesus loves all fishes, goldfish or guppy. cling on to that, i will, and not be bothered by guppies or fighting fish or angelfish who dislike me.