One step at a time

hello dear, how have you been?

After writing the last post about the dinner I had with my university crush on Thursday night, I felt asleep but woke up at 3am. I felt some immense emotions bottled up in my stomach and in the end, I had to cry them all out before I could fall back asleep at 7am. I realised that meet up with him was a triggering event for some deeper emotions that I was carrying and didn’t really know how to deal with.

As much as I don’t like to admit, I know that my mental issues have caused me to become socially withdrawn, even though I often say to myself that I have a lot of “good” reasons for that. I disconnected with a lot of people, even if I met with some friends, I often put on a mask when I engage with them.

But in the last few months, I feel like this has been one of the areas that God is guiding me to breakthrough, and I have been intentionally encouraging myself to meet and reconnect with more people, and open myself up for deeper conversations with those that I used to be closer with. I feel like I have been practicing that since my Manchester trip back in May when I went there to help my parents settle down, then going to this Chinese doctor after I came back to HK and became friends with him, and then the recent Paris trip where I had to spend a lot of time with the IF team.

Sometimes, I can feel that I am making progress and I might even feel proud of myself for being able to make people feel cared and loved, and even inspire and build people up. But other times, like how drained and down I felt after the dinner with my university crush, I would just feel like I am so far from being mentally capable to re-engage with anyone in the world.

And when I woke up at 3am that night, I was overwhelmed by the frustration to feel like no matter how hard I have been trying and practicing to be more genuine with people, be attentive whenever I am in a conversation, there’s still a big part inside me that is pushing all these back and feeling triggered and let down by the world. And all I realise was that perhaps I am still not well enough at the end of the day to be mentally capable to live “normally”. These depressive thoughts just kept flooding in and I forgot how I stopped crying and fell asleep at 7am. It was so overwhelming that it didn’t go away for the last two days even though I tried to avoid them.

And this morning (Saturday), I finally had the courage to have a conversation with myself and God about these emotions. And I was reminded how far I have come since my “worst”, back when I completely ghosted everyone and just wanted to vanish from the world. Along the journey, there was never a big leap forward, God always guided me step by step, one step at a time. And it’s okay if I sometimes have to take it slower, put a hold on it or even revisit my past footsteps. God is patient to walk with me, and he wants me to be patient with myself too :)

So today, after going out for breakfast with my brother, I decided to go for a drive by myself, just to allow myself to take my time to recharge in solitude as much as I need under the sun.

❤️‍🩹 Miss you and love you, Andy

PS. I finally got a new grocery trolley and this is my latest funny weird look to the wet market today, haha