The grass is always green.

I am quite sure that everyone has heard of the saying: “The grass is greener on the other side.”

Being a perfectionist, this saying is pretty much the basis of my perfectionist tendencies. I strive to be better because I know I can be better. My self-improvement is not a hypothesis, it is a fact. In fact, I believe that everyone can be better versions of themselves when one puts in the time and effort.

However, it is not all the time that things go our way. I personally experienced a setback in my life which interferes with most of my plans that I had planned out for the future. There are alternative routes that I had planned out, but I hate to settle for less and at that point of time, I felt horrible about everything in my life. I thought about how I disappointed myself and everyone around me. I felt that the validation I had to exist was gone. It was an odd feeling on how I wish to just crawl into a hole and disintegrate into the ground because I felt like I could no longer face anyone I knew merely because of how my life no longer show how much of a perfectionist I am. It felt like I had a pseudo-lost identity. I stayed away from any form of communication for a few days until I had accepted my predicament.

I turned on my phone with expectation to get questions on how I am and in my head, I was imagining the look of disgust and judgment that people would have when I tell them. However, that was not the case. It was the opposite. I received plenty of encouragement messages from my friends when they found out. I started crying.

In my childhood, I barely had friends and at that point of time, I did most things alone and I felt that I was meant to be alone. As the years go by, I rarely have a proper connection with people and only recently in the past two years, I have made proper friends that actually stick by me. I started crying because I could finally see that I am not in an uphill battle to prove everyone wrong. I started crying because it took me 19 years to see that I am not alone. I started crying because I finally understood that people that matter to us will accept us at our lowest and stick by us.

My father always tells me that everything happens for a reason. I have held that belief close to me all my life and sometimes, I doubt if that is true. Today, I saw the reason behind my current predicament. It may be making me feel miserable inside, but this situation has shown that the grass is not greener on the other side, but that the grass is always green no matter which side I am on.

Feminism; it’s completely mental.

I have always been a feminist for as long as I can remember, even before I knew that there was even a feminist movement in the world. I was that kid that would sulk because I had to perform female duties such as helping out in the kitchen and my brother and father would not have to. When I question my mother and grandmother about this, the answer they always give was, “You’re a girl, you have to do this.” I never understood that answer and I still don’t. I’ve written a feminism piece previously titled, ‘Women can belong anywhere they want’. Even though feminism is recently seeing some progress in recent years, it has also became a dirty word. Some people are ashamed to be called feminists because of the negative connotations that is brought about from the misunderstanding of feminism. Therefore, I would like to bring up a little problem I see in our modern day society with regards to our perception of feminism and women.

The original intention for feminism is to achieve equal rights for men and women, such as women being able to vote just like men. Many think that we are suppressing the rights of men in order for feminism to achieve their goal. That is wrong. For simplicity, let me put it in an analogy of people getting pie slices. Traditionally, men get a whole pie each, while women only get 6/10 slices of the pie. What feminism aims to achieve is that women also get a whole pie each just like men hence attaining equality. Some misunderstand that feminism is to bring men down by only giving them 6/10 slices of the pie in order to attain ‘equality’. With this analogy, I hope the essence of feminism is very least explained.

With that misunderstanding (hopefully) cleared up, I would just like to talk about the perception of feminists. I am a feminist and I am also assertive, outspoken and I say what I need to say, mostly in a polite and tactful way. Such traits are said to be masculine and when displayed by a man, he is called an ‘alpha male’, completely desirable by society. However, when a woman like me displays those traits, it is suddenly undesirable and being scowled at, often getting comments like “It’s probably a feminist thing”. I think this is a form of double standard that many women have to deal with on a daily basis where we are called ‘bossy’, ‘know-it-all’ and the common ‘b-word’ to describe female dogs. This sort of mindset definitely boils down to the traditional patriarchy that I grew up with, where men and women have traditional gender roles and characters that we are supposed to embody. Is this double standard a problem? Definitely. Such a simple thing can affect many things that a woman potentially can do, but because of this narrow mindset, many women are not able to go places, literally and metaphorically.

Such a subtle problem is definitely not as urgent as the need to stop other female problems such as rape and honour killings, but it is a contributing factor because everything starts from the mind. I do feel that this is worth emphasising on as many people, even governments, forget that education to change the mindset is one of the most important and key ways to create a change along with the physical implementation of policies.

I want to feel infinity.

Warning: This post may make me sound like a delusional teenage girl (I am a teenage girl, not sure about the delusional).

Tonight makes the end of my term break or commonly known as spring break (Singapore doesn’t have seasons, we can’t call it that) and second term of last year in junior college will commence in about 9 hours. I spent most of my time, if not finishing up tutorials, indulging myself in a book or two over the week and watched a movie. I’m not sure about you, but I get sucked into the fictional world very easily and I lose touch with my reality. It’s unhealthy but it is an amazing feeling. I re-read The Fault In Our Stars and also am reading Lolita. (I know, the juxtaposition is just too much) These books made me think about love and the whole concept of it.

To be perfectly honest, I am so shamefully unfamiliar with this whole concept of love. In my 18 years, I have never experienced this feeling. Sure, I have had a few infatuations but never that feeling of infinity that books describe love holds. The books I mentioned above describes love at its extremes. One where the course of life and death tests their love and the other, a fetish. But the thing is, no matter who they are, cancer patient or crazy author, they still crave affection. If you know me at all, you’ll know that I have a list of qualities on why no one should ever date me such as low self-esteem, anger management issues, not being able to give in etc. With these in mind, I keep telling myself that no man ever deserves a crazy woman as myself and no man deserves to be tortured for a lifetime with me. I guess my brain is telling me to eradicate my own rights to love and be loved because I don’t deserve it. But, my heart, this damn heart, tells me otherwise.

Those books tell my heart that this short-tempered perfectionist deserves someone too. I deserve the feeling of feeling safe and being able to feel vulnerable even if I am a strong independent woman at the most of times. I deserve to know that I have someone to listen to my troubles and for me to listen to him too. I deserve that warm fuzzy feeling when he looks into my eyes and says, ‘I love you.’ whenever I doubt us and my worth in the relationship. Hell, I deserve to get into a fight with him because of my jealous tendencies because I love him way too much to let go.

The thing is, I want to let my brain know that I deserve the little infinity that Hazel and Gus had, maybe even the joy that Humbert Humbert had when he looks at Lolita from the window. I want to let it know that my brain should stop building walls whenever someone gets too close and my brain warns that heartbreak may be imminent. I know the brain knows better that heartbreak will slow me down and it warned me, but inside, I am hoping, even if it’s a tiny grain of hope, that my heart proves my brain wrong for once. I just want to feel infinity at least once, even if it’s temporary.