Last day of my dayoff

hello dear, hope you are doing alright. miss you 🤍

This is a long sharing. Today is the last day of my 5-day break, I went out to Causeway Bay for getting some stuff and then Kwun Tong for my vocal class. My mental state was already just so-so this morning, I thought that’s understandable since it’s the last day of my holiday. But when I was on the bus to Causeway Bay, I had this strange feeling of missing the UK and I don’t really know why.

After awhile, I had to take the MTR to get to Kwun Tong. I actually seldom take the MTR these days, I always go for bus ride or driving. I don’t even remember when the last time was that I took the train, but I had no choice today. What I didn't expect was as I rode on the train and changed lines, I started to develop an anxiety attack.

It was only 4pm that time so it wasn’t even that crowded. But I was just suddenly so overwhelmed by the environment and I felt like I couldn’t breathe and my heartbeat was racing. I don’t know why all I could think of was I want to get out of this now and I’d rather take the smelly tiny suffocating noisy London underground.

I finally got out in Kwun Tong but when I was exiting the gate at the station, I was so baffled and I just stood there for a few extra seconds after taping my card, as if I forgot how to cross that gate. I didn’t expect to experience that from such a normal train ride. And because of that, I could barely sing anything during my vocal class.

On my bus ride back home, I still felt so frustrated and overwhelmed by what happened, and I really wanted to figure it out with myself and God before I have to resume my busy work again tomorrow. So just now before I went to bed, I opened my notebook again and I started writing down these different areas of my life that I see as important:

Health, Relationship, Faith, Family, Career, Music

And under each of them, I listed out the matters or names that have been constantly on my heart and mind that I am looking to “resolve”.

At first I wanted to talk them out with God and pray about each of them. But when I looked at each of the things I wrote down under each bucket one by one, I realised each one of them itself is already too overwhelming for me to even “talk it out” properly. They are the big questions that have been in my head for a long time, and there are more than 20 of them on that page. I started tearing up and all I could say to God was: I am so overwhelmed right now, I don’t really know what else to say.

But it was in that honest and vulnerable moment, God made me understand that there’s actually no way that I could ever “resolve” all these matters in these different areas of life in an instant no matter how long a break I take. And that was also never his intention for me in this 5-day break.

But it doesn’t mean that he wants me to give up. I feel he wanted this 5 days to be a pause for me to do a checkpoint check on myself. And ultimately, he wants me to remind me that sometimes when we feel like we are stuck in a situation, not knowing where to turn, perhaps the only right thing to do is to sit with it. Sit with it long enough to understand it, feel it, process it, wrestle with him about it, and trust that as we do all these he is working on it. And in due time, he will lead us to that “resolve” that we’ve been searching for.

Perhaps it’s never really the UK that I missed earlier today. What I missed was that feeling of running away from my “problems” and deceiving myself that I am not stuck by being in these fast-changing environments whenever I travel from places to places. But it is also this 5-day break experience of staying in HK and letting God speak into my heart that helped remind me that the “runaway” or break was never the ultimate answer to our problems, but my trust in God that he’s with me in every step and every season. And this is part of what he wants to show me to live a life in its fullness.

Sorry this is a very long post and it’s probably a messy write because of my anxiety attack. And I also didn’t take any photos today because of that :( But I found some old ones taken from a few weeks back. I hope my sharing somehow speaks to you in some ways, even though I don’t know what it might be. Love you, dear. ❤️‍🩹