journal.coffee

Sometimes, not regularly but often enough, I found myself walking under the moonlight without a set destination in mind at the oddest hours possible because I was afraid of the four walls waiting for me in the place I called home. All the while my beverage served as the perfect metaphor for the night sky, the gravitas of my situation, and the stark fear of crossing the fine line between being alone and being lonely, even if in error.

It was then, that I’d immediately call someone and hear a familiar voice or talk to a stranger instantly redeeming myself. The truth was that as much as I preferred and needed to stay alone, I never, for once, wanted to feel lonely. I have reason to believe it was the same for a lot of us; those too proud of ourselves yet susceptible to crumble under the weight of our own heads, if left unwatched for too long.

I am glad, then, for all the times I wasn’t as proud as some would believe me to be and when I had humility to accept that even black coffee, like happiness and sorrow, tasted best when shared with another human being.

Stop. Stop trying to make sense of things that are obviously bigger than yourself. Stop looking at people through tainted glasses of envy. Stop sabotaging the things you have over those few things you don’t. Stop finding answers to questions you don’t know how to ask. Stop fitting your life in a timeline you can’t mark. Stop looking at icons and idols with starry eyes. Stop becoming an imitation of them. Stop walking endlessly to take a look around. Stop to look at the bird that does a flip as it glides through the sky. Stop whatever you’re doing and savour the moment. Stop taking photos of everything you see and just look. Stop feeling so overwhelmed that you cease to exist. Stop feeling so overburdened to start being free. Stop and take a breath every once in a while. Stop. Stop reading this and go fix what you thought you couldn’t. Stop telling yourself you can’t; you can.

I have always been obsessed with the why of things. Ever since I was a child, I’d think things through, exploring all sides and angles something could have. I loved peeling the layers of life, people and everything that happened.

Over time, the process of peeling those layers became synonymous with who I am and how I think. Everything I saw was bound to have more than what met the eye.

It became muscle memory to look at something happen, experience something, and start diving deeper into it.

Just as an artist would seek balance in all things, I seeked depth. Over time, it became a requirement. There was an odd sort of high in figuring out the whole picture, connecting dots and finding the why.

Like an addict, all I had to do was take one hard look into the mirror to accept that my need for the why did more harm than good.

I learned that life happens and more often than not, there’s no why; it just is the way it is and things are just the way they are.

It is in that lesson that I found my calm.

I often wonder which is more troubling, the feeling that something is amiss or the agony of never knowing what feels so awry?

Taking offence, unlike what you might think, is also an art. You see, it is quite similar to silence. A person who is silent always, never uttering even an ounce of their opinion is as good, if not worse, as a person whose opinion lacks quality. Similarly, taking offence on everything trivialises the idea of something really being offensive or hurtful.

Our generation has already ruined most of what being offended by something really entails; we’re a generation of people who live in their echo chambers thanks to social media and cookie-centric, activity-tracking internet applications.

We spend way too much time listening to our own selves or people who toot the same horns that we do and as soon as someone brings a new sound, however harsh or soft, we get offended.

This feeling of unease which we so beautifully dub into a demand for apology as we take our pitchforks out of our backpacks usually comes not from a place where we’re hurt by others’ thoughts but from our inefficiency to accept that no one in this world owes us opinion that we can easily digest.

This inefficiency comes from the absence of contrarian opinions in our everyday lives.

So, before you ask for an apology or get offended on whatever it may, make sure you’re not just being a pompous prick who is just used to looking into the mirror for way too long.

Always remember, if everything is offensive, nothing is. So take offence but do it carefully and selectively.

I’m an old soul with a knack to learn everything about the modern world and honestly, it is nothing but a bittersweet symphony. Yeah, like the song. On one hand, I want to escape into journals and vintage cars and postcards and handwritten notes and love letters and just lie down in the grass under the stars. While on the other, I want to know what that thing does and how that thing works and how technology changed everything and how wonderful the sonder in malls and fast-paced cities feels like and how I can be in one city now and in another an hour later and of messages and texts and how I can talk to my computer who sounds like a human being. It’s an impossible standard of balance. It’s like wanting to live a colourful life in black and white.

“It’s like I’m living my life in third-person.” I’m not sure how these words came to me some time ago but these are the only words that have somehow managed to describe my imposter syndrome.

Ever since the December of 2015 happened, I’ve tried my sheer best to internalise how drastically my life changed. With that change, came an enhanced imposter syndrome.

I’ve tried to do everything right for the last three years now; from cultivating the right habits to behaving the right way to taking the stairs instead of escalators.

It has been the whole spectrum with (hopefully) nothing left behind or overlooked. While I’d change nothing, I know now that my doing of these come from a place of fear instead of a place of gratefulness.

College was a volatile time and things changed faster than dates. Some days were so long, I can fill pages and then get tired of writing. Yet, every day has had the ever-looming presence of a feeling of undeserving; not that I talked about it ever.

It is a difficult feeling, the feeling of undeserving. Every single thing in your life seems like an unfair blessing. Something that you shouldn’t have but was somehow bestowed upon you and while everyone views you with appreciation or even envy, you view yourself as a liar, a fraud.

In fact, if the upper veil of my life or my filtered portrayal of it were lifted, you’d see me breathing heavily with anxiety, sitting on a floor, trying to make sense of things that I don’t understand but you probably don’t know about that part because of my spam of music recommendations, blog posts filled with some often accurate pep talk, and cups of coffee. Perhaps, it is our generation.

As a major phase ends and as I leave for whatever comes next, I do it with the understanding that it is not in whether you think if you deserve something or not, just if you’re grateful for whatever you get.

The reason I haven’t written lately is that I wanted to get this out but I wasn’t able to do just that in a way that would do the gap some justice. As the gap increased, so did that feeling and it was a classic catch-22. So, here it is.

At least, some part of it.

I’m a small-town kid. My entire life has been about being in awe, eyes wide open, with how high and low things can get. It has been a long time of watching, learning, unlearning and relearning. I educated myself from the movies I watched, the books I read, the music I heard. Everything that I know about the world was felt, learned and recorded somewhere. Maybe that is why I’m partially obligated to create content, in any way I can. It’s my way of giving back.

What? No paragraphs. No witty puns. No metaphors that blow you away. The problem with being decent at articulating what’s up and what’s not is that it feels like the end of the world when you can’t do just that. Here’s a random photograph. Here’s a wasted text box.

A little exaggeration never hurt anyone. No picture was as colourful as it looks now. Everything needs a little post-processing. Life is similar. Memories and nostalgia are, logically, a post-processing of our lives. Nothing was as vivid as we think in hindsight. Your hometown wasn’t heaven way back when. Life wasn’t easier way back when. It was all pretty much the same. Time, as it turns out, is a unique preset. The only filter which infallibly enhances the good parts while healing the not-so-good ones. The result is a rather radiant, colourful and larger than life polaroid of memory.

People have a tendency and rather, an innate need to make everything seem like it’s a bad thing. Anything that is ideally a good thing is somehow turned into a word of shame.

However, it has come to my realisation that people can only view someone else through their limited perspective. When people face something from beyond that view, they try and turn the context negative, hoping their own limitations are well-hidden beneath it. That isn’t the case though for it is far more evident to you of how you have transcended such people.

In encounters and situations like these, don’t scream and beg them to see things your way for it will only reinforce their stance of negativity. Socrates has a thing or two to say about that. Instead, ignore them and keep going. They’ll come around in due time.

As someone once said, you cannot force open the petals of a flower.

Have you ever wondered what a moment of inspiration feels like? Well, hear me out.

You’re going home tomorrow, it’s been a while and you haven’t felt that great about anything you did lately. Then, three things happen almost spontaneously, like some predisposed plan, some grand scheme.

You get a coffee and have a great conversation with your barista, you come out and play a song on your phone and as you look up a plane passes under the moon. In one fell swoop, everything aligns perfectly, it all just fits somehow and you smile like you’re the happiest person in the world.

There’s no magic pill and it isn’t grand like what they show in the movies. It’s in the seemingly unimportant or in the mundane.

Inspiration is a series of gears, very small and insignificant, working together, one cog at a time, moving a machine which is, unlike their individual selves, significant and important.

That’s what a moment of inspiration really feels like. It is any moment where you’re completely in the present, absorbing and embracing every little thing like there was nothing else to do.

It hits you and all of a sudden you feel inspired. Then, you do whatever you’re good at; you do you!

Today I realised that I’m not as impulsive as I previously believed. It’s my decision-making process which is rather quick. I used to make rash decisions once upon a time. However, that changed gradually as I grew up. Now, I make moderately calculated decisions quickly.

Good design is working within specific constraints to fulfill a particular purpose or task as well as you can. My process relies on that philosophy. You may think otherwise and that is fine, if that works for you.

The way I see it, if you’ve acknowledged the basic premise and you have mapped out your constraints well, the only thing left between that decision and you is action.

Everything after that basic process, the back-and-forth questioning, the constant begging for random advice and so on is superfluous. It’s unnecessary. It’s clutter. It feeds on your inaction. It’s a feedback loop.

I don’t understand sitting on something for a month and then doing what you would’ve done anyway. Why waste the time? Just do it. Nothing’s going to change next week, month or year.

If anything, the constraints will be the same, if not tighter. The premise will remain the same. You’ll still be at square one. So, roll the dice already. Push the domino, see how things fall. Then, improvise.

If your design is flawless, you wasted too much time on it.

Life is full of character breaks. Those are the moments we remember, to be honest. The times we didn’t act like our usual selves to become something more, something better.

So, if you’re stuck with the stuff which you said and believed in some time ago and believe otherwise now then by all means, break free.

Break your character to build your character.

You know who I despise? Overly-friendly people. I have nothing against being cheerful but have you met that one person who just won’t stop smiling, or talking to you like you are the most beautiful panda cub on the planet? I hate those people. I hate them because I know for a fact they’re faking, and I cannot tolerate that.

In fact, I’d take a person with a crooked smile, whose face betrays their words, over an audaciously and annoyingly smiling person whose tone, not words, are overly positive. I have nothing against positive words, but that cringeworthy tone that screams “Oh, I’m from the land of rainbows and everything good in the world”, that tone riles me up.

I hate overly-friendly people because they’re not real; they’re trying too hard. It isn’t the angry, frustrated, or the frowning you should look out for. On the contrary, it’s the Mr. Sunshines you should keep an eye out for.

There’s a reason stereotypical serial killers are shown to pretend to be (overly) good; it’s quite frankly the easiest thing to emulate.

This isn’t the end; this is just a small part. Move forward with balance and stability.

(A description of the first tattoo I ever got done.)

They say “no man is an island” quoting a poem they haven’t even read or felt. Yet, isn’t it in the nature of our planet itself to spread out? It all began with Pangaea splitting into Gondwana and Laurasia, then them into the seven continents we know, then the borders arrived.

Separation to become a completely different being is in the very nature of habitable life. Why fight nature then? Why fight history? Just let it run its course.

If you ask me, every man is an island, drifting apart from places he can no longer call his own, and over time, drifting toward better, newer horizons, becoming something completely new and magnificent in the process.

I think when people say your 20s are the most important years, they aren’t exaggerating. I’ve just spent a year or so in the bracket and there is an ever-present uncertainty. However, with that uncertainty comes a lot of energy and opportunity.

So, it feels like everyone is doing a lot and yet, it feels like none of it is going anywhere. This is perhaps the time of our lives where everything changes quickly; interests, majors, jobs, passions, lovers, habits, everything.

We’re at our most malleable and yet, we don’t lack identity like we did when we were kids or rebellious adolescents. We’ve made a rough sketch, perhaps a line art of the final thing and we’re working on the picture, slowly yet steadily.

Every day is a roller-coaster and the peculiar thing is that you don’t know what coaster you’re on until it’s dusk and the day descends to its end. It is then that you realise whether the ride was worth it or not. Then, you wake up again, buy a ticket again, get on the coaster again and be surprised again.

It’s uncertain. It’s exciting. It could be amazing. It could be devastating. The catch is that you’ll only know once you’re through with it.

That’s what I believe. I’m not sure what will happen. Who is, right?

I don’t get flowery language. Someone may have the correct word. Perhaps, there is no other word that could mean exactly what they want to say but is it any good if no one gets it?

Language was never solely about finding the right word. Rather, it was about saying the right things to the right people at the right time. At least, that is what I believe. I have a liking to the simpler things in life. So naturally, I use the first word that comes to my mind. The right word comes to you, like the ones you just read and the ones you are about to read.

I have nothing against words. Every word is beautiful, and some words are obviously more accurate than the others. However, the way I see it is that if someone spends more time on the dictionary than on your message, I think you’ve failed. If your sentence is unable to give context to that one long word you’ve squeezed in it, why bother writing it?

Someone called me a poor man’s Bukowski and I didn’t mind. “I’m only twenty-something-years-old”, I thought, “I have a long way to go. Countless pages to fill. Countless years to go unnoticed”.